I feel like it wasn’t too terribly long ago that I looked into your beautiful baby blue eyes and saw this new life in you that made me a mom. A little nose like mine and strawberry fuzz that covered your crown. You were magnificent and I knew that I too was reborn that day. You made me a momma, and in your little face I had found my truest love to date.
I was only 19, barely on my own path and I was suddenly diving headfirst into a world that previously had involved the occasional messy diaper and few other minor inconveniences that my babysitting jobs entailed. I had no experience with your tiniest of frames at 17 1/2″ and 6lb 8oz you were much like a baby doll i had once drug around as a small child.
I was just a baby myself, much like you are now, my sweet little love. I was freshly plucked from my fast life as a teenager and tossed into this world of Motherhood. I was grateful beyond measure for a family that a seasoned pro ready to spoil her first grandchild and a poppa who thought you hung the moon. Foe the first time, I saw how hard it was to be the mom. It was an appreciation I hadn’t known prior to your arrival.
Here we are, a mere 18 years later and I’m standing the shoes your Nana once wore, without her here pushing me on. I watch as your still tiny frame tries to accommodate your own little girl. I never thought about being a Nona, Mimi, Nana, or a Mamaw past that “one day” assumption. Yet here we stand. Footsteps that I didn’t wish for you to follow. A path that’s hard to tread at your young age.
Everything will be harder. It will, however, be clearer. You’ve already decided certain aspects of this little person’s life that will impact their life for the future. A name, a nickname, where you’ll live and all things you want, hope, and dream she will be. However, who she is will be shaped and determined by the paths we as the family who surrounds her chooses to take. As you know, my little love, children are most often along for the journey chosen by those who raise her.
I hope with your own journey in mind that you know this much is true. I am here. I am still your momma even as you become a momma yourself. I can still kiss the boo boo’s, but I can’t take the falls. I can hold you as you scream, but no matter my desire I can’t shoulder the pain. I can guide you, show you and teach you the lessons I’ve learned but I can’t transfer the experience. I can be like the grandmother that was taken from you 14 years ago, but I will never be Nana you knew, nor the momma you are now.
Life has thrown us a lot of punches. We’ve taken the hits and learned to fight back. You and I grew up together, myself as much as you. I was forced to walk this road down Motherhood lane much on my own. I haven’t been the mother you deserved, nor always the one you needed me to be, but I’ve been the best I knew how to be. You, my little love, will too. Mommin’ aint easy, but I’ll be here for you, with you, and loving you through it as long as I live. You’ve got this, my sweet little love! You’re as tough as a mother. I can’t wait to see the amazing person you’ve created and watch you become the momma you never knew you were destined to be. I’m proud to be your momma. Soon, you’ll understand just what a mother’s love truly means.
I thought about just giving up on my goals and then thought twice about how important my goals are to me. If I could just give up on my goals so easily, did I really want to reach these goals? YES! I want to reach my goals. My goals are too important for me to just call it quits 3 months into the new year. I have decided to revamp my resolutions and go get my goals. I am going to share with you how I plan to do this and I hope this will inspire someone else ready to flush their goals down the drain some motivation to join in on the challenge.
Goal Getter’s Guide to Revamp and Revise your 2022 Resolutions
I should be ready to call it quits and throw in the towel on the year and all the goals I wanted to focus on in 2022. Afterall, four hospitalizations for two of my threefold since starting 2022, would be enough to make even the most stable people go completely bat shit crazy. YET…here I am in all of my trauma drama bipolar momma bear glory ready to take the second quarter of this year by the horns and reclaim my new year!
The new year did not start off with the momentum, fire, and future forward trajectory I had planned for. I was not expecting the chaos to commence right out of the gate, but hey, you get what you get and you can’t throw a fit! {you can but it won’t help} So I’m calling shenanigans and saying I’m going to start this year over! Anyone else?
Obviously, I’m not a time traveler who has the ability to go back to January 1st and start over, but I can restart today. I truly believe this is where so many people lose track of their vision. It’s so easy for us to say ‘screw it, I haven’t gotten to my milestone goal so I should just quit.’ I’ve done it a million times. That mindset kept me stagnant. It’s time for that to change! We need to fix the mindset that says it’s ok to give up when we aren’t where we thought we’d be. How?
Finding a Better Way to Achieve Goals
How many times are we going to set ourselves up to fail before we change the plan? Many times failure is not from the inability to accomplish the goals you’ve set or a lack of resources to achieve those goals. I’ve determined that failure is found when we choose to make our excuses bigger than our motivation is to be successful. The key is to set goals with a vision for your life in mind.
I’m not good at keeping myself accountable for my progress. This usually leads to excuses or blaming external sources for my failure. I’ve found that it’s really easy to fail when you set yourself up to fail beforehand. An internal dialogue that is negative and is constantly triggering your self doubt in your abilities will lead to you stopping to believe in yourself before you can even get any momentum.
What is your Vision?
Create a vision for your life. I know that is easier said than done, but knowing what you want is the first step to getting there. This is how I plan to create my vision for my life.
Creating the Vision to Determine your Goals
Write what I want my life to look like. Go into detail about everything I want for my life to be.
The first is the overall vision for my life.
Next, I will create a vision for the next 3-5 years.
Finally I will create a vision for this year.
Create a vision board. This can be done as a cluster method with words, your own doodles or pictures of things that you relate to your dream life.
Determine which areas of my life I need to set goals in to achieve my vision. These are my 6 areas that I feel encompass my overall life. Feel free to add your own and edit these to fit your vision. Rank them in accordance to the importance of your ability to fulfill your vision.
Family
Love
Self Care
Creativity
Work
Financial
Social Circle
Create achievable goals in each area that you feel are necessary to reach your end result or vision. Making sure these goals are dependant on your action and not the actions of others are key.
Action Plan
Now that we know what we want it’s time to create a plan to get there! It’s easier to say you want to have x, y, and z, but how you plan to achieve those goals is key. Create an action plan that you can track and grade yourself on. This will allow you to breakdown these goals into action items that require you to take steps towards the goals and your vision for your life. If you can create a goal, you can create an action plan to reach that goal. When making my action plan I used the following template that you are able to use or edit to individualize your action plan.
What is the goal?
What do I need to achieve this goal?
How much time will I need to invest to achieve this goal?
What is my contribution to this goal going to be?
What are my milestones?
When do I plan to have this goal accomplished?
Daily steps I plan to take to reach my goal?
Tracking Progess of Goals
It’s important to be able to track your progress. When we keep ourselves accountable to our goals we can more easily see what steps are working in our favor and which need to be revamped to better serve our success. I choose to track my progress on a weekly basis. This allows me to see what I’m doing right and what I am doing not so right each week. This will help to fine tune my action plan and see what aspects of my action plan are working for me and what aspects are working against me. This will keep me accountable to my plan for success.
Each month, I will do a more thorough review to make sure I am on the path that leads me to my desired results. This is why I feel it’s important to have milestone goals. If we are hitting milestone goals then we are on the right path to hitting the target goal. If we aren’t then it’s time to see why and reflect on what actions we didn’t take or didn’t work.
Part of the accountability is in grading your progress. Much like when you get a report card in school, this well help you to grade your action plan to the progress you are making towards your goal. Much like what I’ve seen in many other goal plans, books, and guides, I have adopted the grading method as a way to make sure what I am doing is working. If I set a goal and have the action items, the action items will be what I grade. If I have five action items then I should be able to easily track which items I completed and how much momentum those action items will have in my forward trajectory.
Don’t Give Up on Your Goals!
We have to remember that this is all trial and error. Cut yourself some slack, but not too much. It’s important to remember that if it were easy we would have had it. If it were easy then everyone would be doing it. If it were easy it wouldn’t be near as exciting when you achieve it. Keep yourself motivated with the milestone goals, don’t allow them to be your excuse to not continue towards the goal.
In addition, we tend to have an ‘all or none’ attitude towards reaching goals. We tend to put so much pressure on ourselves that we believe one misstep means that all progress is lost. There is a correlation between repeated mistakes andfailure, but I believe if we can evaluate our actions objectively and see our mistakes as stepping stones towards the goal vs. away from the goal we can accomplish anything. It’s all dependent on how much you want it. If it’s really important to you, then you will do anything to achieve it. Even if it means revamping how you thought you would get there.
Goal!
I have decided that if I chunk up my goals enough I should be able to reach my goals in a shorter period of time. Since this is my quarter new year, I have opted for the 90 day challenge approach to reach my goals. I will set goals that are attainable in 90 days. 90 days is long enough to do just about anything. This way by the end of the year I will have met my goals and be well on my way to the vision I have created for the year, five years, and my life in general.
Each 90 days I will set new goals and measure my success. Follow along on this goal getter journey and lets keep each other accountable and headed towards the vision we have created for ourselves. I want to hear your goals and see your progress too! Sign up for the 90 day Goal Getters Challenge and receive a copy of my “Goal Getter’s Guide”, exclusive content related to the 90 Day Challenge including my personal goals for this challenge, a buy one get one free coupon for the stuff-n-things shop for My Threefold, AND a chance to win a $100 gift card at the end of 90 days! What do you have to lose? You can meet your goals, be in the goal getter gang, get free merch and win prizes along the way. SCORE! Your goals, my goals, together – we’ve got this! Stay positive! ♥˜
There comes a point though that we can’t just smile through the struggle. We need support and someone to sit with us while we cry the tears, express our fears, and not try to tell us how to fix all of our problems. I’m here to tell you, it’s ok to not be ok. Mommin’ ain’t easy. It takes a village and in our case a damn army because we are fighters over here! But damn it, this part is hard. There are no cheat codes for raising teenagers with mental illness! Believe me, up-down-up- down, left, right, or whatever it was in the original Nintendo game, doesn’t work. I need a reset, pause or some power ups to get through our ups and downs!
I’m struggling with life throwing punch after punch. They are landing blow after blow. I’m at the point that I almost wish I’d get knocked out so I could rest a bit easier. Unfortunately, I’m just getting my ass beat. Life yet again is the bully who is kicking my ass and stealing my lunch money. Instead of just giving in and handing it over, I just keep fighting back. I still have hope that there is something better around the corner. I want to believe that all the hard my threefold and I have faced over the last several years will have some reward in store for us when we get to the other side of this obstacle course. I have to believe enough for all of us, because if I give up, so do they.
If you’ve been following our journey for a while you know 2021 brought a lot more than our fair share of hard times. Going into 2022, I was hopeful that we could close that chapter and begin seeing our way forward to the future. I felt like we finally had overcome big hurdles and found a groove. I was wrong. So wrong. 3 months in to the new year and we’ve already had 2 hospitalizations each now for #2 and #3 of my threefold.
#2 just finished a week inpatient at the beginning of the month and stepped down to partial hospitalization or day patient {hospital during the day and home at night} after this last round of inpatient care. Today while at partial #2 got upgraded to an inpatient unit at the grippy sock hotel, extended stay addition. She needs medication adjustments again. Bipolar is difficult to manage, in case you weren’t aware, now add in the fact that #2 has Bipolar 1 and also happens to be a teenager…that’s more difficult to manage. .
I know I’ve spit the statistics before but bipolar is one of those super unpredictable mental illnesses. It’s also super difficult to diagnose. Most people seek help when they are in a deep depressive episode. Most often bipolar disorder has depressive episodes that stay for months and even years without relief. When you have a manic episode in between it can appear like you are ‘getting better’, but you’re not. Mania is the ‘polar’ opposite of depression. I like to explain it like this – if depression is the worst you will ever feel than mania is the best you can feel. If depression makes you believe you’re worthless then mania is the feeling of being worth your weight in gold. This can make it seem like you’re capable of anything. If depression makes you worry about everything then mania is the absence of worry. It’s not a good thing. This is when people ruin relationships, cheat, steal, experiment with drugs, spend every dollar they have and become invincible.
Usually a depressive episode on average has been found to last 50% longer than a manic or hypomanic episode. There is a 60% greater chance of substance abuse with bipolar disorder. The main statistic that scared me most and steals my sleep is that nearly 50% of those with bipolar will attempt suicide with an alarming 15% who complete suicide. That’s why I share our story. That’s why I won’t quit fighting for our future.
I fight hard for my threefold and I everyday to make sure that our names don’t become part of the scary statistics. I fight the stigma surrounding mental illness because the misinformation isolates us and tells us we should be ashamed to have a disorder. I laugh about our crazy life and how I am the trauma bipolar bear momma because it makes the bitterness and heaviness of these statistics a little easier to swallow. I smile through the struggle, but I guarantee tonight these statistics will steal my sleep and my peace. All I can do is continue to try and stay positive. We’ve got this! ☮️❤️😊~M
Another emotional week is coming to a close for my threefold. ALL three are home. Hopefully for a long time! It’s been up and down around here. I’m just trying to ride the waves of emotion and be the support my threefold needs me to be. It is a hard job, this mom thing. I will be tending to broken hearts and broken promises for the foreseeable future. Being a teenage girl is hard too.
#1 experienced her first big love over the past year. Her boyfriend {we’ll call him ‘J’} and #1 have been together for about 16 months or so. This is her first long relationship. Many of her firsts happened with ‘J’. She has been in love and it’s been beautiful to watch that young love. I actually really like ‘J’ and know he has been a good support for #1 through a very tumultuous year.
Tonight though, ‘J’ called it quits with #1. Her devastation and complete breakdown was heartbreaking for me to witness. I watched and tried to calm my sweet little girl as she hyperventilated and cried uncontrollably. I wanted to hold her, but during panic attacks she has increased sensitivity to touch. instead I sat on the cold floor with her hushing calmly and telling her that she would be ok, even if she wasn’t ok in that moment, she would be. I felt helpless I wanted to fix it, but there are no magic words to mend a broken heart. Instead, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I tried to calm her insecurities and her feelings of worthlessness.
Instead of sitting on the floor we drove to the gas station down the road. We have chocolate. We have funny tv shows and movies and we have a little heartbreak hotel set up. My newly appointed adult daughter will be sleeping in her mom’s room tonight. She will be comforted with chocolate and inappropriate humor. We will ride the wave.
As I sit writing this little dramatic comedy in the making, I am stealing away my moment to cry knowing this pain will linger with her for a while. I know that the first love and the first heartbreak that usually comes with it will be forever etched in her memory. She is tough. My stick of dynamite in a tiny 4’10” body. She has grown so much and has a bright future ahead that is bound to include more love and more heartbreak. This love will be the beautiful high school story she tells one day to her own child when they experience that first love…and the heartbreak that will break hers to watch. I’m loving her through this one knowing that life goes on and that she won’t allow the heartbreak to break her completely. I’m staying positive because I know she’s got this. I’ve got her…and I’ve got this! ☮️❤️😊~M
