Epiphany

So lately, even though my life is so insanely crazy, I've been doing pretty well. Keeping up with school and work and the kids. Not perfectly, but good enough. Most of the time I'm quite happy with my life because it's full and pretty fun, and interesting.

Once in a while though, I have a minute or an hour of total panic. The sheer volume of things I need to do and should be doing and should have already done piles up on me and I realize that I just can't do it! And I have a minor panic attack. Or cry. Loudly. But then the moment passes, I get back to work, and I realize that even if I can't do everything, I can do enough.

And tonight, I had an epiphany. What if I decide that I'll do the best I can, and that'll be that? Obviously I can't add more hours to my day or more hands to my arms. And if I do my best and I still get C's or we have to sell our house or I get fatter or one of my kids gets behind in math or we don't have family night for a month or I forget some of Jason's doctor appointments or my bathrooms don't get cleaned for a few months or my kids have to wear dirty socks to school or we have frozen pizza for dinner 3 times a week or we go into more debt or I void the warranty on my car because I didn't get an oil change or heaven forbid I have to ask my parents for more money.......I think I'll probably live through it. I think my kids might live too-- and my husband! We will all survive.

Because here's the thing. In my handy dandy psychology classes, I've been learning about stress. And how people that see stress as a threat spend a lot of time dealing with their feelings of stressed-out-ness and people who see it as a challenge are motivated to get some work done. When I get overwhelmed and start panicking, guess what I'm not doing? ANYTHING! How ridiculous is it to spend a perfectly good hour crying that I could be spending doing some of this stuff that needs to get done?

So instead, I'll just keep going.  I'll do what I can, because that's all I can do.