I need to stop being a planner before my daughter catches my disease!

Look at this face?  This is my daughter when she was one.  What is this face really trying to tell me.  Now, looking back at this picture I don't know.  But I should have figured it out better.  Why does her face look like this and exactly what does it mean?  I think she's smarter at age one to know, but wasn't able to articulate it to me accurately or even think she should tell me.  I don't even know if she's able to articulate it to me accurately now.  I do know, I've had my face look and feel like this lots of times.  It could have been a myriad of reason, but there is one thing I know for sure.   A face can mask what you are actually feeling on the inside.  Mine does all the time. 

I take lots of photos of my kids sometimes 100's at a time so I can get a "good shot".  This face showed up in one of the 100's of photo's.  One second she was smiling and the next she was looking like this.  I, as an adult, do this all the time.  Mask my emotions with a smiling face.  

What was she actually feeling on the inside to make her face look like this?  I was the one trying to make her smile and laugh.  I was the one trying to make her do something out of her normal "plan" of a day.  She was trying to "plan" to look like a perfect cute kid in the picture.  Her body was, and ultimately her face saying something else.  Was I listening?  Doubtful.  She wasn't crying.  She wasn't screaming.  She was doing exactly as I had planned.  Take a cute shot.  And yes, we did get get a cute one.  But, did she plan on wanting to to take it.  Probably not. 

I've been a planner my whole life, I suppose.  I can't ever remember not planning anything.  I'd plan out what outfits I'd want to wear for the week for school.  I'd plan out what homework I was going to do and when.  I'd plan out how my room was going to be decorated.  I'd plan out planning!


The first problem I have with this is the fact that I'm a girl!  I know guys who plan things, but do they obsessively plan or worry about planning as much as women?  Plainly put...NO.  They are lucky in this fact, simply because they are men.  They don't care.


I'm stressing right now over the fact that Christmas plans are not finalized, schools and costs are not figured out for next year (that's another blog), my day is still so unpredictable just from the mere fact that things pop up unexpectedly.  For instance, the other day, my day was running smoothly as planned.  The next minute my son falls off the stool to the sink and smashes his two bottom teeth loose.   We had already had our coats on ready to go out the door to school. Plan over.  Bloody mouth, stress, and confusion run a muck.


In other words I'm not living in the moment like I need to be, as I've been trying to teach myself and maybe you.  How impossible it is to live in the moment and be a multi-tasking mom, though?  Sort-of impossible I guess.  But either way, I need to learn to do it ASAP before I give my daughter the disease to want to plan.


It's kind of like the disease to please.  Who'm I trying to to please with all this planning?  Myself?  My kids?  My family? The school system?  Even my dog who is staring at me right now.  Can I pet the animals, type, pull up my calendar, work, clean up the spilled cereal, clean up the barf the cat just spewed on my carpet and please Mr. Toll Free caller, who just called my house for the million time asking me to perform a survey for Thornton voters?  No! I'm getting pissy right now just because the phone rang and it's off my schedule.


I used to work in a job where we had to follow a schedule down to the exact minute or millions of dollars of medicine would be destroyed in a matter of seconds.  This was great.  Do this or your whole job is S.O.L in a blink of an eye.  Yes, it could be stressful at times when things went off schedule.  (They did quite often).  But it was a simple adjustment of knowing what it took to get things back on schedule quickly and once you were good at it, it was a lot less stressful.


Why can't I seem to figure this out for my own life?  Stuff gets off schedule all the time and I can feel my internal energy shoot through the roof.  I end up panicking inside thinking aghhhhh, my day, week, month is all in limbo now, because I can't figure out the schedule to my life RIGHT NOW.


My husband's solution to all this?  He say's "Forget about it, it will work out.  Go to bed!"


Why are guys so smart and so accurate about this statement?  Can I do anything about my situation right now? No.  So, I need to stop worrying about it.


The first time I remember someone telling me I need to stop worrying about things I can't control was when I was 21.  I was taking a lunch break walking with my one of my new friends at work, who continues to be one of my closest friends.  She was a few years older than me, and she bluntly told me "Why are you worrying about things you can not control?  You are wasting your time!"  In other words, stop planning!  She's a smart cookie.  Hmmm, I'm 35, though now.  I remember her words exactly and I've heard them plenty of times from others, but why is it so hard for me to remember?


I have the disease to plan, which ultimately is the disease to please, which ultimately gives me a disease in my body.  I'm slowly releasing this disease.  I guess it's like an exorcism since no Dr. can fix it.


I've had extreme, unexplainable pain in my body since 1995 and not a Dr. in the world could fix it.  I'm talking debilitating pain, where I can look like I'm functioning, but my body is screaming at me like I'm walking around on bones made out of toothpicks and my muscles are made out of rocks.  The toothpicks can't support the weight of the rocks and the rocks doesn't move like a muscle should.  I've literally been moving my entire torso for over 16 years in awkward directions just so I could move my head because my neck would not move.  I've been labeled as having probably four or five different medical syndromes.  Most of which I can't remember their names.  Now a days, it seems they have a medical syndrome for every unexplained "disease" on the face of the Earth, so Dr's and drug companies could appease people like me.  After countless Dr.'s, medical bills, diagnosis that don't help, and even the voodoo Dr. of Longmont, Colorado could not fix my problem.  I figured out what my problem was.


One day I voiced something that I didn't think mattered.  But it obviously mattered to me.  One day I decided not to plan what I was going to even say or do.  I just did it.  I have no idea what possessed me to do it, it just came out of me and it just happened.


What happened the next day was a miracle!


No, not exactly, more like a complete nightmare!!!


 I went into complete panic mode.  My whole entire life as I knew it was getting completely turned upside down.  (Not really,  I just was thinking it was because it wasn't going as planned.)  I was having panic attacks now that were quite severe and I thought Armageddon was coming upon me to destroy everything I ever planned or wanted to plan for my life from here on out.


Wow!  That's pretty dramatic!!


After 9 months of this complete chaos in my mind, I finally realized nobody gave a care in the world about what was going on in my head but me.


Let me say that again.   Nobody gave a care in the world about the Armageddon of stress that I was thinking was occurring by this non-planned out event but me!!!


Everyone else was living their daily life as normal as could be and here I was panicking that I had ruined everyones life and my own because something didn't go as planned.


Hmmm.  The day I realized this, my body suddenly said, THANK YOU!!!!  All of a sudden, 16 years of unexplained medical pain disappeared.


How is that possible?


I've had countless X-ray's, MRI's, physical therapy, chiropractic care, medical massage, prescription medication and Dr.'s telling me I have these syndromes.  If there has been a syndrome, I've had it!  The Dr. said so.  What the heck does the Dr. know.  NOTHING!


What the Dr. should have said was "Your mind is an idiot!  Your body is a genius!"


My mind is an idiot because it makes problems out of nothing.  It crates chaos where there is none.  Did you meet my little friend from early?  She's a neurotic mess! http://guilt-riddenmommy.blogspot.com/2011/11/say-hello-to-my-little-friend.html.


She is the same friend who is wreaking havoc on my body and causing me debilitating physical pain.  She's lives in my mind. She doesn't live in my body, but she likes to run a muck around it thinking it's her own personal play pen to make a huge mess in.


The day the light bulb when on in my head telling me "Hey, your mind is actually causing you to have a disease".  Was the day I stopped having the disease of physical pain.


Yes, I still get physical pain.  That neurotic friend still breaks lose and tries to turn on and off the lights and throw her toys all over my body.  She put her sippy-cup of milk inside my left shoulder and let it spoil and rot over night without me finding it.


I still get physical pain, but not to the point where I think my actual bones are broken, or have torn tendons or ligaments, swollen joints, muscles that don't move or have perma migraine.  I've pretty much had perma migraine since I was 19 years old.  How have I been functioning like this for 16 years is beyond me!!!


But, these past two weeks my mind has been in plan mode, and my body has been telling me stop.  I've relented to my old way's of not listening.  Functioning as if my bones are deteriorating.  My rock hard muscles are back.  (I've even had massage therapists try to convince me I've had back surgery because they don't believe me that I don't had medal rods in my back!)  Muscles that don't move.  Joints that are swollen.  Pain where I feel like I broke my arm and shoulder, but there is no physical evidence that it actually exists.  My syndromes are back.


Last night after speaking to my husband and him saying "Stop planning, go to bed!" and a good friend who reiterated the same thing; I actually listened to them and walla... I slept like a baby.   I even was able to get up easily at the crack of dawn before the sun came out. (Why my kids continue to torture us in this manner, even though they are not babies, is beyond me).


So, before my daughter comes to me saying, I have a headache, I'm tired, my stomach hurts, my leg hurts or my arm hurts, I'm going to take a second to actually believe her.  I'm not going to automatically tell her to "tough-it-out" and get on with this thing we call life.  I'm not going to make her do things her mind is telling her is causing her physical pain on her body.


Yes, I want to teach her that she needs to be respectful to others by following through on commitments that she has already said yes to.  But did she need to say yes in the first place?  Did she need to plan something to make everyone happy?  Or even make her little friend in her mind happy?  Is her body happy?  If not, then her mind is running a muck and I want to teach her that before she turns into me.


Yes, I want to ensure that she's playing a sport for all the right reasons, doing it because it's making her body feel good.  I want her to figure out if her pain is actually physical because of an injury or physical pain because of her mind.


What's the balance?  I don't know, I'll have to figure that out, too.
I don't want to raise a wimp who wants to drop out every time she gets a sore muscle.  I want her to be like me and preserver through hard times and know that when the "going gets tough, the tough get going."  But I don't want her to be like me where her mind thinks her body needs to tough it out just because.


I don't want her to turn lazy because she say's she has a headache or her toe hurts.  But I also want her to know she can think more like Daddy or Grandpa.  Their both guys, who don't torture their bodies in unnecessary ways to appease their minds.  They both don't worry about unnecessary things just because.   I want to be the mom who teachers her to know that her "body is smarter than her mind".  If her body is telling her she's sick,  maybe it's because her mind is running a muck inside it.


How will I know this?  I'm not sure.  I'm still learning, too.


But all I know, is it's taken me 35 years to figure out "My mind is an idiot and my body is a genius!!"  I need to listen to it.  I'm going to teach my kids to listen to theirs.