There I was standing in church, no less, complaining again to my sweet friend, the second one of the morning. I caught myself again and thought “oh my, what am I doing”.
You see, I was once again complaining about the hundreds of things I had to get done by a certain time. I have taken on too much once again and I needed to unload my stress.
So it got me, as I was sitting with my kids on the couch watching another “Harry Potter” weekend. As I watched them trying to keep their eyes open in the middle of the afternoon.
Are we stressing our kids out? Are we keeping our kids too busy?
You see, we parents, especially moms, have a habit of complaining about being so busy with life. So much we take on and stress us out. In fact, I wrote a post on my other blog about this same thing, you can find it here.
But what is this doing to our kids? The stress that we have because we are committed to so much. Are they growing up in a world everyone is so stressed, where every conversation begins and ends with complaints about being strained and busy.
My oldest is a bit of an overachiever. She makes straight A’s, she plays travel soccer, she is in a number of clubs at school, youth group president, on a government group at the school board and this year an officer for the SCA. I ask her all the time, do you have time for that? What about a social life? Well, I got caught off guard a couple of weeks ago when she said, “I’m just doing what you would do”. Well crap! What have I done!
Then I got to thinking as I was sitting at the table the other day working on a number of things and my son asked me yet again for the 100th time if I would come out and play baseball with him. I told him I couldn’t yet, I still had a bunch of things to get done, and once again I got a sharp stab by yet another truth “Mom you promised you would play with me and I’ve been waiting an hour!” Yet again, I was losing sweet valuable time with my little man working on things I had taken on.
I love my volunteer positions, I love all the work I do, I love my business, and well that can’t go away because it pays bills. But over the past few weeks I have committed to change. If I have to wake up hours before my family then so be it. If I have to start using the word “no” to people then so be it. But something has to change.
I don’t want my kid’s to be stressed now because of me, I don’t want my kid’s growing up believing that rushing around, complaining and being stressed is the way to live life. I want my kid’s to enjoy their childhood now, to enjoy life, to enjoy me.
So, as summer begins to come to a close and school is right around the corner, I will be sitting down with my kids and discussing this. I will be taking the month of August and spending much quality time with them. The emails can wait, the documents can get posted later and well if I miss another meeting I will just have to read the minutes. All the committees, all the emails, all the meetings will go on without me, just like life will too. But I’m not going to miss this time with my kids. I’m not going to have them look at me with stress in their eyes anymore. God gave each of us the job of being a parent for a reason, we must take that job so very important. These little people who are in our care will grow up to be big people. We want to guide them to be the best big people ever, we have to be the best examples we can be. Are you the best example? Or are you the stressed out, too busy example?
I have a few weeks of summer left with my kids, then I have one starting junior year, middle school and 2nd grade. Before that starts I want to create some happy memories with my kids. I want to smile, laugh and play with them, not worried about the to do list sitting on the counter. What are you going to do?
