Letting Go; Day 4 of the March Writing Challenge

Poipu Beach, Kauai **

 This one is hard, especially for a lazy control freak like myself. I jokingly say, "lazy" because there are a lot of things I will let slide because I just don't have the energy to deal with it (struggles of an Introverted Empath), but then when my anxiety kicks in I can definitely become more of a control freak. Which kinda drives me crazy. 

But how do you allow yourself to just let go? What does that even look like? 

When I became a mom there were a lot of things I realized that I needed to just let go of, after a lot of struggle on my part, of course.  Like having complete and total control of my free time because that no longer existed. Parents learn the hard way that there is a big chunk of time when your child is very small where there is no such thing as "free time" like it once was pre-kids unless you work very hard and sacrifice a lot to get it. Which feels like something has to suffer in some way for it. 

I struggled with trying to keep things organized and often felt upset with how I would spend my free time which was always nap time. If I just sat and vegged out and relaxed then I would be stressed that I didn't get any chores done. If I spent the whole time doing chores I didn't feel like I was able to just relax. If I napped myself - which is the golden advice, right? "Sleep when baby sleeps" I was so sleep deprived that I was always groggy when my baby woke up and I was never ready to wake up so I was irritable and somehow felt like I was more tired. I realized after a visit to the doctor years and years later that I was severely anemic and needed to take an iron supplement and that is one of the reasons why I was so tired. I have no idea why this wasn't ever addressed in any of the appointments I had gone to before that and had blood work done. So that was incredibly frustrating.

The reason why I chose this as the theme today is because my day completely got thrown off from what I had planned. There was an early morning dentist appointment for one of our kids that completely slipped our minds until the reminder call last night. (Thank God for those, right?) So, unfortunately due to tooth pain, my child needed to stay home from school the whole day. This is the first week back to school due to the covid shut downs, so I wasn't quite prepared mentally to have a child stay home from school during the first week back despite being sympathetic and empathetic to the tooth pain. I was not about to let them just go back to school and suffer all day. I feel very lucky to be able to make that last minute change in schedule work because I am a stay at home mom. Not every family is able to do that. So even though I try to be like seaweed flowing in the ocean and letting the current take me where it needs to go, it can still be hard when you have your mind set on a certain number of hours of free time to get things done. And my current writing projects are some of those things.

It's funny too (in the ironic sense of the word) because my phone is also not cooperating today at all, as well as our internet and that has also made me super annoyed and realizing that I need to just "Let Go" with what I had planned to do which was share and post things from this writing challenge. I was thinking about life before even having smart phones and how it was somehow easier and less complicated. I need to figure out a way to not be so attached to it and to not need it so much but I really don't know how to pull that off. I'll get back to you on that if I think of something.

And of course the pandemic itself has been an exercise in Letting Go - letting go of so many things. I have almost lost count of all of the things that we just had to let slip through our fingers, each pebble of sand falling to the ground and blowing away with the wind because we just...couldn't. And that's been hard. It's been hard on the kids and hard on the adults and hard on the grandparents who are out of state and feeling alone and isolated. 

I'm also going to just "Let Go" with feeling like I need to keep adding to the post (something I always feel inclined to do) so I'll say goodbye for now. But before I do I'd like to share a poem I wrote a few years (that I just rediscovered) aptly titled, Let It Go: 

"Today in the sun, 

and in the breeze, 

beneath the trees... 

I let go. 

I left the baggage and the burdens, 

 I admitted the ugly truth...to myself 

- this red hatred 

- the fear 

- the sorrow... and I shed it. 

 I dropped it. 

 I crumpled it like a dry orange leaf poking into my hands and sent it floating away with the wind. 

 It drifted and I shifted 

- my body, my thoughts and my anger. 

Today I'm 

just 

trying 

to 

let it go..."           

Thanks for reading!

Love,

Colleen

*About the March Writing Challenge: I have decided to try to write a blog post a day for 30 days to get back into the swing of being a writer again, which is one of my true loves in this life, creatively speaking. I'm a mom during a pandemic, so we’ll see how it goes! <insert nervous laughter.> Please leave a comment below and tell me where you are joining me from and how you found my blog; IG, Google, FB, Blog follower, etc. Thanks for joining me!**

**The photo above is one I took of the sun setting on Poipu Beach on the Island of Kauai. We were living there when I took this. This beach was about 10 minutes from our house. There are different phases of life that we just have to "Let Go" of too and for me (right now) that is living near the ocean.