SquarePeg Books

I’m a mom and a chauffeur and a PA and a groundskeeper and…

Yeah, you know the whine.

This whole “set and maintain boundaries” thing is hard to do. Setting a schedule is probably what I need to do, like:

pick up and put away 5 things a day, vacuum a room, walk the dogs, workout for 20 minutes, read, write, laundry, weed the yard, go to work, check emails, check on my Mom, check on my MIL, get the kids to wherever, groceries, vaccines, bills, cook, bake, shower, repair this-

See what happened back there?

It started small. Just pick up and put away 5 things a day. Not an unreasonable chore, and it is something that will slowly chip away at the disorder. Then it jumped to vacuum a room. Also, not a huge deal. Honestly, it could probably be rolled under the “5 things” heading, but that isn’t what my brain did.

It jumped immediately from that to “walk the dogs,” which in all fairness should be done daily because that’s a responsible doggy owner thing. Walking the dogs is a little stressful for me because I have to always be aware of our surroundings so frik and frak don’t loose their damn minds. I immediately, right here, feel the urge to go off on a tangent about how we’ve tried training and so on and on and on.

Which spins me up because even though I know it counts as “working out,” I also know that I need to do more than that in order to improve my health, but the dogs simply will not cooperate for all the snackies in the world when they’ve decided they want to go after something. And then I look at the clock and realize I still haven’t gotten the laundry started, or the filters cleaned, or set out something to cook, and I should really read that book that’s been staring at me forever, but I’m really stressed right now so just 5 minutes on YouTube while I’m folding laundry and-

I think the self-care I need to learn is how to recognize when I start spinning out and overwhelming myself just with the to-do list. I haven’t even woken up yet, and I’m already stressed to shit because of everything I feel like I have to do as a responsible adult BEFORE I can play with my words.

The self-care I really need to learn is Stillness. How to stop jumping ahead in my head, and just focus on what’s in front of me. How to make a to-do list that’s a reasonable length for the day, without feeling the need to add twelve days of non-stop chores and errands because so much needs to get done in order to have a house that is worthy of a two page spread in a Homes and Gardens mag.