A Primer on Boundaries

I have a pattern of attracting needy people. It’s been a life-long pattern, and it isn’t a bad thing, it’s just something I must be aware of. I easily, sometimes instinctively, slip into the role of emotional support and even find myself attracted to people who seem as if they need help. This role is familiar and meaningful, and it is an essential part of who I am. I feel most tapped into my core-self when I am joyfully helping others, but if I am not self-aware and intentionally caring for myself, I can also become worn out, over-worked, and resentful. It’s difficult to draw boundaries, but I’ve found them to be absolutely necessary, not only to protect myself, but also to keep from enabling others and supporting their destructive habits.

Where we draw boundaries is a matter of personal conviction, but wherever we choose to put them, we need to be intentionally aware so that we can act appropriately to voice and enforce them. For myself personally, here’s where I’ve drawn personal mental boundaries. In the case that it is not an emergency, I don’t want to push myself to be helping anyone resentfully. If I can’t do it joyfully, I have gone too far, done too much, and I need to draw a boundary. In the case where someone needs significant help, I am willing to be inconvenienced, stressed, or even distressed in my effort to help someone, but I am not willing to move backwards in my journey of self-improvement and mental wellness. At the point when I am no longer functioning with all of my mental resources, that is when I need to draw a boundary to protect myself from harm. In so far as I can help it, it seems a better to me to protect myself from harm than to let myself be harmed and go on to harm someone else or demand resources that I otherwise wouldn’t have needed, making me a liability. I also want to assure others that they will not harm me without trying. When I receive comments such as, “Sorry to dump this on you” or “Sorry if I’ve been messaging too much”, I can honestly reply, “I wouldn’t reply if I wasn’t able to joyfully and while taking care of myself.” I don’t want them to have to worry about my wellbeing when asking for support. And if only I could rest assured that everyone I ever asked for support was taking good care of themselves first, how much calmer could I be knowing I would not accidentally cause harm!

Boundaries are, for me, primarily mental and personal. I decide when I can and can’t reply. I decide when I will and won’t help. I decide when I do or don’t need to be involved. But when voicing boundaries to other people, which is only fair if you expect them to honor your boundaries, I’ve found a specific formula to be helpful: identify your need, specify the boundary, and explain the action you will need to take if that boundary isn’t honored. This is important! Let me give an example:

Unclear boundary: “I just don’t know if I can talk as much anymore.” 1. You haven’t clarified why you need to limit talking. 2. You haven’t given a specific limit. The other person will be guessing whether they can or can’t talk in the future. 3. You haven’t made a plan for what happens if this boundary is crossed.

Clear boundary: “I’ve realized I’m neglecting my family by talking so much, and that isn’t fair to them. I’m not going to reply to messages after 7pm to spend some time away from my phone. If I get any phone calls or messages after 7pm that aren’t emergencies, I can’t take them.” Note: you don’t always need to voice your action plan for if the boundary is crossed, but you do need to know what it is. You can’t control whether someone honors your boundary, but you do need a way to enforce it.

A few things I’ve learned in the way of making boundaries:

Don’t assume everyone has good intentions, assume they are doing their best to survive.

Check in with your own body, your emotions, and your energy levels. Know where you are, and then honestly work out how much you are able to give without running dry.

I cannot take responsibility for someone else’s life. I can help, I can support, but the end result is not to my fault or to my credit. I can hope for the best, but ultimately, it is necessary to not take the result personally. No matter the outcome of the relationship or situation, I can know that I did what I was able to do, and no further.

Let me know if you have any more thoughts! Are there any specific boundaries you’ve made that have been helpful?

God bless

Weight of Mothering

It’s been a rough day and I’m wistfully, longingly jealous.

I’m jealous of people who can leave the house on a whim, pick up their phone and keys, and walk out the door. They can stroll through a park and wave to strangers, or write at a coffee shop without a time pressure, without a hand to pull on theirs, without a concern in the back of their mind of something they left behind.

I’m jealous of people who are known by others as an individual only, not a “wife of” or “mother of” just themselves, their story and their person.

I’m jealous of people who get to talk to other adults and be treated like an adult every day.

I’m jealous of people who have their own car and freedom to use it whenever they like, people who have their own money and no care how they must save it.

I’m jealous of people who can plan a road trip a week in advance, driving, camping, taking their time, all without having to keep anyone else alive.

I’m jealous of people who look around thinking, “Everything I need to do is done. What do I feel like doing with my extra time?”

I’m jealous of people who get raises, promotions, and job reviews telling them what a valuable employee they are.

I’m jealous of people who have time to feel like themselves.

To sum up – I miss not being a mom.

I love my children so, so much, but today I don’t love being a mom. It’s just so constant! Mom life has so many wonderful aspects that bring me joy, but when it never stops, ever, it just gets exhausting. And I don’t even do it well enough to feel justified for feeling worn out, or feel like I can ease up a little bit to take a break. I don’t even have a terrible mothering experience to complain about. I’ve had two fairly easy pregnancies, healthy babies, and an amazing husband who never has to be asked to be an involved dad because he loves to be a dad.

When I told my precious girl, “Momma just needs a break,” she said, “I’ll give you a hug, mommy. A hug can make you feel better.” How can I not love that?

I find myself wistful for the freedom that I used to have, but when I had it – I prayed for the life I have now. The freedom I miss is something lovely worth missing, but the heaviness of my burden is also the weight of deep, everlasting importance. This stage in life won’t be forever, but the effects of it will last forever. These children are growing and learning faster than I can keep up with. They are precious souls, growing into adults, and I get to take part in the blessing that they will be to the world. I get to be part of their story. I feel my flesh wanting to make this story about me, but we know it’s all just God’s plan to be glorified that we get to take part in.

Some time set aside to do frivolous things will probably help me feel better. Connecting with people and creating things also make me feel like myself. Eventually I’ll have more time to do that again.

My Foundation

It’s been a tumultuous past two weeks. Good, bad, confusing, grounding, a lot of things. It came out that a situation we were close to wasn’t what it appeared, a friend had been dishonest, and now the situation is fraught with pain and instability. In truth, there was always pain and instability, but it has finally all come out into the light where we can all see it and try to handle it. 

It’s a lot to process. It’s disorienting to realize that what you thought was the case wasn’t actually the case. It’s disorienting to feel as if you can’t trust your own judgment anymore because you were so painfully wrong. 

As chaotic and confusing as this is, it has also forced me to go back to my foundation. My Christian life hasn’t often been passionate or feel-goody. Sometimes it feels very mundane, but these Biblical principles have laid for me such a firm foundation to put my feet on. The character of God is unmoving. The gospel of God is something that I can always rely on for home. The commandments of God provide security. While we cannot know these things in the way we know what we see, these are the things I have chosen to stake my life on, and they are a floor from which my entire house is built. 

I can’t imagine having my life fly apart and trying to piece it together myself without the security of the Bible to go back to. 

Mothering and Parenting Styles

I’m eleven weeks expecting! My baby has graduated from embryo to fetus and is now the size of a fig, so my phone tells me.

My firstborn, Everly, is less than 2 months away from celebrating 2 years on this earth with us!

So I guess I am in the thick of this “mom-life.” When I think about the exciting parts about being a mom, I’ll be honest, the diapers and potty-training aren’t what come to mind. Don’t get me wrong, I have actually enjoyed raising a baby so much more than I expected! But I can’t wait to have meaningful conversations (about more than ABCs) and school lessons about history and geography.

This may sound weird, but I still really struggle to think of myself as a “mom.” I get an uncomfortable feeling just thinking about why this might be the case. I think some of this discomfort may stem back to a rocky relationship with my own mom during my teenaged years, (which has not only healed but bloomed since I have become a mom myself.) And I think a greater part of it may stem back to a deep struggle I grew up with, the struggle to be an individual with a unique sense of self. I don’t want to be shoved into a category. I don’t want people to see me and check the “mom” box and assume that they know all there is worth knowing about my life.

For this reason, I’ve felt a persistent need to be engaging in activities I used to engage in, to talk to people I have always talked to, and to find another labels for myself than “mom.” I think it is one of the reasons I’ve felt driven to begin online college courses, so that I also fall under the umbrella of “student” as well.

When I was expecting with Everly, I felt heavily inspired by one mom in my life who shared her experience with me. She didn’t have her babies sleep in her bedroom, and with sleep training, they were each sleeping through the night by 8 weeks. She powered through life at full speed and took her children along for the ride. She is a powerful force to be reckoned with! She is an athlete, an organizer, an amazing cook, and a teacher. She is always learning, always growing herself, and always pushing her children to be the best they can be. And to top it off, she’s also kind and hilarious. Yes, when I first met her, I was in awe. The most telling part of her parenting is that I adore her children. They have healthy attachments and healthy independence. They are brilliant and kind, and I even married one of them.

Right after I birthed Everly, I began struggling with breastfeeding. I knew one way to nurse a baby, and that was sitting up with a boppy pillow around my waist. I got mastitus three weekends in a row, and each time felt completely knocked out and incapacitated. Everly slept in a basinet next to my bed and would wake up every 20 minutes or so to feed, but would fall asleep after only a couple minutes of nursing. I couldn’t keep her awake to get a better feed. Layer on top of that the baby blues that every new momma gets and the terrible feeling of being alone and not good enough for my baby. I was a mess!

A friend from church, also an experienced momma, came for a visit to sit with me and give me encouragement. She also brought freezer meals that I didn’t even ask for, and her oldest volunteered to come with her and clean my kitchen. This friend began sharing with me how she parented. She co-slept with her babies, something that I had heard only terrible things about until then. She believed heavily in baby-wearing and her newborns were almost always in baby carriers, often against her bare chest. She had no job outside of being a mother and a teacher to her children, and she joyfully poured all of her energy into this style of attachment parenting. I was in awe! The craziest part to me was that her children were amazing! They also had healthy attachments and healthy independence. They were smart and kind and lovely, and one of them was cleaning my kitchen!

It rocked my world, just a little bit, to compare these two radically different mothering styles and compare their children and realize that I admired both of them so much.

I don’t think I could be whole-heartedly committed to attachment parenting without feeling a bit resentful of my children. Like I said before, it’s important to me that I am more than only a mother. But, I also think having a little more grace for myself and my baby while breastfeeding would have gone a long way. I remember one time we forgot to turn on the heat before going to bed and Everly woke up in the early morning when it got cold. Instead of waiting for the house to heat up, I scooped her out of her basinet and set her next to me where she went right back to sleep. Lying next to my sleeping baby, I felt all of my momma hormones give an enormous sigh of relief. There is nothing like having your sleeping baby next to you and knowing that they are well! It’s a feeling I cannot even describe. Co-sleeping may have been the entire answer to the terrible baby-blues that I was experiencing.

So this huge blog post, that I almost hope no one reads, because it might be a waste of time, is all for the purpose of saying, I am looking forward to understanding more and more just what kind of mother I am and what parenting style works best for our family, confident that my children will be okay. I can’t wait to have this next baby! Life is going to be crazy! But also, I know this is a stage of mothering that will not last forever, and when it is gone, I will probably miss it. Probably. So I want to do my best to enjoy it while it is here!

Do I deserve healing?

“You deserve to get better.”
“You deserve to find healing.”

In our depression, we often think, “This is how it always will be. Even if it was possible to get better, I am not worth the work that it would take to get there.” I have even had the thought, “I don’t deserve to get better,” as if it would be an injustice for me to be happy.

This is one of the reasons that you cannot get very far in therapy without developing a sense of self-worth. (See last week’s blogpost.) Unless we see ourselves as a project worth working on, where will we find motivation to work on our own personal growth? This is why depression can be such a vicious cycle.

To counter these thoughts of self-hatred, therapists will sometimes say, “You deserve.” I’ve even found myself using that phrase when trying to explain to friends that it is worth it for them to seek out mentorship and/or therapy. How can we convey to you that to seek help is not an injustice or a waist of time?

As a Christian, I’ve realized that this statement, “You deserve to get better” does ring false according to my worldview. We don’t deserve anything just for being alive. We are not entitled, we are not owed anything. And yet, we are still worth it!

Next time I want to say, “You deserve you get better,” I would do better to say, “You are capable of getting better, and it would be good for you to do.”

You ARE capable of getting better. You are capable of steadfast friendships, satisfying relationships, and personal growth. You are capable of living a life full of meaning and joy. Your capacity for greatness is nearly limitless.

And it would be a good thing for you to do. As a creature, you have a responsibility to your creator to be the best creation that you can be. It would be good for you to get better. It would be good for your family. It would be good for your friends and for the world. And it would be good for the glory of God.

Where Secular Therapy Falls Short

I have begun the very first steps of what may be my journey to become a therapist. It will be a long while until that happens, if it happens, but while I wait and work, I listen to a lot of therapy literature and podcasts. I love it. It fascinates me.

I was listening to one of my favorite therapy podcasts “Psychology in Seattle” when a patron wrote in a question that I had wondered for awhile. In summary, she asked,

What proof can you give that all people have value or worth? I can’t figure out why that is the case, but my therapist says that I can’t get any further in therapy until I accept and believe that every human has value just for being.

On the podcast, Bob answered, again in summary,

Imagine that your son does something that makes you angry, your little toddler. Is he worth less to you? Do you love him less? Of course not. He is your son. What about when he grows up and does something really bad, like stealing your car and wrecking it? Is he worth less to you? Do you love him less? Of course not. We all have to accept that we are sons and daughters to someone, friends and siblings. We can’t lose our value by what we do and do not do.”

I see what Bob was saying, and I agree with some of it, but his illustration does imply that we only have value based on our relationships with others, not inheirent in ourselves. And he hasn’t explained what gives us value, he has only tried to prove that it is there.

I have a worldview that lays the foundation that all therapists are building off of. I’m sure there are other religions that also attribute value to humans and I’m sure that even with or without religion, people can get very far in their growth without needing to prove this point to themselves. But having grown up in the Christian tradition, I can’t help but feel that this is truth, that we are made in the image of God, specifically designed and purposed by him.

We can conceptualize truth as boring, lifeless facts, but another way to conceptulize truth is by understanding that truth ought to propel us forward and open up more truth to us, in the same way that when you learn to ride a bike, your world opens up and many more opportunities are now available. This is the truth that I believe sets a firm foundation upon which we can kick off.

You, dear reader, were designed, fearfully and wonderfully, and given a purpose in which you can find great meaning. Created in the imagine of the divine God, we have a shadow of his divinity, not based on anything that we have done or can do. As one of his purposed creation, you have value that is linked to him.

Even more than that. If you acknowledge that value is determined by the price that someone will pay for you, (a diamond is valued by the maximum price that someone will pay for it), Jesus Christ paid with his life to be reconciled with you. What is the price of the life of God? There is no way to even comprehend the value of God! And he was willing to suffer and die just to have a reconciled relationship with his creation.

Of what value are you now?

Dear Everly’s Mom

Mothers:

Step outside your life for a moment and try to have an outside perspective.

Look at your child/children and ask yourself what you would say to their mother. What does she need to know? What would you want her to do?

I did this and wrote it down.

“Dear Everly’s Mom….”

After I had written all I could think of, I read it all fresh and was very moved by the encouragement I’d give to Everly’s mom.

We often give others much better advice than we give ourselves.

But if I may, if you do take time to think about it, please let me know what you would say to your child’s mom.

Dear Everly’s Mom,
What a beautiful, beautiful child! What a worthy devotee of your life’s work. What a blessing you have been given. Before the foundation of the world, she was appointed into your care, to nurture and raise. You have been given such a privilege. Do not waste any of your precious time with her. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
It is not selfish to take care of yourself. Only when you are being taken care of well can you give the very best of care to Everly. Everly needs a strong, healthy, and happy mother. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
You will make so many, many mistakes, and you already have, and that is okay. Your child needs empathy and guidance above all else, not perfection. But for the sake of your child, please show grace when you make mistakes, own up to them with strong humility. For her sake, lay aside your pride.

Dear Everly’s Mom
Someone said, “Never give up what you want most for what you want now.” You’re tired, drained, emotional, and it would be so much easier to let the rules slide, but for her sake, please don’t. For her sake, make your home a place of stability, which is for her, safety. 

Dear Everly’s Mom
Your child is safe with you. She is safer with you than anywhere, so it is with you that she will test the boundaries. This is not a testament to your failure as a mother, only to the nature of children. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
Give her good friends. Friends are so influential. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
It is not a waste of time to wash dishes and prepare meals. It is not a waste of money to make your home a beautiful place. Please make Everly’s home a lovely place to live, a place she will remember with nostalgia and fondness, and a place she can always come back to.

Dear Everly’s Mom,
Do not be so consumed with chores and projects that you do not enjoy her. Read to her every day. Sing and play with her. Everly will remember you more than she remembers the house. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
Don’t try to do it alone. Find help. Nurture your friendships. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
Foster her relationship with her father, and do not be jealous of the special bond that they share. It is beautiful. It is as it should be. Give them time to be father and daughter, without your presence being a necessity. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
Life’s problems, while they may grow fewer in number (or may not) will grow more severe in consequence and importance. The best way to protect Everly is to make her capable. 

Dear Everly’s Mom,
Her middle name could have been Joy.