reclaiming my (mushy) mom brain
No big secret reveal here. I’m a Momma. Two daughters. And my brain is feelin’ the very real murkiness of years of Mom Life. Wheels on the Bus, potty training, reading the same books 9,367 times. My brain is starved for intellectual stimulation. To be challenged. Stretched. To fail, to succeed. To learn in ways not associated with parenting.
Kids aren’t going anywhere. Sort of a permanent situation kinda thing.
But…
ain’t nothing gonna change if nothing changes.
So change I must. I’m firing my brain back up in ways that used to be my norm. While being Mom. You know, like, at the same time. Apparently I forgot that’s an option. I ditched my I can’t have both approach and have integrated Mom Life into Me Life. And, as it so magically does, the world dropped me a lifeline exactly when I needed it.
Her name is Laura McKowen. If you don’t already know her, know her. I’ve girl crushed her for years.
It looked like this: a 40 day Writing + Meditation course, innocently waiting in my Inbox. She had no idea that human on the other end was me and that invitation was a feast for a starving soul.
When I opened the e-mail (hers are worth it) and read all the details, I was frothing at the mouth. Seriously. Two of my favorite things (stillness + pen to paper), woven together into one, elevate your sh*t sorta thing. She had me. Meditation + writing, for me, they’re PB&J . They just go together. ‘Til death do us part.
I have to take a breath, a pause - transition - into writing. I can’t just go from a whirlwind morning of packing lunches, Peppa Pig, subtraction worksheets, negotiating with a 2 year old over popsicles for breakfast, pigtails, traffic and forgotten show and tell stuffed animals to W R I T I N G. Hell no. Doesn’t happen like that. I’ve got to close my eyes, clear some space, get in the game. Meditation is the foreplay. Even if its 3 minutes (see, told ya - just like foreplay). It’s a non-negotiable.
Then.
Then I can start tapping away at the keyboard or moving my pen over paper.
I clicked all the things and presto, I was in. I didn’t think about it or check my calendar to see if I had conflicts. Had I, you would never even be reading this. I didn’t hesitate because I felt it in my gut. It resonated. I wanted it. More importantly, I needed it.
Writing and meditation are solo activities. To create a community of like minded peeps, traveling the road with you for a time, it was alluring. Real people I saw, heard, communicated with. There were weekly live zoom talks led by Laura and an online forum that constantly buzzed with shop talk. The course just came to an end. And I did it. While Momming, Traveling, Lifeing.
It showed me that I could integrate my worlds. I’ve spent far too much time waiting for long stretches of uninterrupted time that never came. And never will. When the kids go back to school, when I finish another big project, when we move, when I have the baby, when I recover from having the baby, when, when, when. That mindset had me chasing my tail and chipped away at my self-worth. My inner critic was torturous.
I changed when to Now. And then I started. I took action.
5 things I learned.
External Accountability helped me get the ball rolling: it was the push I needed to go from thinking about doing the thing (this concept that lived “out there”) to actually doing the thing (applying it to real life). I wanted to write and meditate daily, but I wasn’t. Once I did differently (Laura’s class), I started getting different results. But I needed support, a system, a thing that made me take my own passions seriously.
Small things done consistently get bigger, better, results. It’s the law of compounding interest. It’s fact, science, whatever you want to call it. It’s real and it works. I meditated for 15 minutes. Then sat down with a lined journal, black pen and the writing prompt for the day (my favorite one: What if you just stopped? So good, right?). All in it took 30ish minutes. That’s it. But the domino effect it has had on my habits, my productivity, my joy, my attitude: game changing.
Living from the lens of Now, not When. That perfect time is never coming. Read that again, friends. Don’t wait or you’ll be dead. Do the thing now.
I can integrate Me into Motherhood. They can (and always have) coexisted. But now I let them (the many spokes on the wheel of Who You Are) support each other, teammates not competitors.
The world needs whatever is inside of you. These things (the fires) they are our way home to ourselves. Doing them keeps your marriage together, makes you a parent that doesn’t go awol, a human that sees the world with hope. The world needs us to do our thing. I feel this when I write because it connects me to You. You! The person reading this. When we share our stories we realize we are the same.
“Success is the product of daily action. Not once-in-a-lifetime transformations”
Call to Action
I know you’ve got a list of things you want to do, create, become, manifest. It hangs over you, swirls inside you, terrifies and electrifies you. You don’t want to die with your music still inside any more than I do. Than any of us. We are the same, me and you. Ditch the lens that says when or some day and shift to Now. Take one step. Then another, then another. Maybe it’s just saying the thing out loud, to another person. I’ll be that person. Tell me. Let me take the journey with you, I’ll be your tough (or tender) love, your push, your partner. Nothing worthwhile happens in a vacuum.