triathlonmami.com

Don’t you feel like you are prioritizing your business over your children … or the other way around … that because you have children you will never be able to give your business the attention it needs. I live between the front door view of green lush mountains, and the back patio view of an arid plane covered in sagebrush. I’m not going to choose to go hang out on the pack porch looking at the wild west Mesa. Sitting in the front porch looking at the forest does not mean I don’t love the feeling the mesa brings me.

During the week, I give myself permission to focus on my business and my clients even though my boys are home (I am writing this in pandemic times when schools are online or cancelled). As I was unpacking and getting our site set up for dinner I hear my youngest son run in and say “D is hurt, you’ve got to come. because I have an injured hip) to my son who is on the ground in a ditch, turn on the flashlight and see his foot with a bone sneaking out while his foot hangs loose. No way to call an ambulance and calling one would just delay him getting to the hospital by about two hours which is how long it would take us to drive there.

I know this pandemic has been hard on so many people, and I am also aware that not all of us are experiencing it the same way. Because I cannot believe that I am the only one feeling like this, even though it seems everyone is clamoring for life to get back to normal. I mean, my 8th grader didn’t have graduation or time to say goodbye to his friends, my boys worked all winter towards qualifying for the national snowboarding championship which was cancelled, and their summer camp … the highlight of their year, will not be happening either. okay if your life was good while it seemed like the rest of the world was going to shit.

The athletic coach in me was thinking: I should tell him how he still has two races to qualify for nationals, how the course was hard, how this is only his second winter, how he will learn from the experience, and I would analyze what he could do differently next time. We want to fix things, we want them to feel better as soon as possible because their not feeling good makes us highly uncomfortable. I’d tell myself … “hold space, hold space, hold space let him go through it so it can come out of him.” That’s when we were able to talk, about what went wrong, what he could do about it now, the future, and that’s when my “learn from your mistakes” sermon came out.