parenting

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

This week, I was a little obsessed with parenting better (as always), cultural appropriation of food (and my white, white guilt), trans issues, and sustainability.

Are you teaching kids how to make good decisions? Here’s how to be sure (A Fine Parent): A Fine Parent has loads of great articles talking about positive parenting. This has a great breakdown on steps to take to teach the skills needed for good decision-making.

I Raised My Glass to the Moon (Five Kids is a Lot of Kids): Beth Woosley has a lovely, honest, hilarious voice. Some of her article make me laugh, some make me choke up. This is a mix of both.

Sniff (Lunar Baboon): Awesome comic about parenting and life, expressing a lovely moment through the generations.

A Guide for People Who Suck at Mindfulness (Rants from Mommyland): This is why I want to throw my phone across the room when I listen to the “mindfulness” app.

Babies (XKCD): What he gives actually is a pretty good response to seeing a baby.

 

Help Your Child to Wonder (Rachel Carson): As an environmental communicator, Rachel Carson is one of my icons. So I was thrilled to find out that she wrote an article way back in 1956 about exploring nature with her nephew. Also, the sentiments she describes and advice she gives still ring terribly true.

Life in a refugee camp (Yes and Yes): A very different perspective on refugee camps from last week (Syrian refugee camp in Jordan), from someone who visited this one because her students’ families were actually in it.

How It Feels When White People Shame Your Culture’s Food – And Then Make It Trendy (Washington Post): “I tried to pretend the blue fish swimming around in the murky green water were pets, but the lack of tank accessories gave away our true intentions, stunning my white friends.”

Craving the Other: One Woman’s Beef with Food and Cultural Appropriation: (Bitch Media): This is another great article on the subject and has some particularly icky examples of it, perhaps most unfortunately from Alton Brown.

Take the Red Pill: The Truth Behind the Biology of Sex (Disrupting Dinner Parties): While many people agree that gender is socially determined, even your sex is less black and white than it seems.

Here’s What’s Okay (And Not Okay) to Say to a Trans Person – Once and For All (Everyday Feminism): Trans people are just becoming more prominent in society, but people still ask them things that they would never ask cis-people (people who aren’t trans). Here’s a quick guide to simply showing respect.

Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic and radical (Boing Boing): I don’t know if I agree with this – I think we do have to seriously lighten up on the consumerism aspect of American society – but definitely an intriguing, unquestionably Marxist approach to sustainability.

 

 

7 Ways to Get Your Child Ready for a New Baby

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 9 Comments

7 Ways to Get Your Child Ready for a New Baby (Photo: Teddy bear sitting on a high chair)

“You’re going to be a big brother!” I told my son (nicknamed Sprout) when he was almost three years old. “That means I’m going to have a baby.” He shrugged and went on his merry way.

Telling him was the easy part. Getting him ready was the challenge. I’m an only child, so the personal aspect of having a sibling was pretty foreign. Chris has a younger sister, but he doesn’t even remember her being born.

To prepare, we looked into advice on the internet, took suggestions from other families, and thought about what we would want if we were a little kid facing this big change.

Thankfully,  following these ideas really did help. Almost two years on, our kids have a great relationship. While they shove and complain, they also show incredible generosity to each other. One of my favorite things to watch is when

Here’s some of the best advice we gathered, along  with how we applied it:

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Thoughts on 33

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

I am now solidly in my 30s*. At 32, I was only a couple of years removed from 30, arguably not so old. Although I was the mother of a small child, motherhood still felt terribly new in so many ways. Now I’m the mother of a kid who will be going to preschool in the fall, with another on the way. While Sprout regularly baffles me, I’m still more confident in my own skills than I was a year ago. I have a suburban house, a Prius that is now paid off (woohoo!), listen to NPR on a regular basis (Snap Judgment is sooo good), and read books about cleaning, for goodness sake. I’m practically a walking cliche. And yet, I don’t feel like I’ve sold my soul. In contrast, I think I’m closer to the person I want to be than ever.

Thoughts on 33 Last year, I talked about how I had been able to be open and honest in what would have previously been stressful social situations. This year, even the nagging doubts have faded. On the few occasions I’m hanging out with adults and not literally chasing a toddler, I don’t have energy to waste on being anxious. I’m just relieved for a chance to talk to my friends.

For example, I went to a Hygge party at my friends’ house on Saturday, which is supposed to evoke the Scandanavian feeling of “coziness” and spending time with friends around a fire. While the candles and thick hot chocolate helped, I just felt so safe. Even though I never imagined that I would tell the story of pumping milk on the second floor of a convention center to anyone at all, much less my male friends, I was recounting it without a care. (Previously, the idea of telling any story involving my breasts was horrifying, much less one involving machinery.)

Even my parenting, which I was so sensitive about people judging in the past, has become more low-stress. Perhaps it’s because everyone knows toddlers can be a pain or I’ve tolerated my fair share of tantrums lately (even in public!), but what other people think just doesn’t weigh on me like it used to.

My self-acceptance is only part of my new-found contentment. Another part is that I’m realizing I now have a lot of the things I always wanted. I always wanted to be married and have kids. While everyone is influenced by societal pressure, I also love both of those aspects of life. In terms of my career, my general position is about as close as you can get to a childhood dream. When I was in third grade, I wanted to be a marine biologist studying whales in the summer and a famous novelist in the winter. While my plan lacked a fundamental grasp of how careers worked, science communicator is pretty damn close. And of course, I always wanted to help people. While frustration and occasionally despair sets in when I contemplate how much needs to be done and how little each of us can do, I do know that my paid and volunteer work does “make a difference.”

Looking over the basics of my life, I’m coming to realize that my frustrations aren’t because of foundational problems, unlike some people. I don’t want to throw everything out and start over. Instead, the places that make me wring my hands are issues where I need to tweak things or find a better balance. That’s a hell of lot better than needing to start from scratch.

The visioning work I did earlier in the year helped me gain this perspective. While nothing is fundamentally wrong, I was starting to feel stagnant. Entering my thirties, I was just going along without a lot of thought to plans that wouldn’t pay off for years. We were busy enough with the huge changes involved in buying a house and having a child, not to mention all of the daily tasks in-between, for me to be strategic about the vision for my career or other life goals.

But just planning for the year shook something loose. From bucket lists to visioning documents, I keep coming across tools and prompts to give me momentum. Seeing a path forward is so much more encouraging than feeling trapped. While my to-do list remains a constant – especially getting ready for the baby – it’s now always in service of larger dreams. Keeping the context for all of the things I “need to do” in the front of my mind is much more motivating and less exhausting than doing them for the sake of it.

While I don’t know what the following year is going to bring, I feel more grounded than I have in a long time, perhaps ever. It’s a good place to be.

 

*This sentence originally said, “I am in my mid-30s.” When I mentioned it to Chris, he protested, “No, mid 30s is 34, 35, 36. You have at least one more year.” Then he paused and added, “Because if you have one more year, then I have one more year.” Indeed.

Eating Ethiopian with a 2 Year Old

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

As a kid, my idea of adventurous eating was that I went to a deli that served tongue. (I never ate tongue, but the mere presence of it on the menu was enough street cred for me.) Admittedly, I didn’t live somewhere with a whole lot of options – all we had in my town for years was a couple of average Italian restaurants, a pub, and a Friendly’s.

But now, living in the D.C. suburbs, we are absolutely spoiled for choice. D.C. itself has a thriving foodie culture and our suburb has a number of immigrants who have brought their delicious food with them. So I’m dedicated to ensuring Sprout is exposed to all sorts of cuisine. So far, we’ve had Indian, Thai, Lebanese, dim sum, and authentic Chinese dumplings. But last weekend, we went a step more adventurous than we ever had before – Ethiopian.

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When Restrictions Keep You From Lifting Your Toddler While Pregnant

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Parenting with Pregnancy Restrictions. How can you be a good mom to a toddler or preschooler if you can't pick them up? Here's how. (Photo: Boy kissing a mom's very pregnant stomach.)

Sitting in the specialist ob-gyn’s office, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that I could avoid more scary bleeding during my pregnancy if I just followed a few simple guidelines. The bad news was that the guidelines were simple, but they weren’t easy. In particular, I was forbidden from lifting any heavy objects.

Looking at my two-year-old son, I asked the doctor, “Does that mean I can’t pick him up?” The answer? Definitely not. He was little, but  still way past my weight limit.

Not being able to lift my toddler while pregnant put a major crimp in my parenting options. Suddenly, a key piece of my toolkit disappeared, affecting everything from how I hugged my son to bedtime routines. Over the course of the months of restrictions, I figured out some strategies to adapt my parenting to these limitations.

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The Bedtime Toddler Blues

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 7 Comments

Sleep has never come easily for my son. As a newborn, he wouldn’t sleep during the day unless he was held. The moment just before his body touched the crib, his eyes would flutter open and he’d start crying. (“Sleep when the baby sleeps,” my ass.) He was seven months old the first time he slept through the night and over a year by the time he did so consistently. And that was only after a couple of traumatic evenings for all involved. In toddlerhood, he often sings and talks to his animals for a full hour before drifting off. But lately, there’s been a significant shift for the worse.

Toddler Bedtime Blues

None of this is particularly unexpected, considering my family history. Both Chris and I are night owls, as is my mom and his dad. I had night terrors as a kid, my mom had childhood nighttime seizures, and my dad sleepwalked until he was in his mid-20s. While it would be surprising if Sprout didn’t have any sleep issues, it doesn’t make them less exasperating.

In the last year, we thought we had made peace with his sleep schedule. Sure, he stayed up way past his 8:30 bedtime, but considering he wakes up past 7 pm and still takes naps, he got plenty of sleep. As he’s a bit of an introvert, it seemed like that time provided him the private, wind-down space he needed. It’s not like we had a way to force him to fall asleep anyway.

But in the last few weeks, our structure has gone to hell. The first thing to go was our bedtime routine. Normally, it goes: finish dinner, take bath, jump on our bed, get into PJs, read books, brush teeth, have a short conversation about the day, and say goodnight. Each part provides a balance between the boring bits (washing, brushing teeth) and the fun ones (jumping on our bed, reading).

While the routine has a lot of transitions, they only recently became an issue. Sprout has managed to found ways to extend and delay every one of them. From sitting in the tub long after the water has been drained to sprinting away every chance he gets, our bedtime routine has gone from 45 minutes to over an hour. Sometimes his delaying even starts before dinner, when he puts up a giant fuss about washing his hands. Shifting between activities has become increasingly difficult, but if we skip any of them – even allowing him to turn off the lights – there’s a melt-down as well.

The earlier the resistance starts, the more likely there is to be a snowball effect. Just when I think I’ve gotten him all chill, he remembers a grave injustice from 10 minutes earlier and gets upset all over again. All of my tricks from Happiest Toddler on the Block that used to work, like repeating what he’s upset about or promising it in fantasy, just piss him off more. There’s a constant sense of “What the hell is going to upset him this time and how do we deal with it?”

Tonight was a perfect example. Sprout was smiles and giggles until we wanted him to actually do his five jumps on the bed. (We would be fine with skipping them, but he would not.) We got to jump three when he randomly spit up some stomach crud. Chris turned our Green Bay Packers blanket over so that he didn’t jump in vomit, which meant the “Big G” was backwards. This was completely and utterly unacceptable to Sprout. He started crying and refused to jump. Both suggesting he’d do his final jump or skip jumps altogether elicited screams from him.

We finally carried him off the bed, where the angst continued on the changing table for several more minutes. I requested Chris intervene, hoping a change of scenery would help. It didn’t, although I avoided getting kicked hard in my pregnant belly while trying to put a diaper and pajamas on a flailing toddler. The rest of the evening alternated between him loudly expressing his displeasure, saying “I want a hug,” and sitting on my lap with his face in my shoulder. At 9 PM, I placed him in his crib, where I left after 10 minutes of urging him to lie down. Of course, this set off a new round of crying.

After running that obstacle course, all I want to do for the rest of the night is collapse on the couch. Lately, I’ve really wished that came with a glass of wine, but pregnancy has limited my indulgences to chocolate, ice cream, and decaf tea.

Previously, we were safe once he was calm in his crib. But now the resistance has extended far past his official bedtime. Recently, he’s taken to yelling “Mommy mommy mommy” from behind his closed door, sometimes for good reasons (like because he pooped) and sometimes for bad or pointless ones (like telling me “[Sprout] likes basketball” or asking me to tuck him in when he’s chosen to stand up). S

Sometimes it’s between the two. The other night, I went in after his “Mommy, mommy, mommy” suddenly became more intense. I found a bed full of ice cubes and the top to his water cup on the floor. “It’s broken,” he pointed out. I blinked, noticed that his toys were all at the other end of the bed, and asked, “Did you do this on purpose?” He responded, “No. Yes. Took top off and dumped all over.” At least he was honest!

If I was a stay-at-home mom, these bedtime issues would just be the crummy topping on the challenges of being home all day. But at least I would have the rest of the day – when he’s usually good-natured – to look back on.

Instead, this struggle becomes the majority of my weekday interactions with him. I have a fairly long commute, so I’m home at 6:15 PM at the earliest. That gives me maybe 45 minutes of playtime, dinner, and then the constant balancing act of bedtime. I don’t want to give in – and am often incapable of doing what he wants – but I hate both of us being miserable during what should be special time together.

So it just makes me feel like a crappy parent. Because of my commute, we can’t put him to bed earlier without sacrificing time together. Even though I honestly don’t think it’s over-tiredness, I still worry that it’s my fault somehow.

It’s especially frustrating because it reinforces all my worries about having a second kid. I guess it’s good that he’s still willing to stay in his crib and not climbing out, but it makes me even more concerned that he’ll start climbing out at the worst possible time. Furthermore, I’m already anxious about not having enough of my emotional energy to go around and then Sprout finds a way to drain it further. Because he was such a fussy sleeper, I worry that he’s going to wake up his brother and then his brother will start crying and then Sprout will start crying and then no one will ever get any sleep ever again.

I know like all things Kid, that this is a phase. I just really hope that it passes sooner rather than later.

Any suggestions for making bedtime go smoother?

Reflections on a New Year: Dreaming and Scheming

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

Goals are tricky little beasts. They’re so easy to pin to big, specific things or be swayed by society’s expectations. It’s easy to ignore the more subtle things that need to be done, like forgiving yourself or making space to enjoy nature. In our capitalist, consumer-driven society, those seem shallow, even though they’re essential to loving others or contributing to a larger community.

After reflecting on 2015 and considering how to approach the coming year, I moved into the process of goal-setting. I knew that the things that were both frustrating me the most and in my control (aka not Congress) were the difficult, slippery issues requiring a lot of emotional work. Because I was overburdened and under-satisfied, I needed to deal with those issues before I could worry about specific actions for my career or volunteer activities.

Thankfully, the Holiday Council provided a nice framework for thinking through that type of goal-setting. Molly, the leader, encouraged us to come up with five ways of being for the coming year, as well as a word that encompassed all of it. While I frequently think about what type of person I want to be, I’d never really considered those traits as characteristics put into action at any particular time. Considering my personal values and what I particularly want to work on in the coming year, I picked the following “ways of being”:

  • Showing kindness and acceptance
  • Empowering and trusting those around me
  • Embracing simplicity
  • Being at peace
  • Telling meaningful stories

After a such a stressful year, I wanted to find ways to be less anxious and more compassionate to myself and others while still “making a difference.”

Reflections on a New Year_ Dreaming and SchemingWord of the Year_ Listen

From those, I realized that my word of the year is “Listen.” It reminds me of the three steps set forth in a prayer by my former church pastor: “Let me listen, let me learn, let me love.” Listening – whether to others’  needs or my own – must be the foundation of my action.

This word and these ways of being helped me establish my goals, which balanced internal, family needs with external ones.

The first two goals were both ones that I would undervalue and ignore unless I purposely focused on them: 1) to let go of my harmful expectations for myself and others and 2) immerse myself without regrets in spending time with my family during maternity leave. While I would be full-time on maternity leave no matter what, I want to have the maturity to feel like it’s not time wasted.

My second two goals were more traditional, although they’re as much about discernment as old-fashioned hard work: helping my church through its transition and having a sense of direction for my career. In both, I want to have a vision moving forward so I don’t just feel like I’m flailing towards nothing in particular.

So far in the year, most of my efforts have focused on simplifying. It just seemed like the right place to start. During Lent, my former pastor always said that fasting wasn’t about giving things up so much as making room for new things. I realized that to have enough space for a newborn, I needed to make both mental and physical space in my life.

Oddly enough, simplification can be a massive project. To help, I drew inspiration from two books: Living the Simple Life and Spark Joy.

As part of our book clean-out, I found Living the Simple Life by Elaine St James. I got it as part of a holiday gift exchange years ago with another book about living in the woods, intending to romantically contemplate how to get back to basics. Appropriately, my busy life kept me from reading it until now. While a lot of the book is not applicable to my life or now radically out of date – it came out in 1998, when the Internet was still something most people didn’t use – just reading it sparked my motivation. Knowing it is possible to simplify helped me interpret what that may mean in my individual life. As the author says, it probably doesn’t mean selling all of your stuff and moving to a cabin in the woods.

For me, I realized a lot of my self-imposed stress emerged from having an endless list of things that “needed” to be addressed. In particular, my activist guilt is the most goaded by the flood of emails I get from organizations requesting I sign petitions or send them money. To minimize that, I’m trying to get myself down to only 15 mailing lists. While I haven’t gotten there yet, I’ve already made a habit of unsubscribing to lists immediately if it’s not what I want. I’m also trying to spend a couple minutes a day randomly erasing or archiving old emails so I don’t have that huge number staring me in the face. I’ve already reduced it down from more than 6,000 to 5,500. While it’s still giant, I’m glad it’s no longer growing.

The second book was Spark Joy by Marie Kondo, the follow-up to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. After hearing a lot of good things about the previous book and seeing Spark Joy as a free offer, it seemed like something arriving at just the right time. With the need to clear out the future baby’s room that had been a bit of a dumping ground for “stuff we don’t know what to do with” for years, I definitely needed encouragement. While I didn’t follow her “tidying” instructions exactly – or in many cases, not at all – thinking about how my possessions spark joy or not has been really helpful. In addition to helping get rid of stuff, it also helped me consider about how to enjoy the stuff I have now. For example, I’m going to take many of the ticket stubs from concerts and postcards from travel and make a big bulletin board so I can remember those fond memories on a regular basis. I’ve already made huge progress on the room. As it previously inspired despair and now looks like a place where a child may be able to live in the future (after we move some furniture), I’d say the book made a difference. Having things physically organized makes it a lot easier to be mentally organized.

Messy baby room

Before: Yikes.

Almost clean room

Almost done!

Besides simplifying, I’ve also focused on empowering other people. My core urge is to do everything myself because I think I can do it better. Empowering others requires a level of humility and trust that’s both challenging and necessary. At work, I’m putting together an extensive list of reference materials so that other people can take on pieces of my job while I’m on maternity leave. It’s both weird and illuminating to get down all of the knowledge I carry around in my head in a form that makes sense to other people. In my volunteer activities, I’m allowing other people to take over some of my Kidical Mass rides because I simply won’t be allowed back on the bike by that point. As hard as it is to hand my projects over to others, even temporarily, it’s better that they can continue without me than be lost. More importantly, it opens the door for others to contribute their own vision and experiences that wouldn’t have happened if I clung to these projects myself. I want my work to help others to learn and grow rather than restricting them, so this is a great opportunity for that to happen.

As the year progresses, I’m sure these specific goals and steps towards them will shift. But I deeply appreciate the sense of structure they provide as I move through these major transitions in my life. The word “Listen” and ways of being have already provided a foundation for how I structure my time and think about my priorities.

Editor’s note: I didn’t get paid by Stratejoy to write these blog posts.  I just found that the Holiday Council helped me out a lot and wanted to work through some of these thoughts.

Reflections on a New Year: Seasons of Life

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

“You can do it all. Just not all at the same time and not right away.” – Cat Grant, Supergirl

My ambition has the patience of a two-year-old. “But I want it NOW!” it screams, regardless of my rational self’s attempts at talking it down. It’s not that I’m unwilling to work to achieve my goals. In fact, that’s one of my defining traits. It’s that I feel driven to work on all of my goals – personal, professional, relational – simultanously. Small wonder my mental to-do list is the length of the Oxford English Dictionary. But in December, I started to change that thinking, with the therapy session, Stratejoy’s Holiday Council, and of all things, the Supergirl TV show, illuminating an alternative approach.

Livewire

Cat Grant, my new favorite editor in the superhero world. (Bye, J. Jonah Jamison!)

While “You don’t have to do everything all the time” seems like an obvious statement, it’s one I’ve never allowed myself to believe. But hearing it from the therapist (or at least words along those lines) poked through that mental blockage. I realized that, societal expectations aside, I’m the only one in my life who actually expects me to do that.

To shift away from this thinking, the therapist suggested that I pick a couple of areas to focus on at a time. “But I can’t give anything up!” I cried, “They’re too important.”

But in the midst of saying that sentence, I saw a middle ground. I could continue to do things without going full steam ahead on every one of them. Thinking aloud, I said, “I don’t want to give anything up, but I don’t have to get an A in everything, right? I can get Bs in some things.” Now, while grading your own life is not exactly healthy, just the idea of letting myself purposely “get a B” was radical. Obvious stuff to the non-overachievers, but I had never framed it like that before.

Appropriately enough, the Holiday Council addressed many of these issues as well. Molly Mahar, who leads the calls, reinforced the idea that “I am enough,” no matter what my accomplishments list reads that day. She discussed the idea of seasons of life, where some aspects of our life fall back and others come forward. “You can have unlimited dreams and goals, but not unlimited priorities,” she said. Again, the distinction between dreams and priorities was one I had never connected the dots on.

Appropriately, amongst the exhortations to dream big, there was only space in the workbook for three major goals for the coming year. (Despite my newfound realization, I cheated and added a fourth. But before, I probably would have had six, so it’s an improvement.)

In needing to narrow my focus down to four areas – one of which focuses on improving my mental health – I could pick out my true priorities for the year. Now, rather than worrying about “not doing this or that,” I can look at my goals and if it isn’t on there, say with confidence, “Nope, that’s for next year.”

Of course, the hardest part is actually carrying out said goals. While some of them are big ones with many steps, others don’t have long to-do lists but will actually be more difficult. For example, even though it should be simple in theory, I haven’t actually fulfilled any resolution to regularly get seven hours of sleep a night in years.

But just as I’m learning to have patience with seasons of life, I need to have patience with myself with the goals I have taken on. While there are many cliches about this topic, my favorite reminder is from Anne Lamott. She talks about how writing can be radically discouraging if you try to think of it as a whole. Instead, she tells a story where her brother had to do a huge report on birds that he didn’t start until the night before it was due. Her father, advising him on how to approach it, said he just had to go “bird by bird.”

And that’s life, isn’t it? Even if you don’t know what’s ahead, writing is done sentence by sentence, parenting day by day, community building meeting by meeting. All are important, even if you never get to the goal. The moving forward needs to be enough.

Being satisfied with that forward movement while also being able to dream is ultimately what I’m struggling with as I back away from cramming “too much” into my life. It’s not coincidental that these themes keep arising in different, seemingly unrelated aspects of my life. As quoted at the top, media mogul Cat Grant, tells Kara Danvers (aka Supergirl) exactly what I needed to hear yet again. At one point in the Holiday Council, Molly Mahar quoted (from Lynne Twist), “Once we let go of scarcity, we find sufficiency.” That sounds a lot like the permaculture idea that there is no such thing as excess, only things that need to be used in a new way. Nature provides what it needs to function. My own life will too, if I only let it.

Reflections on a New Year: Looking Backwards to 2015

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 8 Comments

Trigger Warning: Pregnancy loss / miscarriage

Quite frankly, 2015 sucked. Nationally, the U.S. suffered from a series of mass shootings; racial-based violence; entire cities having their water supplies poisoned; the hottest year on record; and a racist, sexist bully leading in the polls for a major political party. Personally, I dealt with the trauma of having a miscarriage, followed by the added stress of restrictions on my next pregnancy, my church community going through a difficult transition, and a number of promising professional opportunities falling through. It was a year of crushed expectations, metaphorical doors slammed in faces. It would be easy to say “Good riddance” and not think about it again. But I’m not doing that, for a simple reason – I love to learn, and there are no better circumstances to learn from than terrible ones.

I didn’t feel this way in the beginning of December. At that point, I felt like my life had a tremendous number of moving pieces I was trying to keep in sync, all of which were exhausting and none of which I had any control over. Even though I was always doing too much, yet it never felt like enough. I wasn’t a good enough mother, co-worker, activist, wife, daughter, writer. I longed to have peace and satisfaction.

So I did two things that would have previously been anathema to me; I went to a therapist and joined a personal coaching group.

I had been thinking about the therapy since last year, when I had what I recognized after the fact as a panic attack at Disney. While I hadn’t experienced anything nearly so dramatic since then, Chris saw the toll that stress had been taking on me and encouraged me to talk to someone. I dragged my feet for months, taking weeks to answer emails that should have taken minutes. As a chronic over-achiever, I emotionally felt like getting help was weak, even though intellectually I knew that was bullshit. After all, I’m good at everything else – why can’t I fix myself? But I was too far inside my own head to know what was actually going on; I needed an outside perspective.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what I got with the therapist. Contrary to my Far Side-esque fears, she listened without judgment or even for the most part, recommendations. In fact, the most radical thing she told me was that what I was feeling was perfectly normal. My stress was understandable, considering the year I had been through. My feeling of never being or doing enough is common among folks who become invested in big causes, especially those associated with systematic injustices.

In other words, there was nothing wrong with me. Just hearing that was a relief. While I would want to get help if something was wrong, hearing that what I was feeling was justified (even if my coping mechanisms weren’t great) was so satisfying.

Following on this first dose of self-help, I signed up for Stratejoy’s Holiday Council. I had no idea what to expect, except that I felt drawn to it. In the past, I had dismissed this sort of thing as too touchy-feely or woo-woo. But my feeling of helplessness during the last year made me crave something to help me process it and move forward.

hoco15_header_date_final

My intuition was right – the Holiday Council was just the thing to fulfill that need. It consisted of three group phone calls, a workbook to fill out and exercises (like posting in the private Facebook group) to complete between the calls. Each of the three weeks had a different focus: the first on looking back during the year, the second on visioning for the coming year, and the third on concrete planning for 2016.

The first week inspired a deeper look at some of the realizations I had come to with the therapist. In particular, the challenge to post a photograph to Facebook that summarized the year brought surprising insights. While I had previously dwelt on the year’s disappointments, I also wanted to acknowledge the beautiful moments I spent with my family. In fact, it was often those joyous times, whether playing in the basement with Sprout or camping in the mountains, that buoyed me through the hard ones.

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Not the same photo, but also from Red Rocks.

I finally decided on a photo of Chris, Sprout and I at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, taken by my sister-in-law during our trip to Las Vegas. It was only days after I found out about my miscarriage, but I still have a genuine smile. On that trip, I experienced the freedom of being happy despite the surrounding circumstances. That lesson carried me throughout the year, teaching me how to function in spite of loss and disappointment. When I got pregnant again and then had complications, I found ways to revise our adventures around my restrictions instead of allowing my fears to control me. Sometimes that meant sitting on the ground at the Renaissance Faire because there were no seats available, but dirty pants were better than not going at all. Although I didn’t get a highly anticipated job, I coordinated a complex social media campaign while also launching a completely new website. Although I felt overwhelmed about the future of our church, I started chipping in so the congregation can run the services without a pastor. Reflecting back helped me realize how strong I had been, even when I felt helpless.

While just choosing the photo was a challenge, posting it to Facebook was even harder. It was the first time I had told anyone outside of my immediate family, my church pastor, and the therapist about the miscarriage. I held my breath as I hit post.

But even though I hadn’t been able to speak of it in more than a whisper before, sharing my story with this group removed the barriers I had been holding on to. It enabled me to confront my feelings and write the piece just published on the Good Mother Project. It drew it out of my head, reducing its power over me. Even though I had been haunted for months by those images, writing about the experience was like writing about something that happened to someone else. I wrote that piece on the way up to my parents for Christmas break and was able to talk to Chris and Sprout as I wrote, even occasionally laughing. I can’t say I’ve moved on completely – I don’t think I ever will – but the safe space the Holiday Council provided allowed me to process and then share my story.

I’m glad 2015 is over. But I’m also glad I took the time and energy to consider how it changed me and what that means going into 2016.

Guest Post on Good Mother Project: We Left Everything Except My Broken Body

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Trigger Warning: Pregnancy loss, miscarriage

One of the most difficult things to talk about as a mother – for very good reason – is the loss of a pregnancy. I had the misfortune, in April to experience one in the 10th week of my pregnancy. In the hope that it helps other women who have gone through the same thing, I wrote about the experience for the Good Mother Project this week.

I was waiting for blood. Every time I went to the bathroom, I was waiting for those spots. But they never came. No sign that the life that had been developing inside me wasn’t any longer. That I was pregnant one minute and then wasn’t the next.

Read the rest of the post at the Good Mother Project: We Left Everything Except my Broken Body.