One mom's ideas
The time of the year where I spend more time breaking up fights between children then I do enjoying things. Cold weather to keep us inside, so I search the internet for the pretty things I wish I could be seeing instead.
I felt the need to share.
This new flower of thinking has bloomed and spread pollen to others near me.
I LOVE IT!
I know that its early January still so the “resolutioners” will fall off, but what a great start! I know its just the people around me, but that is helping my mental health anyway. I bask in the positivity being shown all around me.
I spend a lot of time in life forcing myself to accept the negative but focus on the positive. Being around people who focus more on the negative, or SPREAD the negativity around like wildfire, drains me. I can’t handle that mentality. I understand that life deals some bad cards to people at different times in life and that it will be super hard at times to find the positivity during that time.
I have clearly been through some incredibly hard times surrounded in negativity as well.
From that place I found that so much of my day to day life depended on what I chose to focus on. If i focused on the negative things happening too much, my mental health took a bad hit for the day. When I had something to look forward to, or focused on something that had more positivity, my outlook was completely different.
I was still smiling by the time the day was winding down.
My family got to see a happier version of me then the slow moving begrudging human being that I had become. Seeing them make choices to do the same is amazingly uplifting to me.
I still have negative thoughts of course. I still have negative things going on around me.
I just choose not to focus on them.
So I don’t do New Years Resolutions but this year I figured that I would try something a little different. I have goals that I would like to start implementing this year, but they are much more like life style changes instead of resolutions. At least that’s what I continue to tell myself.
This year marks the first kid graduating high school and having the potential to move away from me. It doesn’t matter that he may not any time soon. It’s the idea that he is old enough to be able to. I have been trying to focus on how to pull my mother hen instincts back a bit so that he has the ability to grow and learn a bit before he moves out. I am not sure that I can make myself succeed at this, so instead I will occupy myself with other tasks.
This year I will be working harder to find different volunteer options to work with military veterans. I have always been drawn to work with the veterans in our country and am always looking for different ways that may work into life in a long term way. I already work on donating to people who are able to send care packages fairly frequently throughout the year, as well as send Christmas cards to soldiers overseas. However this doesn’t take much time nor effort on my behalf. I would like to find more opportunities. Please feel free to offer any ideas that come to mind. I am wide open for suggestions.
More to come.
“Some days, 24 hours is too much to stay put in, so I take the day hour by hour, moment by moment….”
In a 2016 study, an estimated 20.4% of adults in America had chronic pain
8.0% of adult Americans had high impact chronic pain.
That’s 50 MILLION American’s
That’s 2 out of 5 adults
1 in every 4 people with chronic pain are also diagnosed with a sleep disorder
It is the leading cause of long term disability in America.
70% are women
I know I am just spouting off with statistics that I found on the internet. However this is something that effects my family tremendously. We used to get told that we were the zebra’s of the medical field, but we are not. We have some extra stripes sure, but really we are the same as everyone else.
I hate knowing that. We accepted our stripes years ago. We all knew that we just needed to focus on getting back up and straightening out crown a bit before trudging on before the next faceplant.
Maybe some people could feel better knowing that they are more normal than they thought they were. The problem is that the way that life is showing me that we are not that unique is by knocking the legs out of the people around me. I’ve watched car accidents diagnose brain disorders, broken bones diagnose connective tissue disorders and allergic reactions diagnose auto immune diseases.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
I want to go back to where we were the zebras. I wasn’t ok watching my closest family members going through it but at least I was under the impression everyone else got to live happy pain-free normal lives.
Live life lightly 