I used to love mornings.
I mean, really. I loved mornings. I would sip coffee all morning, write until my heart was content, read, clean … oh, it was such joy.
Then I became a mom.
eeeeerkkkk. Put on the brakes.
Mornings pretty much can suck as a mother. I mean, truly.
And while they certainly are not the easy street they used to be, I actually still really love mornings. I just have to rise very early to enjoy them.
Now that my kids are in school, the pressure to get keep them on schedule is even greater. Packing up and preparing takes much longer and is much harder. And, the responsbility of all of those papers, and lunch boxes is so heavy at times.
It’s easy to fall into that trap of rush, rush, rush — which often means yell, yell, yell.
It definitely is — at least at the age of 5 — still quite a nag fest in the mornings, but I’ve discovered the magic elixer to making it easier on myself.
My late is your early. Yup, even when I think I’m late, we’re always early — very early, in fact.
When I realized that my internal clock was rushing and yelling and nagging my children because of my own stresses, I relaxed. Now, late is late and, frankly, we’ve never been late. We’ve been later than I wanted to be. We’ve been later than the school bus we get behind sometimes. We’ve even been almost late. But we’ve never actually been late for school.
Knowing what stresses me makes it so much easier to stress less. And what has happened is that I’m relaxed, more awake and a lot more happy when I am driving off to start my day. It’s not fool proof. There are just days when, well, no amount of Zen in the world can help me deal with two 5 year olds getting out the door by 7:30 a.m. No amount of meditation. No amount of coffee.
And I”m OK with that.
Breath. Meditation. Centering. Faith. Trust.
It’s all in me. It’s all up to me. It’s all I’ve got day after day.
I am the difference between a smile and a frown each day, between laughter and tears.
So glad I’ve finally, finally figured this out.
