I suffer from Fear Of Missing Out syndrome.
BIG TIME.
Well, until recently, that is.
I think my FOMO issue happened kind of gradually.
Or it increased and intensified gradually.
When you have lots of kids, you get used to a certain level of chaos.
You get used to messes.
Lots and lots of messes.
The ordeal of loading 5 kids seven years old and younger in and out of the car multiple times a day becomes routine.
You are in the thick of things, and you don’t realize what is happening in the moment.
People say things to you like, “I don’t know how you do it,” and you just kind of shrug it off.
I mean, you just figure it out because you have to.
As the kids grow up, you tell yourself things will get easier.
But then the kids start school and now they have sports and homework and school plays and practices and concerts all sorts of stuff.
And you want them to be able to do it all because you want to make up for all the shit you never had a chance to do when you were a kid.
And then you are losing your everloving mind, and you understand exactly why your mom didn’t have you enrolled in every activity known to mankind.
Because at some point it becomes too much.
And our FOMO syndrome is actually kind of ironic.
Because by trying to do everything, what you really miss out on is having a full and enriching experience in any area.
Your existence parallels a tapas restaurant or perpetually eating your meals via free samples from Costco.
You never get the full experience of anything.
Plus you inevitably have a nervous fucking breakdown.
I realized I had allowed myself to be doing too many things at once about two months ago.
And I knew what I needed to do, but I didn’t want to do it for fear of missing out on an experience.
It wasn’t until I pulled the trigger and made a decision to start eliminating things from out schedule that I achieved enlightenment.
I don’t want my kids to miss out on opportunities.
But even more than that, I don’t want my kids to miss out on having a childhood full of happy memories with me.
And that’s what I was doing.
I was trying to give them all the things and be there for them in every capacity when I really wasn’t there for them much at all.
I was giving them an unnecessarily overextended, frustrated, irritated, and exhausted mom.
By trying to do all the things to make my kids happy, I was robbing them of THE most important thing.
My time and my energy and my attention.
After changing my mindset and my beliefs about what was really important for my kids (and me), I made the first big deletion with the decision to move from our current swim team which is 45 minutes away from our house, back to our old team that’s much closer.
Even though I knew for months that this would be the best decision for all of us in the long term, I wrestled with this for so long.
I was sure the kids would be devastated.
You know what?
Nobody is devastated.
There were some tears at first, but now all the kids are fine with the change. They are able to see how other areas of our lives are going to improve and how some areas already have.
I am so much more relaxed. I am more patient. I am more understanding.
I am much more relazed.
All that stuff was not making me a better mom.
It was making me a worse one.
Sometimes, we believe that giving our kids as many experiences as possible is what is the best for them.
But it’s giving our kids as much of ourselves as we can that is really what they need (and want) the most.
And giving as much of ourselves as we can requires us to give to ourselves.
It requires us to make our health and our well-being a priority so we can be present and available for our families.
We can’t do that when we’ve cluttered our lives with all the things for our kids so that there is no room left for us.
Sure, you have to make some sacrifices when you decide to become a parent.
But making sacrifices doesn’t mean neglecting yourself.
It means sacrificing some of your wants for all of your needs.
It means sacrificing some time. It means sacrificing predictability. It means sacrificing privacy.
But it doesn’t mean sacrificing everything, including your own well-being.
When you take good care of yourself, you can take good care of your kids.
Part of taking good care of your kids is showing them that there are limits to what we are able to do.
Yep. There are limits.
Maybe not to how much you can do.
But to how much you can do at once.
And I gotta say, it feels a whole lot better to be doing one thing really well than it does to be doing a whole bunch of things really poorly.
And so, the life decluttering continues.
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