Hang On

I have a reoccurring dream. In this dream, I am driving a vehicle up a very steep mountain. There is little to no shoulder on this road because of how steep this mountain is. I keep driving around and around this mountain, going faster and faster each time I get around a bend. On one of the turns, I eventually lose control of my vehicle and my vehicle goes off the road into the abyss of the unknown. Then I wake up. Sometimes I wake up in tears, sometimes I wake up shaking, and then sometimes I wake up with a shot of adrenaline racing through my body because the dream was that exhilarating. It takes me a few moments to realize that it was just a dream.

For the last 6 months, I have felt like I have been living this dream. Between school, work, sports, 4-H, and everything else in between I find myself wondering when things will slow down. It feels as if we went from zero to 100 mph in just a day. Every time I think I have our schedules under control, we go around another bend and our lives hit the boosters and we seem to propel faster and faster. I no longer know when the games are for the week, I take it one day at a time, praying that we can make it from the west side of Manhattan to Westmoreland for the game with time to warm up. After our games, we race home and I hope that we can spend a few extra minutes in the barn before it’s time for bath and bed. How families with more than two children are able to keep up with all of the schedules, practices, livestock, etc. is beyond me. For this reason alone my mom is one of my heroes, raising three kids that were involved in everything under the sun.

I don’t know how the rest of you organize your lives and still manage to make dinner, do laundry, wash dishes, and clean the rest of your home, but I am all ears – please share those tidbits of advice for the rest of us.

I know I’m not alone in this feeling. I know that every single one of us struggles to make the schedules work, get to all of the games, and participate in all of the practices. The one thing that I have started to accept is that sometimes, it just doesn’t work. AND THAT IS OK. There will be a time that your child misses a practice, you have multiple commitments at the same time, or your schedule didn’t go accordingly. I have found that life goes on and the sun comes up. As silly as that sounds, it took me a long time to be okay with not meeting all of my expectations for myself and my kids.

I can tell when life starts to ramp up and I can feel someone press turbo boost. I have the dream. The dream where I no longer have control but wake up before anything bad happens. It is a friendly reminder to slow down, find your pace, center yourself, and hold on.