The Mental Gymnastics of Showing Up
As much as I want to prepare for Soraya’s sleep study on Monday, we have a big weekend ahead – Yasmeen has her solo/ensemble singing contest AND Leena has her first dance team competition!
There’s a lot of planning that has to happen to make sure Safi and/or I can make it to both performances and keep up with Soraya’s medical care. It doesn’t make it any easier that for some of these activities the event information doesn’t come out until a few days before.
The dance studio had sent out the itinerary and the day was much longer than I had anticipated (12pm-9pm!!!). I emailed the admin to figure out if it was ok for parents to tag in or tag out another person if needed. The response was that the parents are expected to stay the whole time, and sometimes if they absolutely had to work, they would work it out with another dance mom...
This was a hard email for me to process.
Enter my “Say It, Don’t Feel It” strategy. I wrote back and just went there. I told them that since I have a child who is on a ventilator, has medications she needs to take at certain times, and is in hospice, I would need to know if I could tag in a babysitter.
The admin did not write back – instead the director called me! We worked out the details...but the whole interaction was awkward.
While preparing for the big weekend, I have been SO distracted at home. Safi has been the same, as he’s been worried and feeling a lot of emotions with the upcoming sleep study. Earlier this week he cleaned up Soraya’s plate after a meal and placed the food waste in the laundry basket!
Well, I did worse. I was multitasking and put Soraya’s iPad in the WASHING MACHINE AND WASHED IT! 😵💫😱🫣🫠
Uggh, the mental fatigue, the grief, the mental gymnastics JUST to be physically present is hard.
What has been the silliest mistake you have made while in stress, grief, or distraction?