#day4 of #30days of #radicalaccountability complete.
I so do not want to blog about my day. But skipping it wouldn’t exactly be radically accountable, so here I am.
My day was rough, and it was entirely, completely, and PREVENTABLY my fault. I set myself up for problems from the very beginning by overscheduling my morning, so when I then overslept marginally and the kids did what normal 2-year-olds do whenever their parents are trying to get out the door, I completely melted down and yelled at the kids for the first time in over a month. And I don’t mean I was just loud. I’m a loud girl. Loud is no big deal. I YELLED.
I didn’t just yell. I was That Mom you swear you will never be and then suddenly you’re watching yourself like it’s a movie where the girl hears a noise in the basement and goes to investigate and you’re like, “Don’t do it! Don’t go in there!” and you can’t stop her, and these words are coming out of your mouth and it doesn’t even matter what you’re saying because you are just SO MAD and they’re SO SCARED because Mommy done lost her mind. It was not a great way to start the day, and taking them to daycare after that and leaving there, with their teacher having to peel them off my legs because they were both sobbing and didn’t want me to go was pretty much the worst experience of my life.
Looking at it objectively, it’s actually been a long time since I had a morning this bad with the kids. This was an anomaly, not the rule. This is not going to be the defining moment of their childhood. But it doesn’t matter because I keep playing the tape over in my mind of my screaming at my babies because I couldn’t get it together and keep it under control and overwhelmed myself with too much to do in too little time. The fact that it had been so long actually made it worse, because they were so caught off guard. I’m having a really hard time chalking this up to “we all make mistakes” and “tomorrow will be better.”
I apologized to them before we left the house and again before I left them at school, and then we talked about it when they got home today. They’re resilient. They love me. They’re basically over it. We had an okay evening. I’m just still beating myself up over it. So now I just need to move forward, to make a plan to avoid the triggers, to keep moving ahead.
But that was the domino that I allowed to knock over the rest of my day, and it feels awful. I got my two shakes in and folded a basket and a half of laundry, but I missed 2 of my 3 sets of tablets, skipped breakfast in my race to get out of the house, and ran only a mile of my planned four. I’m coming in short on calories and water, and felt like I came up short on everything else I did today, too. I made my new running pal wait 45 minutes for me to be there for like 13 minutes of our planned time together, when I should have just canceled our date last night when my morning at work got moved around. Oh, and I’m going to be #latergramming like crazy tomorrow because today had plenty of pics and little posting amid my constant scrambling and negative self-talk today.
So here’s the plan, because tomorrow needs to go better and I need to make that happen right now:
- Bed tonight the minute after I hit publish on this post
- Set both alarms so I can’t sleep through or hit snooze without realizing
- Do personal development FIRST THING while eating FIRST THING so I can be in the right mindset and not hungry or grumpy when the kids get up
- Cuddle with the boys for 15 minutes before doing anything else with them so we can reconnect
- Prioritize my to-do list for tomorrow after the kids go to school, and focus on only the MUST-DOs so I don’t have two overwhelmed days in a row
- Stop negative self-talk as soon as I notice it by replacing it with positive statements as I breathe deeply
- Make time for stretching and breathing breaks during the day between meetings so I can regroup and recharge
It’s easier to stick with old habits than to transition to new ones, and I really felt the powerful of old habits today. My goal is to use today’s frustration and disappointment as a reminder that this #radicalaccountability for #realchange is happening at exactly the right time for exactly the right reasons, that these are growing pains. Feel free to remind me of this if I seem to need a pick-me-up tomorrow.
Follow my #30day journey of #radicalaccountability here at Amateur Parenting and through mynutrition and lifestyle journal on Instagram. Want to join me? Add these hashtags — #30days #radicalaccountability #coachkristen #dayX – to your social media posts and let’s do this together.
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