How to Grow While Overwhelmed

[Holly Noonan]

I have a renewed respect for single parents after the week I just had. My husband was just away for a week on an incredibly-well-deserved vacation (solo kayaking at Moosehead Lake.) I got everything done. I fed the dog and gave her her meds. I emptied the dishwasher and the dehumidifiers under the house. I fed, bathed and nuzzled my son to sleep every night. The I got up and cleaned the kitchen and finished all my domestic work by about 9:15pm, at which time I would start my other work.

I definitely got less sleep. It just so happened that this week started the day after the Women's Health Conference (which went splendidly.) But the adrenaline didn't have time to wane before I started my single-parenting week, and I just couldn't catch up on sleep.

So while I got everything done, I couldn't handle anything more, and my health got more fragile. Good lord, how do people do it with TWO kids, much less six or eight?!

It made me think of the nursing moms catch-22 where the constant, staggering sleep deprivation makes coffee more important than most anything else in life. Food. Washing your hair. Definitely sex. It poses the question; How in the hell does a person strive when they are just barely holding things together?

I remember bike touring around New Zealand in 1995 with my boyfriend (now, amazingly, my husband.) I was cranky riding through the rain. Cold, wet feet. Stinky camping clothes. Glop for every meal. It seemed to me a girl had a right to be tired and cranky. The hills! The wind! But my fit, sunshiney boyfriend saw no reason to feel anything other than rapture at the precious opportunity to ride our bikes for months around one of the most magnificant places in the world. OK, he DID have a point. But at my most tired, where was I supposed to find the extra energy to muster anything other than my most natural inclination to be a grump? It required extra energy that I didn't seem to possess to consciously shape my attitude and my communications. I really don't know if I succeeded, but perhaps he could see that I was trying. (Because, frankly, it's astounding to think our young relationship endured that many months in a sodden tent.)

I learned two things from that;

1) We often have energy reserves we didn't think we had.

2) You don't have to succeed, you just have to keep trying.

As for the mysterious energy reserves? It's not the burst in laying eggs a doomed chicken has before her demise (must carry on the gene pool without me!) That energy has a frenetic, draining sort of feel, like getting hopped up on flu meds and going to work when you really should be in bed. It will make your fall harder and longer to recover from. That's in the "borrowing energy from the future" category, where that 3pm latté belongs. (I think of coffee as an energy credit card with a high interest rate.)

No, the energy to grow while in the middle of overwhelm comes more from a shift in vision. You are doing your life anyway. It costs very little to turn a mental ligthbulb on to simply watch how you are doing it. Simply by watching yourself, you are in motion. You are noticing tiny things that accumulate into action over the years. The motivation comes from the knowledge that if you don't turn the lightbulb on, it will actually cost you more life-energy longterm. For which you'll need more coffee. With cream and sugar. And interest.

Staying with the lightbulb analogy, it's like the decision to switch to high-efficiency lightbulbs, from old-fashioned ones. If you don't do it, you know you will spend more for electricity over time. It is more expensive to stay stuck.

This leads me to number two: If you take your eye off of "success," then you won't get discouraged by "failure." Just focus on "try." That's what I learned on those long, ass-achy hours on my bike in New Zealand. If I get discouraged by failure, then slow the pace down to what's manageable, and then just...keep....riding.

Eventually you lift your head up and you've ridden around a whole island, lived 14 more years, visited 7 more countries, had a kid, built a home, and wouldn't you know it? The to-do list is still there. I'm going to put it down and go meditate.

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[Marada Cook]

This is a really, really good point. A farmer friend and I joke that we are 'moms with a beer in one hand and a coffee in the other - plus a kid in the lap'. I like the analogy to a credit card with a high interest rate.