It’s Time To Surrender

On Friday I lost it on the kids.

I yelled. I swore. I threatened. I completely panicked.

There are lots of reasons I arrived at this point on Friday.

And I did a lot of thinking over the weekend.

Then this morning a friend of mine posted something on Facebook.

She said,

I was at a meeting yesterday where the topic was “surrender.”

Someone made the statement, “It has taken me years to realize that a ‘fuck this shit!’ attitude is not the same as surrender.”

It was a holy shit wake up call for me.

An epiphany or an a-ha moment or a revelation.

Or all three.

Everything I’ve been doing for the past ten years became crystal clear.

I am powerless over just about everything I have been trying to control.

What I realized last night is that my life has become unmanageable.

What I am doing in order to function is unsustainable.

And I need to surrender.

I thought I had surrendered.

But I haven’t.

After doing some research I have discovered the difference between submission and surrender.

Submission is accepting reality on a conscious level but not on a subconscious one.

It’s telling yourself that things won’t change.

For now.

Surrender, on the other hand, is allowing things to just happen.

To stop fighting them.

To allow the Universe to do its thing and fully accept whatever it is you are experiencing.

I know I haven’t surrendered because my life is filled with tension.

And not a little bit of tension here and there.

Massive, life-altering tension that is affecting me physically and emotionally.

It’s affecting my health and it’s affecting my parenting.

It is big time affecting my parenting.

I am no longer willing to live with the constant physical, mental, and emotional tension.

It is exhausting, and it’s unraveling me.

This was perfectly illustrated in a swim lesson I was teaching today.

I was teaching a young boy to kick with a kickboard.

A kickboard is meant as a tool to support your arms in the water.

It works very effectively when your shoulder are relaxed and you simply rest your arms on it.

Not having much experience with a kickboard, this little boy’s arms were extremely tense.

The more tense his shoulders were the more he submerged the kickboard.

The more he submerged the kickboard, the more unstable his body became.

He was unable to control the board the deeper it was pushed under water.

The more he tensed up, the less effective and more unmanageable the board was in the water.

My life has mirrored this little boy and the kickboard for the past ten years.

And while I thought I was surrendering, I was simply pushing the board deeper and deeper under the water and my life was pushing back just as hard as the water in the pool.

This all clicked for me today.

I messaged my friend who shared the post about surrendering.

She is not religious, but she is very spiritual. She prays a lot. She is very open about it.

I asked her this:

How did you start praying? How the fuck do you surrender?

I am fighting reality — I’ve been fighting it for so long, and I’m so tired. I’m just really, really tired.

I need to surrender but I have no fucking idea how to do it. It’s terrifying.

The thought of surrendering scares the shit out of me.

But you know what?

So does the thought of continuing the way I have been for the last ten years, and more specifically, the last two years.

It’s time to, as they say, Let go and let God.

How am I going to do that?

I don’t know.

But I got this advice from my praying, surrendering friend:

… I also pray the (not catholic) rosary.

You just ask for help: “HELP! I need your help!”

Without too much worrying about “who” you’re asking.

The rosary gives you a ritual to do it with – it works for me. But all you really need to do is say “help!” And then when it shows up – though it might not look like what you expected or specifically asked for – you say “thank you!”

For example, whenever I pray for healing, almost immediately things get exponentially worse – it’s like the recipe for healing – ask for healing, and the pimple becomes a boil and it festers to the point of needing to be lanced. And then it is – but it never would have been if it hadn’t gotten so bad – and then the healing comes.

So that’s where I’m gonna start.

Alright, Universe.

I’m open, and I surrender.

And HELP! I need your help!