For years I thought I could do it all, I had a career I loved, I could manage my time since I was self employed and my passion was to help people achieve their home ownership dreams!!! I still love doing this, it makes me joyful when the entire process works and everyone succeeds.
I decided in my late 20’s after many failed attempts at relationships to finally be super clear, and really focused and visualize, articulate and be sure about what I really wanted my life to look like. It took me many years, and lots of self help courses, seminars, books, and even a flavour of the week dating blitz to get to the point where I found my perfect life mate who could get on board with the life vision I wanted. We did it, and have never looked back no matter what ups and downs we faced.
Throughout all of the fun times of getting rolling in a life as a couple, as parents. We had our first huge plan interruption when my FIL became gravely ill after the birth of our first child. This accelerated our plans to move his parents into our home and thus we became a family who had both Mother’s living in our home. Fun times, if you recognize your life at this point my guess there is some European background in your family.
It was great, we had the space, we had planned on some version of this when we bought or first home, It was set up perfectly for what we had in mind as a multi generational home.
That said, roll the clock forward 15 years, and our lives hit its busiest peak personally, financially, emotionally, and I hit a wall, I did not even realize how badly I had lost control of all of the balls I had in the air until one day I stepped on the scale and I was fifty pounds over my wedding weight as the great expanding bride, and almost ninety pounds over my optimal weight. While the kids were small I could convince myself it was baby fat but lets face it they were in their teens….
how had this happened?
Other things were also starting to become a challenge, my MIL was declining as a result of her age and progressing Alzheimer’s, my mother was falling and breaking her ankle her wrist and needing more support in small ways to keep her independence in our home. The kids were more independent and at the same time needing me in a different way and there is nothing fun about putting two hormonal girls in the same space as a menopausal mother. I bet you know what I mean, my husband learned that reading quietly was a great escape during these times.
I was at that age where I still thought I was young enough to remember everything but losing sight of smaller details, becoming less tolerant of sudden changes to schedules, last minute requests and needs of others, and it was starting to affect how I worked in my fairly high pressure career helping people who were under time constraints to get answers for financing high value purchases. My volunteering which I love and thought energized me became more of a challenge and the sports we did as a family just became more work less fun for me.
Life changes, and the realization I could not keep up were the wake up call, that and leaving the car running with the keys in the ignition in front of the house for half the day. I needed help, I could not keep going on like this, everyone seemed to need more of me including myself, it all became hard, there was no fun, I felt trapped, I had no life, no freedom, I felt like my only fun was food, shopping and netflix.
I started resenting the effort things took, I stopped entertaining as much as I had and I limited my efforts to those things that were necessary. Stress overtook joy and it all started going down hill. I always knew I was the centre of the household but I felt gutted, and it was felt by everyone.
I am happy to say I am on the road to recovery now, I have so fully embraced the new abilities I have learned to help myself, I actually am ready to share it with you my friends.
Ask me how this all works