The fundamental idea behind meditation is the idea of mindfulness, of having a level of conscious awareness during the practice of meditation, observing what is going on and acknowledging it without being consumed by emotions or becoming attached to any particular emotion. Apparently, if you practice meditation long enough, you should be able to transfer some of the mindfulness to your day to day life and be able to approach stressful and difficult situations with a similar method: observing them, acknowledging them but not becoming attached or consumed. Sounds simple, right?
Here's when it becomes less simple: On Tuesday, I picked Harper up from preschool. There are many benefits to having Harper go to afternoon preschool, but not disrupting Reid's nap is not one of them. With a 1230 drop off time, by the time we get home, Reid is WAY overdue for her nap. Since she gets up no later than 630, so making it through 6+ hours of wake time is not ideal. She probably should go down at 1130 but that would mean that I'd have to wake her up to bring Harper to school and then any opportunity for me to get a quiet moment (to clean, what else?) would be gone. And I'm not hiring a babysitter to stay with her for 15 minutes. So there's that.
Back to Tuesday. We get home from dropping Harper off, Reid is tucked soundly into her crib and I begin on my to-do list, which includes some laundry, dishes and answering a few work emails. About 40 minutes into her nap and still near the top of my to-do list, the door bell rings, Oscar starts barking non-stop and Reid is awake. Nap time = over.
When I picked Harper up from school she threw a (fortunately, very rare these days!) tantrum about cookies. I'm not going to relive it so we'll leave it at that. I was finally able to scrape her off the floor and get the girls in the car and we were off to the grocery store, a task I really hate doing with both girls these days but don't often have a choice. The grocery store we go to has kid-sized grocery carts and Harper loves to push her own, of course, and in the last few months, Reid has realized that she, too, needs a grocery cart. Reid has also decided that her grocery cart needs to be full of groceries, preferably every item she sets her eyes on. The first things on her list on that particular day were strawberries and she went for them with full velocity, trying to tear every single container off the shelf. When I told her no, she proceeded to have a full-throttle, body on the floor, fists-pounding, legs in the air tantrum about 5 feet from the entrance to Whole Foods. Meanwhile, Harper is on her own adventure in the produce section, banging her cart into the legs of anyone who happens to be in her trajectory. For those of you keeping count, this is two tantrums in 30 minutes.
We make it out of the store eventually and my anxiety is building, I had felt all of my usual pre-panic attack symptoms coming on in the grocery store but I have no choice but to keep moving. There is no one who can watch the kids or take over for me at a moment's notice so unless I am driving myself to the emergency room, which didn't seem necessary, I needed to pull myself together. I felt it would be best for all of us to get some fresh air so we head to the playground. Life is instantly better for the girls, they are running and playing, laughing and snacking on apples. For about fifteen minutes. This playground has three rocking animals- the stand-alone kind elevated on what looks like a giant spring. Harper is riding on a seahorse and Reid breaks into a sprint to go do what sister is doing and runs straight into the seahorse's mouth and promptly gets head-butted down into the mulch. (It's okay to laugh, I can see the humor in the image of my little peanut with her wild, blond curls in every direction getting taken out by a synthetic seahorse.) She is wailing, Harper is wailing and I am wailing on the inside.
I think the hardest part of dealing with this stupid panic attack issue is that the kind of day-to-day event I described above, which is par for the course for parenting two young children, is now beyond what I can effectively deal with. I guess I can't exactly say that because I do, ultimately, deal with it since I have no other choice. But it is really, really tough and it sets my nervous system on edge for an extended period of time afterward. Just when I finally begin to calm down again, something similar happens and I'm back on the same road. Some days there's just no opportunity for mindfulness.
No comments:
Post a Comment