This working mother thing didn’t seem to be going particularly well, writes Elizabeth Tenety in Family.
My kids were sick and melting down. We were short on child care and long on to-do lists. I was behind on lots of projects at work including, well, writing this article. I was starting to drown in feelings of self-pity and defeat.
I’m failing. I can’t. This will never work.
But because I have been reading Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By, written by University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson, I stopped and told myself a different story.
I imagined myself as Working Mother, Superhero. Armed with a laptop, a career and yes, a couple of screaming kids, I reminded myself that I’m genuinely in the middle of some of the most intense years of motherhood, and perhaps my life. I told myself that all of these challenges were helping me to grow into the person I want to be.
Then something surprising happened. The less I told myself that I was a mess, the less I felt so.
See Wednesday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for Wilson’s suggestions on learning to cope.