It all came to a head as we were driving to the gym this morning. My almost 2-year-old kept saying “No class.” She did NOT want to go to the class at the gym. Meanwhile I was pushing through the morning to GET to the gym in order to have a little time to collect my thoughts and exercise my body.
Things at home were stressed as we are working to alleviate financial strain and keep our new business afloat. She is sensitive and absorbs the anxiety in the atmosphere like a little sponge whereas our son more often just disconnects and goes to play monster trucks.
Her resistance to class coming from the back seat got louder and more emphatic. Finally I told her, more like yelled, that I heard her!
I was watching my needs come head to head with hers.
What’s a mother to do? Everyone’s got needs. And there is this real thing of putting on your own oxygen mask before you assist your child. And yet… is there still a place for self denial?
I don’t think this is a popular concept in our modern culture. I think most people hearing about this scenario would root for me to press through and put her in daycare at the gym. Afterall I do have needs too and I can’t help her if I’m not healthy right?
Yes, absolutely. And yet, there is an art to making these decisions. We are a collective “we” made of individuals. Everyone in our family has to make choices to sacrifice for the greater good. It’s healthy to have to sacrifice the “I” for the “we” from time to time.
After I yelled, I parked the car, picked her up out of the car seat and sat down on the curb with her on my lap. She was sobbing.
I was calming down and realizing that this choice mattered.
She was not okay. She was feeling stressed, just like me, and maybe a little overlooked and deflated.
I told her I was sorry and asked her to forgive me. And then I made the choice to forgo the gym and take her to the playground.
In a different set of circumstances this would have been me getting manipulated by my daughter’s strong emotions but my mother’s intuition said that she needed to know that I saw her and that I would stop for her.
So I did. I stopped. We slowed down. We played on the slide. I pushed her in the swing. We looked at the ducks. And I found myself living in the moment in a way that had been eluding me for quite a while.
Somehow, my decision to stop for her, released me into freedom. I was free to love and to enjoy. I was free from myself. Thank you Jesus.
What if sometimes the principle of getting our needs met first needs to be overridden by this incredible principle of self sacrificial love? I mean it’s sounds like someone I’m trying to emulate, right?
I’m not trying to say, “Don’t meet your needs.” “You should be always sacrificing yourself.” But what if we’ve lost something in the conversation about motherhood as we’ve been empowered to give ourselves self-care? What if we’ve lost the joy of dying in order to live?