The Search for Wholeness

You remember Feris Bueller's saying: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."  That is how I feel today.  It is like in a blink another year has come and gone and I'm left wondering, did I miss it?  

I think as mothers we're often consumed by the little details so much that we miss the big picture.  We are so busy doing everything that we don't enjoy it.  Can we be in the thick of it and participate fully or can we be present.

I dug into MaverickRx in 2019 at the expense of The Mama Bird.  Now when I sit and look back on the moments that really busted me up in 2019, I feel remiss for not writing them down.  It is disappointing; I have to acknowledge and accept my own limitations in my personal, creative spaces.  Who likes to accept their own limitations?  Um.... no one.  Zero people want to talk about the shit they didn't get around to doing.  The thing is MaverickRx did distract me from writing; but it also gave me a wild goal wrought with challenges and littered with dreams.  

Every year I have LOFTY goals.  Thanks for that, Dad.  I want so badly to reach each goal.  I try and try and keep trying.  But in the midst of all that trying, something gets left undone.  I cannot be an exceptional mother, with a spotless house, laundry folded and put away, teach fitness, build a YouTube channel, write a blog, see my friends and family, read books, date my husband, maintain a lovely yard, and have a full-time job. Or can I?  

Someone recently asked, "how do you do it all?"  Super simple.  This is one you'll need to write down: I don't do it all.  

Acknowledging my limitations and fessing up to what I'm not going to get done is how I don't do it all.  Things that truly matter are the only things I'm giving brain space to in the twenties - the things that make me feel entirely WHOLE. For example, how clean my house is or if my yard is pretty have nothing to do with what makes me feel whole; and the laundry can jump off a bridge for all I care.  Let's not even go there.  These are not unique aspects of what make a life.  These are universal "have-to's".  Disinfect, clean, mow, fold... everyone has to do this stuff.  It cannot, therefore, consume any brain space or plague us with stress.  

Before I was a mother there were a few things that made me, well me.  I lived to read and write.  I spent hour upon hour listening to music.  I hung around people who refueled me with laughter.  We talked about books, music, and culture. Those are non-negotiables for me to be me.  Creating, feeding my brain, and connecting with the most valuable people in my life, even for a quick coffee or phone call, give me a boost.  

I fell in love before I was "Mom!"  I fell in love with a man who makes me laugh and snort and who puts up with my countless lists and dreams.  He supports almost all of my ideas and when he doesn't he says so.  Although, I can't think of a time he said so exactly.  He might have made fun of an idea a time or two or screamed at me, "You and your ideas!"  But for the most part, 98% of the time, he is all in.  

Once I became a mother, I also fell in love with my kids and fitness.  I didn't teach fitness until I had my first daughter.  Over the course of the past thirteen years, fitness has become engrained in my being.  It is my sanity saver.  Motivating other humans to move, picking them up when workouts get really hard, and making them smile through the challenges really lights my fire.  

My kids are my favorite people, hands down.  They each have an energy all their own, unique quirks and personality traits that sometimes resemble me or their dad, but are most definitely their own spin on existence.  Most of the time we get along well, until someone breaks an XBox controller, the tv, or drags around in the morning and makes mom late to work which forces mom to come unglued.  But my mom friends assure me, that's normal.

Brain space is limited.  What we allow into our brain space - what we allow into our lives is absolutely within our control.  To feel like a complete, whole human we get to select where, what, and who we want to put energy into.  My goal for 2020 is to allow my brain space to be filled with three essential aspects of my life that make me feel whole: human connection, creativity, and movement.  

I invite you to take a minute and assess what will fill your brain space in 2020.  What makes you whole and uniquely you?  What doesn't actually matter in your life that you are allowing to fill your brain space with and, in so doing, creating stress?  Let go of the non-essentials and focus on the aspects of life that fill you with energy and excite you every day.  

Can You "Censor" Rude?

I went to dinner with my parents and children in the city on Monday.  As we were walking toward the restaurant I could hear a rowdy group of people sitting in front of the restaurant.  They were LOUD and cussing like truck drivers.  Which, let's be honest, I've been known to do myself.  My friend Brooke will testify to it.  I have a potty mouth.  But when I had kids, I had the decency to clean my act up and not speak with such colorful language around them.

It seems LOGICAL to me.  If I want my children to speak without profanity, I have to speak without profanity.  Am I perfect?  Absolutely not.  There are times when oops the F word sneaks out.  Like the day I got attacked by a swarm of earwigs.  Or when I scraped a dead mouse out of my dryer with my bare hands.  Things happen.

But on the daily, nope.  We keep it clean.  As we neared the group of boisterous, margarita sipping fools I made a mental note "sit inside."  I ordered for myself and the children, which took a decade.  My parents ordered and were outside setting up a table before I could suggest we just wait for a table inside.  I get it, no one likes waiting, but for my own sanity in that situation, I would have waited.  

Outside our table set up doesn't meet managers regulation and we are asked to move next to the table of cussing hoodlums or go inside.  I said to the manager, "well, I wish I could sit outside, but those kids are using a level of profanity known only to truck drivers or Snoop Dogg."  She giggled, apologized and said she'd set us up somehow inside.  

My darling mother, in the meantime, decided to approach the obscenity loving table of idiots.  She politely asked them to tone down their profanity.  At the table sat six men and a single woman.  The men all quickly apologized, "of course...we're sorry...we'll clean it up."  The woman, on the other hand, would not have it.  She loudly exerted her opinion, "I WILL NOT!  I will not censure myself because of YOUR CHILDREN!"  To which I laughed heartily because, really?  I said, "Oh hunny... I hope one day you have your own children then."  And she said, "I won't."  And I replied, "Of course not."  She quickly replied with the classiest of rebuttals, "FUUUUCCCCKKKK YOU."

Now, as I mentioned, I have a mouth of my own and have often been un-censurable.  Usually, like this nit-wit, I've had one too many margaritas or some other tasty cold alcohol rich drink.  I also, while being a very patient and kind person, do have a temper.  Usually, lets be honest, I stuff my anger down real deep in prayer.  

Truly though, I wanted to rip her head off.  She told ME to F OFF in front of my kids?!  I felt frozen.  I felt like if I rip this little girl a new one in front of my children and parents, that's not exactly setting the best example.  Instead, I sat down inside, and quietly raged while eating my dinner.  I dreamed of pouring a margarita over her incredibly ugly hair.  I dreamed of picking her up from the table by her ear and walking her up to my children and forcing her to apologize for her incredibly rude and terribly awful manners.  I dreamed of physically harming her while politely eating my burrito bowl. 

But I also knew that assault is assault no matter how you slice it.    

On my drive home from the city I wondered, what gives people the right to be such assholes?  Why on earth does asking a person to behave like a big girl and be polite in front of small children qualify as censorship?  Isn't it just RESPECTFUL?  Aren't we just talking about using our MANNERS?  

When did respecting other people around you and using your manners become a challenge?  Honestly, I do not understand.  

It will please you to know that really, in the end, I won.  That same night, I had a dream that my family was under attack by a werewolf.  It was a giant beast of a creature, which I can only assume was a subconscious way of representing the rude woman from dinner with the hideous hair.  In the dream, I protected the children but the beast kept coming at me.  Lunging with wild crazy eyes, intolerably bad breath, and a dreadfully frizzy coat of wild unkempt hair.  I called for my husband and he came running at the werewolf with a Ziploc 1 gallon freezer bag.  I held the beasts head down, with my knee in her neck as my husband suffocated her with the freezer bag.  

I also won because I am not an asshole with the audacity to verbally (or really) assaulting other humans.  

The End.