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There was a time…

 

There was a time

There was a time…

When I had plenty of time – day in and day out. I started to draw and paint to live the creative part of me. I started to do Yoga to move my body and still my mind.

I had time to go to get my nails done, to sit in a café and just watch people walking by while slowly drinking a huge latte macchiato, I had regular hairdresser appointments and lots of time for shopping.  I spent lots of time on writing and even more on reading, reading real paper books.

This time has gone!

I have no time at all, this is a feeling that implanted itself into my brain.

I need to rush through my life because everything is planned and organized and if I get off this schedule tragedies will happen.

I rush to the Kindergarten to be in time before they start their day, I rush back to work, I squeeze appointments in between my work schedule as I cannot attend them with my son. I rush to the Kindergarten to pick him up and run with him through the supermarket because he’s tired and cranky. I rush back home and hope he sleeps so that I can finish my work and prepare dinner, when he wakes up there’s no possibility that I sit on my desk as he will go mad.

We need to play (which is his right!) and that’s the first time where I can slow down a bit. After dinner he’s fully awake and energized to enjoy a long evening with us which means not really time for me to do something creative or watch a movie without interruption, a bit of Yoga works as he starts to like that. It’s late when the day ends and sleeping without me is still rarely happening and instead of reading a few “pages” on my e-book I check emails in bed and hope he’s sleeping deeply soon so that I can take a shower before my eyes close because I’m so tired.

Is this the life I imagined with a child? No. Is this how life just is as a working mum? No.

I think I had to go through this to realize something…

No tragedies happen if I’m off the schedule!

Surely work needs to be done and there will always be days like this BUT it’s up to me to change the majority of days to a more relaxed and flexible schedule.

The more relaxed I am, the more relaxed my son is.

We listen to music in the morning while getting ready to leave the house and we snuggle a while, that’s MORE important than sitting five minutes earlier in my office.

These moments won’t come back!

My office day is scheduled, there’s no way to be completely relaxed there as we have timelines and things need to be done in time but that’s just a matter of prioritizing my work and have proper to-do-lists. If I work highly concentrated instead of being distracted by stressed thoughts about what comes next I work in a more efficient way and yes, more de-stressed. If I need to finish something in the evening anyway why not to drive to the supermarket before I pick my son up? This way I’m faster and my son can go home from the kindergarten right away and snuggle up for a good sleep. I prepare dinner, I work, I am finished when he wakes up and we can do some great things together – we can finish cooking on days I didn’t manage to and he loves the kitchen, or we play or we go to the playground for a while, or we bath him, or or or.

I may not have the time still to work on my paintings, to write lots, to read lots, but I find time to enjoy, I find time to look at a caterpillar as if I discovered something completely new because my son shows me how to do that.

We go outside and search the whole sky until we find a plane or the moon or even both. We start to walk and stop again because there’s a cat climbing up a tree and we follow her to see where she goes.  My little love is not even two years old.

He learned a ton of things in his life already and he is ruling our day!

I am his mother and it’s my task to be at his site, to carry him when he’s tired, to feed him when he’s hungry, to show him this world and to go on my knees to face him on his level.

It’s my life as his mother and I love to do all of this because he should be the happiest child on this planet.

I’m able to write (as you can see), it isn’t as regularly as it once was but does that matter? I’m able to do things just for myself, they are limited and not much but that’s OK. I’m able to draw once in a while, I’m able to do many things I used to do but is that really important right now? No, it isn’t.

Important right now is that we live in this very moment because these days pass by like crazy. My little baby is a toddler already and he soon will be doing things on his own and doesn’t want me to help him or to play with him. I don’t want to miss these days and look back one day to regret that I wasn’t crawling on the floor, checking what is under the table or under the couch, just because it makes him laugh in such a giggling wonderful way. I will have plenty of time in the future for all the other things but right now every minute spent with this little bunch of pure happiness is all I need.

There was is a time…it’s called NOW!

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Crazy days of motherhood

Crazy days of motherhood

Crazy days of motherhood

Life ain’t always easy…

After a working day, without the still breastfed toddler at home, I thought I pick him up in the kindergarten and quickly jump into the supermarket to buy a few things.

Bad bad bad idea, that was the worst idea I ever had.

I think there is a breastfeeding brain which is similar to the pregnancy dementia.

What happened?
I’m sitting just now in the back of our car, toddler is drinking half asleep from a breast the size of a giant melon.
I was barely able to focus on what I wanted to buy, forgot the soup but didn’t care because the main goal was to get somehow back to the car without fainting or crying or both because of the milk overproduction.

When I went into the supermarket I thought all is fine until all of a sudden this insanely pain was hitting me and the mean part is, without warning, in waves, just as if it wants to pinch me once in a while to tell me there are more important things than food for mom – food for the toddler is ready.

Whoever said breastfeeding is all snuggling and lovely and precious and nice (which it of course is very often) forgot that it can be painful and raw like this as well.
As soon as he latched I felt the first small relief, after 5 minutes I felt already better and not scared anymore.
If you are alone with your child in a big store and feel so crappy it is scary, isn’t it?
For me thoughts run weird and uncontrolled through my mind. It’s similar to a panick attack which is hitting you out of the blue without upfront warning.
What if I would faint?

Would I fall in a direction, onto my child or just collapse – why did I put him in the carrier – he’s in danger if I faint – is my husband at work answering the phone if someone would call him now – what was that stabbing sensation in my left breast – who’s taking care of my son – or was it from the heart – how should he get up to here when I have the car – calm down, you won’t faint, it’s just too much milk – he will be completely scared if mommy isn’t there – get out here as fast as you can – now it seems to be better – no, the pain comes in waves – do I leave or grab some more milk, better go, right?

This is a thought-circle which I cannot stop at that moment although I know very well that instead of calming down it’s pushing me more into the panicking corner.
Am I the only one who has these thoughts?

We start to relax now, the fear subsides and life comes back, how glad I am today for this car. Sitting here is like a shelter, it’s our little place to securely and safe with locked doors get back to a normal state. I wrote in another post about our messy car but in exactly this moment I’m so thankful that we have everything inside that car – a blanket to cover my little boy who’s really sleepy now, a bottle of water for me to drink something while feeding him, I could even charge my phone if I want to but right now we are fine.

Who needs soup?

I put the sleeping precious milk vampire into his car seat, cover him with his elephant blanket, check my shirt if all is covered again before I leave the backseat and start the engine to drive us home.

Thanks for these days because sometimes I need exactly that to realize how blessed we are and how happy I can be that we have all these possibilities.

What’s one of your crazy motherhood experiences?