Dear Kerry,
I am on my second pregnancy, and I am finding myself so much more emotional this time around. Perhaps it is the sleeplessness or raging hormones – but I can (and do!) cry at the drop of a hat! It’s not because I a moment is especially sad or happy – it just pours out either way! Do you have any advice for what I could do to help me through this emotional roller coaster?
Full of Tears
Dear Full of Tears,
Oh, I feel for you! It’s incredible how powerful hormones can be. I sorta liked it when I was pregnant because I felt like the filter was off and I felt everything fully. But then I was always sorta relieved when the filter was put back on and I wasn’t crying randomly so many times each day and week. I remember holding my little second baby in my arms when my sister-in-law was talking about how her 3-year old quadruplets wouldn’t always kiss her back when she wanted them to. I burst into tears, hardly able to imagine the pain of my baby being a 3-year old who wouldn’t kiss me back!
My personal work of late has been to really get it that “This is my life right now. I can’t wait, won’t wait…. to start living fully.” I’ve discussed this with so many of my friends whose kids are in the high school and college age range. We all relate to that notion of thinking that “just as soon as……” (the babies are out of diapers, the kids are in school, school’s out, kids are back in school, the holidays are over, the kids are out of this stage, our husbands change jobs, we get a divorce, we get to sleep through the night)…… THEN we will be calm and relaxed and “in the groove” with life. What we all have found is that that day never really comes.
It’s one thing after another. One challenge after another. One thing keeping us busy or disorganized or stressed out or tired or not at our best. And then the next thing we know, our kids are launching off to college and we are standing there wondering what the heck happened. So my new mantra is THIS IS MY LIFE. RIGHT NOW. I might not get tomorrow. What if this is the best it ever is? Even with the craziness or the pain or the imperfection, this moment is all we get.
My wish for you is to be fully present in this very moment with all that it holds: happy and painful, hard and easy, clean and messy, fun and drudgery, fat and skinny, rich and poor …. everything.
