Poor me, poor stressed-out under-appreciated me.  Or that’s what I sometimes tell myself.  Yeah…that garbage circulates through my head sometimes and it just kills my day.  Even when all the evidence points to some serious sympathy points for you as a parent or spouse, you really aren’t going to win anything by pushing it.

Everybody has “poor me” habits, you just may or may not be completely aware of them.  Maybe you start saying really negative things out loud so others can hear.  Or, you start leaving things undone out of spite, hoping someone will notice and rescue you from your burden.  Perhaps when one thing goes wrong you horribilize everything else around you.  Maybe you have a “poor me” habit that is a little different from these, but has that same dark icky feeling.  Ready to step out of your “poor me” habit, parents?

- Put focus on things that matter and have gone well.  Yes, you didn’t have time to finish all the laundry you set out to do, and breakfast got interrupted, and you just had a massive schedule change out of left field before 8 am.  But…you have a chance to make a little extra money, you did get many other cleaning chores done yesterday, and you have supper planned ahead.

This is basically what my evening and morning have been about today.  I was very frustrated when all of this was hitting and I was getting a pretty bad dialogue going in my head.  Now I’ll never get XYZ done, already messing up the day and it’s only 7:15, I’ll never get a chance to catch up, I don’t know what I’m doing and that situation will probably go badly.  Since I made choices or just had a mental slip-up, I immediately started dumping on myself.  I had a limited amount of time now to do various things and I was already syphoning it away by this “poor me” nonsense.

-Decide it’s time for “poor me” to go away.  Only once I decided it was time to calm did things start going better.  I had to just get over myself and realize I had different choices than what I expected, and that wasn’t all a bad thing.  Yeah, I was going to have to be a little more focused and maybe do only some of what I had originally planned.  But even in doing SOME of what I had planned, I would still get more done than allowing my mind to get all scrambled up from my emotions.  It was my job to get my feelings in check – be honest with myself, acknowledge them, and then push them out of the way.

-Start doing something and get into your logical problem-solving mindset.  Once I got started on one of my tasks for the day, I began to think differently about everything.  I could do maybe 20 minutes of this, and just one of those chores, and still have time to do this part of my project.  Perhaps I had heaped a few jobs on myself that could be delegated to the kids, or I was making a fuss about some tasks that could really wait a little.  Sifting through those priorities and tasks was a total left-brain activity.  I couldn’t do that if I
was still stuck in “Poor Me Land.”

-Avoid dumping on your family.  The main thing here is that I don’t want my mental garbage to dump on my kids later in the day.  I already tossed some at them this morning when this was all going down.  And overall, this adjustment to my day is not ridiculous and there are probably more upsides than down.  My efforts to keep my emotions under control will not only benefit me, but also my family.  That my responsibility as a parent, too.  Not just getting things done, but not putting excess emotional burden on my kids – especially when it doesn’t really have anything to do with them.

I got caught doing my “poor me” mom routine this morning, but I have managed to derail it.  Honestly, it was really tempting to hang on to it for a while longer.  It felt justified and righteous, but also poisoning and wasteful.  Thankfully, I was able to catch it early before it ran away with my day.  If I’d let the funk grow all morning, I may have colored my whole day with it and regretted the way I spent my time.  But now, I feel like I have a second chance to start the day.  At 9:13 am, I’m pushing the do-over button.  “Poor me” has left the building.

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (November 12, 2009)

    Last reviewed: 12 Nov 2009