A New Day!

O.k. o.k. I have fallen off the wagon. For quite a while I had a Myspace blog. Although I did not blog daily, I did blog fairly frequently. Then I had friends/family that did not have Myspace, but some of them had an independent blog. So I decided to start a second blog (this blogsite) to update people specifically about the children. Then with life and the kids I found two blogs to be time consuming and instead of blogging to one or the other….I sort of let both blogs just sort of fall off the radar screen.

But lately I have started to realize how cathartic it was to me to blog and I miss that. So I have decided to go back to blogging and I am going to try and be more consistent with that. Only this time I am only going to maintain one “thought stream” and I am going to merge it all together. So this will no longer be dedicated just to what the kids did today, but more about where I am in my life today. Hopefully you will find that you want to read along from time to time, maybe even give me advice…..

Recently I had not been in the best mental place. Work has been very stressful as we have had a lot of layoffs in the recent months and the stress and pressure is really high. So working full time in a pressure cooker environment blended with two children under the age of three, and then now being pregnant! I think the exhaustion and stress started to put me in a negative place more often than a positive place. Recently I realized that I was missing the “passion” the all out fire that made me feel alive and start each day kicking ass and taking names. I believe that “passion” is what has made me “successful” up to this point in my life. Where did the passion go? Did I use it up, wear it out, let someone else have it?!? I don’t know, but it just felt like I let myself get on the treadmill. I have to tell you that I DO NOT find the treadmill to be the equivalent of biking through the mountains! Just kinda felt like a rat in the rat race going through the motions. Don’t get me wrong, I had good moments. The kids could do something to just melt my heart and make me smile, I would have a great meeting or accomplishment at the office…but IN GENERAL I felt like I was waiting for something to be better.

I didn’t like it. I like to feel energized, excited, happy, PASSIONATE! So I started trying to figure out how to get back to the basics. I realized that I had let Rule #1 that my Dad taught me as a kid go out the window. He told me that, You have to like yourself before anyone else can like you. He must have said that a million times. At the end of the day, I got it, the message was self-respect. How can you expect the world to respect you if you do not respect yourself? I had lost, among other things, the most basic thing, self respect. I let my boss bully it out of me. I let the Mommy’s who stay at home make me feel like I missed “special chances” with my children. And so on. There are no shortage of opinions directed at you all the time. Connecting with others attitudes of judgement, hostility, anxiety, was my new energy flow, my level of respect both for myself and for them. Negativity is low respect. I am not a low respect person…although I was starting to have a lot of that negativity in my life. So I have chosen to plug back into the positives in my life. And with that I have found more and more self-respect again. I feel PASSIONATE again, I mean really passionate about life. It feels good!

I recently read a quote by Gerald Jampolsky “When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge.” So I have been finding some peace in letting the judgements go and focusing on the positive things in my life!

In my Myspace blog I always concluded with what I was grateful for. I am going to try to add that consistently here now. I am grateful that I have found some peace and passion again. I am grateful that there are things in my life to be passionate about and that I have such a loving and supportive family and group of friends in my journey through life. I learn so much from them and I can only hope that when they need me, I will be able to give them as much as they have given me!