I was up at 2am again.
Not because of perimenopause this time, but from good old-fashioned back-to-school stress. The kind where your brain won’t stop tallying forms, essays, and supply lists.
So I did the only reasonable thing: I watched five straight hours of a hostage thriller.
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Transcript: Confessions Of A B+ Mom
If you're a mom and your kids just went back to school and you feel like you're hanging on for dear life, this might be the one voicenote you make sure to listen to.
So I was up at 2am due to good old-fashioned stress. My mind started going with all of the things that needed to get done in the next week or two that I had been ignoring under the guise of the last gasps of summer, and I just couldn't go back to sleep.
So, you know, it used to be perimenopause, where I'd be up at 3am and I thought I had handled that with progesterone, which I had, but somehow, now it's back. And so at 2am there was no chance I was going back to sleep, so I made the executive decision to watch a limited series show called Hostage. It was five hours. I literally watched from 2am to 7am, five episodes.
And in this show, the Prime Minister's husband gets kidnapped and terrorists are threatening to destabilize a country, and my extremely tired brain at 4:30 or 5 or 5:30 in the morning, thought to itself, “If she can (she being a fictional character), if she can deal with the pressure of her husband being held at gunpoint and a potential coup, I can deal with doctor's appointments and summer work and college essays and school supplies. Nothing terrible is going to happen if I drop those balls.”
Even though everything in my body was on high alert, as if something really terrible was going to happen if I didn't handle those things perfectly.
And you know, I've been over this so many times with myself, but I had to remind myself that the old me would have gotten up at 2 in the morning, gotten on her computer, scrubbed all of the school emails to make sure that I got everything done perfectly, spent a lot of time and energy to make sure that I was getting a logistical A+ at being a mom. And the new me is really aspiring to something different than being an A+ mom. In fact, I'm aspiring to be a B+ mom.
Now, some of you have heard me say before that my toxic trait is that every idea I have, I think should be a book, but this one, I actually might write one day, B+ Mom as a working title. In other words, perfection is making us less good moms, or striving for perfection is making us less good moms.
So let me explain a little bit. This is, this is how my brain works. At 4:30 I was thinking of this whole thing in my head. You know how teachers always say that what they really value is class participation, but the students don't really believe that. What they really think matters is the number that they get on the test, and that, to me, is the equivalent of the moms trying to get all of the details and the logistics right.
And to me, the class participation, the reason that teachers value it so much is that in class, when you're participating, you're actually actively engaged in the subject matter. I think you're actually learning more, and you're really present to the subject matter that you're learning, rather than being focused on whether you got a 91 or an 89 on a quiz, and aspiring more for the number than for the learning and the knowledge.
So to me, the parallel is what I really want to focus on, and I try to focus on, is being present for my kids and being able to when they come home from school. Say, “Hey, how is it seeing your friends? Are there any new kids in your class? How do you feel about trying out for this team? Are you nervous about it? What was it like? Do you like your teachers? What subject is interesting to you, and which subject feels like it's going to be hard for you?”
That's the class discussion part of motherhood that I want to be able to do because I have enough energy left over, because I haven't been trying to get an A+ on the logistical part.
So I think our kids want us in the class discussion role, too. And so I'm really trying hard to counter my instinct, which is to want to get every single thing correct, and I have to also, because I have five kids, I have to just accept the fact that I'm not going to get everything perfectly correct, and maybe the binder color will be wrong, and maybe my kids won't have the exact right school supply until the day after, and that just has to be okay, because, as I said earlier, nothing terrible is going to happen if I haven't figured out every single thing right away when I come back on September 2.
But oof, it's a whirlwind. So if you are in this position, and you've just sent your kids back to school, I would love to know in the comments how it's going for you, because the other thing that I know is that when we say things out loud and get them off our chest, they feel a lot lighter, and it's super helpful to other people.
So please comment on how it's going for you. Maybe, if there's a funny story, share that also, because a little bit of levity goes a long way in times like this.
As always, thanks for listening. All my love.
