Parents, keep your eyes on the landscape

Sometimes in life, and while driving a car, you must look past the road in front of you and survey the landscape. The landscape — the beyond — that’s where you see the incoming dangers. That’s where you see the environmental factors that are affecting your vision like misting rain and driving wind and the eerie fog that seems to always come and go. That’s when you see what’s ahead and what to slow down for. The landscape is where it’s all at. That’s a lofty opener, no? It may not have grabbed your attention immediately, but if you’re still reading, we can all agree there’s some truth in the general idea. And, clearly, because I’m the author, I think it’s a truth worth exploring for our readers.

My column is directed mostly toward middle-aged and young moms. I guess that’s a good factoid to throw out there from the get-go. It’s not really that my writing isn’t for anyone else — it is. But I think the people who will most readily relate to the thoughts I share are the ones who are in the thick of child rearing and wifery.

Maybe you’re a preschool mom slamming nap mats together and filling sippy cups and buckling car seats on the daily.

Maybe your kids have already graduated to elementary, hopefully freeing you from the burden of diapers and daycare bills and leaving you with sticky messes, spelling lists on the console, and grass and dirt-stained baseball pants to scrub.

Maybe you’re in the miserable stage of preteen parenting, dealing with puberty and school extra curriculars and navigating broken hearts and daily attitudes.

I have children in all of these stages—12, 9 and 2 — and let me tell you, it’s wild.

But no matter the stage you find yourself in, we all have a few things in common.

Mainly, we all qualify as some degree of “busy” and we all

have humans depending on us for many things. Put those two factors together, and it’s inevitable that eventually we’ll find ourselves overwhelmed, frustrated, anxious, worried, tired, and — sometimes — downright ill.

Back to the landscape.

I’m a bad driver. There. I said it. I’m just not great at it. I don’t enjoy it, and unfortunately, I commute 30 minutes each way every day on top of the hustle and bustle of three involved kids, so I drive a lot. I can’t see well at night. My depth perception is horrible. I’m usually some degree of distracted, by my kids, by my thoughts, by the music on the radio… OK, OK … by my phone. But the distractions aren’t really the problem. I wish they were. Truth be told, I’m just a bad driver.

Luckily, my driving skills aren’t the subject of this column, and also luckily, I resist the urge to text and drive more nowadays. Rather, the necessity to survey the landscape for successful driving — er… living — is where we’re focused.

Just like in life, when there’s a mishap, a temporary inconvenience, a blow-up argument, or a tear-filled morning, often we need to survey the landscape.

On Monday morning after a long weekend at the baseball park, my 9-year old was devastated when he dropped his breakfast bar on the ground and perceived it as wasted. I saw tears instantly well up, and though he pushed them back fairly quickly, we were on the brink of a breakdown for the rest of the morning. He snapped at his brother, rolled his eyes at me when I asked too many questions, and all but tumbled out of the front seat in the drop-off line to get away from me. He only said “I love you,” once.

In the silence after I dropped him off, I played the morning’s events back in my mind. Where did we go wrong? Did I wake him up too harshly? Did I not give him enough attention, or make him feel special enough today? Maybe I should adjust the lighting in the house at wake-up time. It might be making him anxious.

Fast forward 10 hours to the end of the day. As I was getting ready for bed that night, I got a text from another mom who was asking about a social situation at school for my sweet middle. Suddenly, it all became a little clearer why he was so on edge earlier in the day. Come to find out, it wasn’t the granola bar falling, or the lighting scheme, or even the toddler’s constant questions. Rather, he was dreading going to school that day. He was dreading facing the peers who called themselves his friends and made fun of his struggling schoolwork. He was dreading what was ahead.

We do the same thing, don’t we? Even as adults, we misplace our frustration all the time. We blame others, we blow up, we overreact, and we use small mishaps to allow us to feel all our emotions that have been building up internally.

I think that’s where we are vulnerable sometimes, when we ignore the underlying causes of our feelings and just let them build up and tumble out whenever. When we let this happen, we find ourselves holding the pieces of the mess we create when we react and explode rather than deal with the underlying causes and issues as they occur. This applies to our relationships, our work, our friendships, our homes and even the way we regard ourselves and our emotional health.

What would it look like if we regularly spent some time thinking and processing those feeling before they spill over into everyday life? What if we made time to talk to our friends, family and coworkers about them? If we often dread going to work, why? If we constantly put off projects and assignments until the last minute, why? If we feel guilty about a certain situation, what is making us feel that way?

Honestly, the moments I’ve put in the hard work of processing my underlying emotions and challenging myself to understand the causes, that’s when I’ve felt the most freedom in my everyday life. When I survey the landscape, rather than looking straight ahead at my headlights, I see the anxiety creeping up on the left. I see my feelings of inadequacies far out ahead. I see my guilt in the rear view. When I look at the landscape, that’s when I see reality. And that is when I can do something about it.