Walking the Tightrope: 101 Ways to Manage Motherhood and Your Sanity

By Dr. Monica A. Dixon

This is the Doctor Spock of your generation. I wish I would have had this book when raising six kids!

Authors Mom

You buy a new microwave and you get an extensive instruction manual, yet deliver your
first born and all they send you home with is a large hospital bill and some sample
diapers. Youre stuck with this micro-being for the next 18+ years, yet have little more to
operate from than the seat of your pants. Dr. Monica shares her tried and true lessons
for how to:



Build your own energy reserves for this most difficult yet rewarding of lifes jobs

Build your own energy reserves for this most difficult yet rewarding of lifes jobs

Practice simple, effective discipline moves that workNOW!

Put creative tips into action that will get your kids to eat healthy, do their
chores, listen and actually talk to you, and learn their limits, all while balancing a
career, friends, a household and your own sanity

Easily and effectively place limits on your time and obligations to others, while
putting your time and energy into those things you most value

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468543162

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Section One

Section Two: Let’s Get Physical

Section Three: Spirit and the Power of Reflection

Section Four: Emotional

Introduction

It was a bitterly cold Wisconsin morning, the roads paved with a thin sheet of ice. As I shook off sleep, I knew I’d have to be on the Interstate early to make the 30-mile commute to my teaching position at a local university. There was no room for error when 400 students were waiting in an 8 AM class.

After showering and dressing, I quickly downed my last cup of coffee before waking my three and five year old sons to ready them for the long day ahead. Suddenly, my older son, Paul, appeared in the doorway, dried vomit covering his pajamas. As I looked aghast, he uttered, Mom, I think I got sick last night. I swept him up and off to the bedroom as I quickly calculated how much extra time a bath was going to add to my already tight schedule.

Once in the bedroom, I was greeted by dried vomit running down the bedroom walls from where Paul slept on the top bunk bed. Ignoring it until I could return from work, I turned to him and his three-year-old brother Sam, on the floor, where I began to undress them. Paul began to vomit again, this time all over the carpet between his brother and myself. From nowhere, our Miniature Schnauzer appeared and, perhaps stunned by Paul’s odd behavior, lunged at Sam’s throat and bit him. The wailing began, one son bleeding and one vomiting, both terrified. I grabbed the dog and pushed him out of the way against the bedroom wall. He instantly peed all over the carpet.

Overwhelmed by it all, I sat down in my fancy silk blouse and wool suit and cried my eyes out. What to clean up first: the vomit, blood or dog urine? My thoughts ran to my husband, an Army officer I hadn’t seen in over eight months. Isolated in the tropical mountain backcountry of Panama, he was on a mission to rebuild schools, hospitals and roads for the Panamanian people. He was only available via field phone, and then only in a dire emergency. He wasn’t going to be of much help to me now.

The next few days were an epiphany for me. Do I sell the dog or the children? (The dog finally went). I was clearly in over my head. I would have to become tremendously creative if I were to survive the next ten months alone until my husband returned. I loved my teaching position, so that was a given, but my entire life needed restructuring. That night at dinner I told my boys things were going to have to change dramatically (as they looked at me through glazed eyeballs), or their mom would soon need a room with mattress-lined walls.

Part of my new plan was a designated chore list. What fun to explain to a three-year old! I doled them out daily and weekly responsibilities. Then I began the long process of clarifying, organizing and implementing changes in every other area of my life. As I watched the three-year-old teeter to the sink that night, our dishes held at a 45 degree angle as he crossed the floor, I said a silent prayer that this new plan would save us all from the brink of extinction.

For 25 years, I’ve lived the life of an Army wife. When he’s called out in the middle of the night to another national or world event, I often won’t see him for months on end. We’ve been together on and off 27 of our 34 years, and I, in the intervening time, have lived the life of a single mom. Granted, there was always a paycheck conveniently deposited in the bank, but from an emotional and physical standpoint, I was going it alone.

Yet, my career is as vital to me as oxygen. Traveling the country speaking on women’s issues these past twenty-five years, I continually hear the struggles, heartbreak, guilt and search for balance of all women who choose both motherhood and career.

Balancing both becomes akin to a circus act. But which one? Walking the high wire, teetering precariously on that tightrope, waiting for one misstep to throw us over into the net? Or, the juggler, masterfully spinning the glass plates representing our lives, our career, marriage or a significant relationship, yet others our children and our selves? As one plate begins to wobble, we quickly give it our attention to right it again, only to discover that in the meantime, two other plates have stopped spinning and are falling to the floor to shatter in pieces. My prayer is that the information you glean here will enrich your life, help you discover your sense of balance to stay on that tightrope, and empower you to juggle those glass plates with ease.

Section One

Overview: Some Beginning Assumptions

There are some basic assumptions that provide the foundation for this book. These include:

1. It’s still our work. Regardless of the tremendous gains seen in the past thirty years by women entering the workforce, it remains that the lion’s share of managing a home still belongs to women. A recent study by the National Opinion Research Council found that women and men share equal quantities of housework—until marriage. In the For Better or Worse department, women gain an additional 14 hours of work per week to men’s ninety additional minutes. The Institute for Social Research reports that married men with children are now doing 16 hours of housework per week—up from 12 hours per week in 1965—but this figure hasn’t budged since 1985! This compares to married women with children working outside the home doing 27 hours per week of housework. Despite nagging, bribes or threats on their life, the reality is that these figures aren’t going to change anytime soon.

Given this, one of the main goals of this book is to help you learn to delegate, organize and communicate your needs to others both in your family and without so that you have more time to care for your own needs.

2. Just say no is a crock. This campaign bombed with recreational drug use and it hasn’t proven very effective with working moms either. Pick up any woman’s magazine and there’s a bounty of advice to Just say no in order to help balance your life. The women I’ve worked with over the years don’t want to say no. They want to be an active and involved member of their community, PTA, or church, maintain fulfilling friendships, and stretch themselves with new goals. If every woman in America woke up tomorrow morning and said NO, we’d immediately lose programs such as Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, PTA, soup kitchens or the rest of a vast infrastructure of volunteer opportunities that support our country and are managed primarily by women.

Instead, we want to find ways to discern what it is we want to commit our time to and easier ways to manage that time to include more of the things we love doing. Through identifying your most important values in the next chapter, you’ll discover it’s much easier to hone in on what really matters, focus on that and skip the fluff.

3. Guilt is not an option. The women I meet in my work are already carrying around bags of guilt the size of Santa’s. It’s the last thing we need, whether it stems from our life choices, the circumference of our thighs or our choice of toilet paper. These 101 tips offer a menu from which to select, NOT an additional demand. Pick and choose as you see fit for your unique situation. Use those that work in your life and offer some sanity and toss the others into the round file.

How to Use 101 Tips for Moms

You’re so busy, you don’t even have time to read this book, and therefore, I won’t waste your time. Although each section builds on another to help you work towards some semblance of sanity, I’ve made the tips easy to refer back to as your life changes. For example, you might revisit tips for increasing communication with your kids as they age, or turn to Finding Meaning in Your Life during a time when experiencing grief or excess stress.

The book is divided into three main sections in order to address the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects all of us experience as a part of being human. Each section builds on the previous, but also stands on its own.

Section I helps you look at where you are now. You will assess your current life on the Wheel of Life in order to pinpoint your strengths and problem areas. As a working mom, it becomes easy to see the microscopic, day-to-day view of your life, but much harder to see the macroscopic, or whole. Often clients who have done this exercise will remark, You know, I’ve been so busy working that I forget that I need time to exercise, or I keep working out at the gym and have forgotten that I need to spend some time praying, too.

In Section II, you will learn positive ways to nurture both yourself and your family’s health to help you perform at an optimum level. I consider this the building block to leading a balanced life because without good health, little else matters. Without the energy to get out of bed in the morning, you’ll pay minimal attention to your emotional or spiritual needs, let alone be able do a fair job at being a mom, partner or employee.

Section III provides ideas to help you manage your emotional health, including simple ideas to stay sane as a parent, how to manage your relationships with others and ideas for becoming more financially secure.

Section IV targets the spiritual side of being a woman, an area that often goes overlooked in the craziness of our lives. You’ll learn ways to integrate and nurture your spirituality to lead a fuller, more engaged and intuitive life.

The Big Picture

Where has our time gone? For one, we’re working five more hours per week, on average, than we did just one decade ago, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics. We’re working 350 more hours per year than the Europeans and our amount of time at sleep has decreased over the last decade to an average of seven (yes, SEVEN) hours per night.

Living lives that mimic the hamster exercising his wheel can lead to many problems, both immediate and far-reaching. Do any of the following symptoms describe your life?

•   Bone-tired weariness. Do you constantly feel tired, lethargic or apathetic, not just occasionally, but more often than not?

•   Crabbiness or irritability. Do you find yourself snapping out in anger or resentment, especially at those you love the most and for reasons even you don’t understand?

•   Isolation or Depression. Do you wish you had more time with friends and family members? Or, do you find yourself choosing to spend less time with others?

•   Overeating, overdrinking, overanything. Do you find yourself doing things to excess, becoming lost in the moment and forgetting reality?

Any of these can be symptoms of a life out of balance, off kilter and in need of some TLC. Continued over the course of years, these symptoms begin to exact their toll on us. We pay a price, physically, emotionally and spiritually, for living a life out of balance.

•   Fragmentation. We begin to feel like the different roles we function in become compartmentalized according to our planner schedule. We race from one event to the next, never really taking the pleasure in of the experiences but being held captive prisoner to our schedule. A balanced life means that you may lose yourself in prayer while exercising, solve work problems while you are following creative pursuits, entertain friends with family at home or spend family time together doing physical activities. This isn’t about the tiresome concept of multitasking, piling tasks on top of another until you discover yourself simultaneously working out on the treadmill, catching up with Facebook, talking to the children and stirring dinner. Balance is about living a whole life, an integrated life, where all components of your self peacefully co-exist in some measure of harmony.

•   Poor Health. Over the years, I have met more women that treat their bodies like an old, used beat up car than the high performance machine it really is. They feed it the cheapest fuel available, leave it outside to rust and weather, don’t take it in for regular tune-ups and then jump in it in the morning, step on the gas and expect it to purr along gracefully all day.

It doesn’t work that way. Our bodies need high-octane fuel (good food), care and nurturing, regular movement and routine maintenance (health check-ups). You cannot expect to operate at peak performance if you don’t care for the machine.

•   Disconnection to nature and the spirit. The crazier our lives become and the more roles and responsibilities we take on over the years, the less connected we become to the outdoors and our grounding. Nature has it’s seasons, just as our lives do, and ignoring nature excludes us from our connection with our Mother. We leave for work in the dark, return in the dark, open the garage door, slip the car in and never see much of the light of day. Nature is our mother, our fuel source, our grounding to where we were and where we are going. Kathy, a client, says that her idea of camping is dirty towels at the Hilton. Connecting with nature and the seasons doesn’t have to mean backpacking into the High Sierra backcountry for a month, but simply spending time on a local nature trail, park or beach at least weekly. Allow Mother Nature in, and she’ll renew your spirit and help discern what really matters in life.

•   Lack of Perspective. The wisdom of the ages teaches us there are two sides to all of life: the Yin and the Yang, black and white, good and evil, fattening and low calorie. The truth lies somewhere in between. The more disconnected and unbalanced our lives become, the less we’re able to see that everything has two sides; we lose perspective. We begin to work as if it is the last job on earth, parent as if we’re raising the next Mozart or Einstein, diet until we look like the latest Hollywood celebrity or furnish our home as if Home and Garden magazine will be in soon for a photo shoot. We lose the gray area of life, the in-between, and the ability to be imperfect or to see alternatives.

For example, many of my clients parent on two extremes of a continuum, either far too strict, monitoring every movement of their child’s life, or far too lenient, all but ignoring the poor kid, with few finding a comfortable place in between to let the child grow guided, on their own developmental path. Both ends of the continuum have negative consequences for both mom and the child (and often, the poor father who has little say in how things will transpire).

Finding Balance in an Insane World

One of the biggest reasons women most often have trouble leading a balanced life is the onslaught of media images to which we are constantly exposed. Earlier generations had an easier time living a balanced life because they were able to live what they knew to be real in the world around them, and they faced far fewer choices. There weren’t ads depicting how to get clothing cleaner than clean; they often wore the same clothes for several days. They didn’t worry about preparing a gourmet meal every night; Monday night was chicken night, Tuesday, meatloaf, and so forth throughout the week. Their children didn’t have to wear the latest brand names; they were lucky to get someone’s hand-me-downs.

This doesn’t mean it was necessarily a better life, but assuredly, it was a more balanced life than those of ours today. Women, already burdened with guilt, are especially sensitive to the messages of what we should look like, wear, drive, cook, clean with and buy. Over time, these covert messages begin to permeate our brains as if they were gospel. To stray is to sin.

The media isn’t the only area where we become defined externally. Advice, often unsolicited, from parents, friends and family also help to cloud our real selves. I was amazed as a college professor how many of my students were there in class due to parental expectations, not by way of their own motivation. Many, when asked, couldn’t explain why they were in college, only that it was the direction expected of them since their earliest memories.

The single most important exercise I do with my clients is to take them on the journey necessary to discover who they are, what they value in life and what matters most to them.

The Wheel of Life

The first step in finding a sane balance in life is to discover where you are at now.

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Take a look at the Wheel of Life. How are you doing in all the various areas? What areas need more attention and what areas might you have over emphasized? Are you spending lots of time on a degree or career and ignoring your body? Are you spending seven days a week at the gym but need to find a job? Grab a pencil and shade in the percentage you think you are giving that area attention. This will give you a quick visual as to areas in your life that may need more attention.

Know What Matters

Do you have a philosophy of life? If so, have you ever bothered to write it down? If not, why not? Why does it matter? I tell clients that not having a written Philosophy of Life Statement is like building a house while ignoring the foundation. Every time the weather turns, it rains too much, there’s a deep freeze or an earthquake and the walls cave, so do our as lives when we face adversity without a statement of our philosophy. It’s our compass, our guide, and our value statement about what we