Forming Habits

Most people that go to Notre Dame study abroad. Something like 85% of people. I was that homebody 15%. I always tell people that going to Notre Dame was my studying abroad. Seriously. I loved it and really came into my own and met some of the most amazing friends a person could ask for, but all of it was SO foreign to me. The culture, the tradition, even the way people lived their faith. So, so different. Thank God.

And thank God that I never wanted to travel internationally because I was horrible at traveling. H-0-R-R-I-B-L-E.  Here are my top 4 most memorable moments of traveling:

4. Needing a police escort.

3. Coming home my sophomore year, I knew the lay of the land a little better. Instead of the bus shuttle, I was taking the train that took me all the way to downtown Chicago where I just had to climb some stairs to catch the El that would take me all the way to O’Hare. Easy peasy. I knew I had to cut down on luggage so I opted for a backpack, small carry-on and a duffle bag. I know! At the time I considered that packing light. What I failed to realize is that the duffle bag was approximately the size of a body bag and I filled it so it was just as heavy as one. Don’t even get me started on the fact that I decided to only bring luggage that had to be carried and absolutely nothing that had wheels. Hello, McFly!

I got off the train in Chicago and faced going up stairs to get to the street level and then getting up another huge flight of stairs to get to the El. And it was rush hour so the streets and the stairwells were packed. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Thankfully people always helped and gave me a hand with my bodybag, I mean, duffle bag by grabbing the other end and we would carry it up together. I had so much luggage, I couldn’t fit through the turnstiles to get on the train. I had to get the attention of the MTA worker behind the glass and have them open the handicap entrance for me. Ugh. I was so dumb. Once I somehow got to O’Hare and checked my luggage, I plunked down on a seat at my gate and it took at least an hour for my arms to stop shaking because my muscles had never exerted themselves that much in their whole lives!

2. My junior year came around and I vowed to never overpack ever again. I packed a medium-sized rolling luggage that was small enough that I could check and a backpack. I thought I was so brilliant. I caught everything in time. I caught the train just fine; I got to O’Hare with more than enough time. I stopped and ate a magically delicious breakfast burrito. I found my gate, saw the city was Houston, and it had a flight number that matched my ticket. Perfect. I sat down and looked at my watch. My flight wasn’t leaving for another hour and a half. I thought I was sitting pretty.

“I totally have this whole travel thing figured out. You know what, I’m so early, I think I’ll take a little nap. So I positioned my luggage in front of me and put my head on it to doze off for a bit.”

But I didn’t just catch some zzzs. I went comatose. I passed out. I woke up an hour later frantic thinking I had missed my plane. I checked my watch. Oh, thank God, still half an hour until boarding. Then I started to look around. Everyone that was sitting around me was different than the people that were around me when I fell asleep. I checked my watch again. No, I should be leaving in 30 minutes. Then I looked at the gate and Houston was not on there anymore. Oh no! They must have changed the gate. No problem, I still have time to ask what the new gate is and run over to it. So I grabbed my stuff and went up the the gate attendant.

“Hi, I’m on the Houston flight, can you tell me the new gate for departure.”

“Miss, that flight left half an hour ago. You missed it.”

“No, it says right here on my ticket, the flight leaves at 4pm and it’s only 3:3o.”

“No, mam, it is 4:30pm.”

Doh. [face palm]

I had completely forgotten to take into account that South Bend, Indiana used to not observe Daylight Savings Time. South Bend. That jerk.

1. Finally we arrive at senior year. There is no way I am making any mistakes. None whatsoever. I’m packing a small rolling carry-on and a backpack. That’s it. Of course, being senior year, my procrastinating had reached its peak. During those finals before Christmas break I had managed to pump out a 15 page paper in 5 hours and it was my capstone paper for my Peace Studies Minor. I say that only so you can imagine how much sleep I had gotten. The night before my flight I had set out a few things but was so exhausted I decided to wake up early to pack. A friend was going to pick me up and drive me to the train. I slept right on through all 3 alarms I had set and all 10 of my friend’s phone calls telling me he was downstairs. I finally woke up when he was knocking on my door. Shit! (I’m pretty sure I screamed that when I woke up and saw what time it was.) I opened my door and basically threw my luggage at him and told him to throw whatever he could find in there while I did my best to look somewhat presentable to travel. We jumped in his car and raced to the train. We pulled up just in time to see it pulling out of the airport. Seriously, we missed it by 1 minute tops. He, being a kind and generous man, offered to drive me to Michigan where it would make its next stop to pick up more passengers. If we could beat it there, I could still catch it and get to O’Hare. I pretended not to notice that he was driving about 95 mph. It’s a miracle we made it. Alive. Really the funnier part was that I had just become friends with this guy a few weeks before. He was probably just trying to be nice by offering me a ride to the airport and I made him pack my bag and drive me to Michigan. So embarrassing. And I really hope when I made him help me pack he didn’t pack any of my underwear or bras. That would really make this memory a lot more unbearable.

First off, I just want to make clear my expertise on the subject. I’ll just bullet point my sleep deprivation résumé:

• In college, homework never started before 1 am
• Papers never started getting written before 2 am
• Movie nights with roomies always to precedent to any schoolwork
• Coffee makes me sick and I’ve tried many a time to make myself get used to it (ask my roomie who used to work at Starbucks).
• My first year of teaching, getting married, and getting pregnant all happened the same year.
• Olivia never ever slept. Ever. Never. Ever. For a solid year I took the 1-3am shift of rocking her and Kraft 3-5am.
• Then Lina came 18 months later.
• Then Teresa 18 months after that.
• Then the twins 25 months after that.

You get it, I never sleep. Sometimes it’s my own fault because I just want to relish the quiet and the still for every second I can, but, mostly it’s because of the crazy life we’ve made for ourselves (which we love but it still makes us crazy). And I just can’t drink coffee. I don’t really drink soda. And, while I started drinking tea about a year ago, I usually mistakenly buy decaf tea because I hate myself and am too sleep deprived to read the dumb box when I pick it up. (Also, funny fact, I just calculated that I have been breastfeeding 40% of the last 7 years and caffeine always really negatively affected my milk production.) So while I would gladly chug any liquid that helps me stay awake, my body is not having it.

I hope my sleep CV is satisfactory to you. Here are some things I’ve learned in the last 13 years of not sleeping to help me not hate life.

1. I hate to sound like, well, what I’m about to sound like but here goes: If you decide to be alert and awake then it happens. You can give in to the grumpy and exhausted (which I do often) but you can decide to not feel like that most times. Remember this is just a season. Sleep will come again one day. Even if it seems forever off. Act like you want to feel and it usually follows.

Of course, sometimes you can’t fight it like this kid in the video. We’ve all been there. But it’s probably not all the time.

2. Don’t eat a lot of sugar. I know this seems counterintuitive because sugar is supposed to help your energy but I found that it doesn’t for me. During Lent this year we gave up sugar as a family. I have never felt so rested. I do notice when I drink a soda or eat a couple of cookies or something my body feels like it is dragging. Self-control around sweets is really hard for me so I tend to just keep them out of the house. I don’t buy sweets at the store or sodas. If I want dessert, I make myself bake it.

3. Eat well. This goes along with the sugar thing. When I get behind on meal planning and we are eating a lot of fast food, my body feels sluggish and unresponsive. More so than usual. If I don’t change my sleeping habits but I eat better, I feel like I’m sleeping better.

4. Actually sleep when you can. I’m awful at this. No matter how sleepy I am, it is so hard for me to go to sleep. I always want to check one more thing off my to-do list, or watch one more episode on Netflix, or read one more chapter. Stop it. Just go to sleep. Now. Go now.

5. I think the #1 most important thing is to manage your sleep expectations. There have been too many times that I have crawled into bed, cocooned myself in a blanket, and reached out to sleep as if it were my dying wish only to hear the door creaking open because someone just wet the bed or to hear a baby whimpering through the baby monitor. Nothing on God’s green earth will make me more mad than this very moment.

I feel like it’s similar to this commercial:

“Deep couch sitting” is telling your body that you are going to get sleep right now this very second. Don’t do that. I figured out that I have to trick myself. Really. When I go to sleep, I don’t tell myself it is to sleep. I just tell myself that I’m going to lie down and rest for a little while. If I get to sleep, fan-frickin’-tastic. Truly. The stars have aligned and the angels have sung. If not, I can’t get that mad because I was only going to rest for a bit anyway. This was a game changer for me. I still get really mad from time to time when I’m hoping to catch a few zzzs during the twins’ naptime and one of them just won’t go to sleep but, for the most part, it helps.

DISCLAIMER: This is not actually medical advice. I know people that have insomnia and other sleep disorders and this will not at all help any of that. This is just my experience and what has worked for me. You could just ignore it all. That’s cool. Or even better, just go pour yourself another cup of coffee. 🙂

 

 

 

 

This seems like a duh thing but I have to be very purposeful when figuring out my actual opinion of things. There are so many things influencing what I think and what I do that sometimes I think I love something because that’s what all people like me love when really, I hate it.

It seems elementary, but I spent most of last year trying to prioritize and figure out what things I really think are important and what things I do because I feel like I should do them.

Here are some things I found:

• I hate sewing.
• I hate exercising.
• I hate drinking water.
• I hate going to confession.

I made this list, now what? Well, why do I hate these things?:

• I love crafts and I am pretty good at DIY projects. A long time ago I took this to mean that I should love to sew because that’s what crafty people do. But I don’t like to sew. Not even a little.

• Kraft and I have been running with a group that is training for a half-marathon in February. I love the group runs on Saturday but I don’t like running during the week. What I realized is I don’t like running by myself. I like working out with other people. I need the accountability and the support.

• Kraft and I have always loved drinking sodas. When we started running I bought us some Siggs to help us stay hydrated but I never really picked up the habit of drinking water. The cap on the Sigg is not the easiest thing in the world to drink out of. I promise I’m not a diva, but if I don’t enjoy drinking plain water that much, it’s gotta be really easy for me to do or I’m not going to do it.

• As for confession, that’s not entirely true, I don’t hate confession. I love going to confession but I hate the actual confessing part. I hate going to a priest who doesn’t know me or my struggles and I hate using vague, sterile language to describe my own personal sins. I always feel like I did it wrong or like I cheated. I love being absolved. And sometimes we need a drive-thru kind of confession, but I want more.

I do believe that the good things in life are worth a little extra work, a little more forethought, a little more sacrifice. That being said, there are so many things that require us to be disciplined and so many things that are out of our control, why don’t we fix the things in our control. If we can make it easier for ourselves to keep up healthy habits or make good choices than we are so much more likely to choose to do the right thing.

Here are some things I plan on taking action on:

• Stop agonizing over sewing projects. Yes, it would be neat to make clothes for the girls but not if I hate life while I’m at it. Instead, to flex my creative side, I’ll find some crafts I might actually enjoy like this or this. I will buy Halloween costumes for my kiddos.

• After the half-marathon, I’m going to go to a lot more Zumba classes. There is a studio just down the street from our house and it is the most fun I’ve ever had exercising. It’s so energizing.  Right now I’ve only been going once a week, but I hope to go a lot more. And at $3 a class, it’s a real find.

• In terms of drinking more water, I scavenged around our kitchen to find some other water holding devices and I found a free cup we got from a bank. Apparently I love straws because I guzzle water from this all day. I’m pretty sure I refill this about 5 times a day.

• Confession. That was a little trickier. I’ve thought about finding a spiritual director/confessor for a while. Well, more than a while. Like for the last 7 years. I’m finally so fed up with it that I emailed a priest I’ve worked with before and asked him if he has time to meet with me. We haven’t been able to work out a meeting time yet, but at least it is forward progress.

Forming habits, especially really good ones, is hard. There’s no need to make it harder on ourselves if we can help it. There are plenty of hard things that we have to deal with. (Like babies who refuse to sleep in past 5am.) So I’m going try and make better the things I can so I can be more patient with the things I can’t.

Several months ago I wrote about a personal characteristic that makes my life hard. I have no idea how to develop a good habit. I have never in my whole life learned how to acquire a good and healthy habit. As a child I never made my bed, I never worked on my science project until the weekend before the fair, I never kept a planner. Now as an adult I don’t floss, I don’t exercise regularly, I don’t spend 15 minutes each night tidying up the house.  I never work on anything little by little. I’ve always gotten away with starting and finishing projects in one night. I’ve learned to deal with sleep deprivation.

But I hate this and the only way to be a successful adult and especially a successful mother is to create healthy habits and work on things a little at a time. I don’t have the luxury of hours of uninterrupted time. I can’t starve feed my kids or leave them to their own devices for the day. But I also feel helpless looking at the pile of habits a highly efficient adult needs that I don’t have an ounce of.

One comment I got on that post was:

I feel like I have lived my life the same way. I am having trouble pulling myself out of this pit.

That’s exactly it. I feel like I’m in a pit. I am stuck. I don’t know how to build a habit and as I have come to find, building a habit is slow, nonlinear progress that involves a whole lot more regress than I’d like to admit.

Being a Mexican mother means being a perfectionist. A relentless, unswerving, not even slightly ashamed perfectionist. If you are depending on me to do something for you, I am awesome. I would love to have ten of me to work on things because it would be done on time and it would be awesome. But if you are actual me it sucks. I kill myself to produce perfect things and my poor family gets the brunt of it. Especially Brandon, he gets drill-sergeant-me screaming at him to help.

Anyway, back to the comment. I am right there with you. Hearing that someone else struggled with this, too, made it easier to move on. What can I do to change? What can I do to learn patience with progress?

Well, that’s what I am trying to figure out. I spent 2013 playing around with different systems, figuring out how many things I could try to change at one time. Which meant I pretty much spent a year failing. A lot. At stupid things, too. Like finding myself incapable of brushing my teeth at night. But I have learned that habits are hard and I have learned that I cannot change a million things at once.

So here’s to 2014. Here’s to clawing my nails into the dirt to pull myself out of this hole. To try and figure out how to motivate myself and not hate myself. Because this is a work in progress. Life is a work in progress. I am a work in progress.