There are those days where the most sensible course of action to take when they end is to sit yourself in your car with a sneaky bottle of whatever beverage you really shouldn’t be drinking and have a bit of a solo debrief.  A few cycles of deep breathing, a simple mindfulness task (Denyse shared a great one recently where she takes the time to look around and individually name five things she can see before allowing her mind to move on) and a few minutes to process the events of the day.

If I could only use one word to describe Wednesday it would be ‘stretched’.  But I’m a blogger so of course I’m not going to stop there.

Wednesday was the day that had it all.  It began so well with a chance meet up with a girlfriend and fellow preschool mum in the line for coffee.  Over the course of power chat we managed to laugh, debrief and give each other the strength and patience to keep on keeping on.  While we didn’t have the perfect answers for each other, we do have solidarity and that sense of not being ‘the only one who…’ which is probably more important as we fumble our way through this working mum gig.

And then the day kind of unraveled.  It felt like I was already running out of time from the moment I switched on my computer and logged on.  Lunch ended up being eaten en route to various things like mandatory fire training with my work girls (which predictably ended at the newsagent in search of their secret stash of Coke Zeros) before we all had to run in opposite directions to get stuff done and mutter darkly about whether that really was the time already…

But it’s always those days when your mind is in power ward round mode that the universe decides that it requires a different plan of attack from you.  And as frustrating as it can be to have your rigid plan for the day disrupted, the universe must be obeyed.

So I slowed down, stopped rushing and listened.  Really listened.  To decisions being made that nearly made me cry as they were told to me but that I had to respect and execute because of my respect and empathy for the people who were making them.   To the waves of familiar sounds around me that signal the routines of a busy hospital on a weekday.  To the thoughts within my head.

I also let silences happen.  I didn’t rush to fill them with meaningless pleasantries or assumptions.  I let the silence and the time do their restorative and calming work.

I ended the day acutely aware that I’d probably given the best of myself but that the most important person in my life also needed me to be that best possible self in those challenging hours leading up to bedtime.  So we sat outside a cafe and had chocolate ice cream in a cone with sprinkles (don’t worry, I had my wipes handy) at 6pm while we talked through our days and discussed various pieces of preschool art.  Then we made our way home where we still had our differences about what to eat for dinner and when the best time to have a shower was but there was a definite air of peaceful compromise and an agreement to disagree to it all.

How do you cope with being stretched?