What Does This Make Space For?

Another approach to chaotic weeks

One of my closest friends has children similar ages to mine and has coined the perfect phrase for when you are just getting absolutely owned by parenting: you got “weaseled”.  

It can be used as a verb, an adjective, or a noun. But the gist of it is the day has gone to hell and you're counting minutes until bedtime. 

To say I got weaseled last week would be a big, giant understatement. 

Overnight, our daughter started kindergarten and our schedules were upended. All of the patterns I've loved and iterated over years disappeared. I suddenly had frantic mornings, big feelings from every kid, no time to move my body and everything just felt off all week. 

My instinct was that I had done something wrong. That I needed to sync with my husband, my nanny, revisit my working hours and schedule, and in all: figure it out.

Forgetting, perhaps that transition is hard. That even good change comes with a tax, and when you forget the tax, sometimes you don't have enough money to pay the bill. And that's exactly how I felt last night: overdrawn. 

So this morning, I also found myself coming back to one of my favorite questions... and today I want to invite you into it. It’s really simple. Just one question:

What does this make space for? 

For me, when "everything is wrong" energy comes along, it makes me want to overhaul every routine and dig my heels in, somehow at the same time. But, what I actually need to find in those moments is calm in the midst of the storm. 

So this week, we were transitioning. I didn't have my normal schedule. There’s nothing I can do to make this new routine feel familiar. But the question that helps me the most is: what does that make space for? 

Because I rely on routines on my average week, I don’t often entertain ideas for activities, conversations, or adventures outside my norm. But this week was a new schedule, so it made space for new things, like:

• A park date with my boys before work one morning. Something that starting my day 45 minutes later allows for. 

• My oldest son grabbing his little brother's hand as we cross the street, and telling him it's “his job to keep the little kids safe”… something his sister has done a thousand times, and her absence made space for.

• My boys could climb to the top of the big play structure, which is normally crawling with “big kids” because no one else was at the park.

It's important to note - this question isn't to diminish the hard. There were  more breakdowns in our house this week than I can count. At one point, I literally put my one of my kids in the shower because we had tried everything else to help them regulate, to no avail. (*** it worked!***). 

The point isn't to ignore the hard. My assumption is that your brain sees the challenges of your life just fine… Instead, my invitation is to notice what the margins are leaving room for. It's an opportunity to get creative, which is hard to do when we are living in the overwhelm and frustration. 

Maybe you didn't end up getting pregnant this month… How does that open up your schedule for the better? Maybe there’s travel you’ll get to participate in, moments that you’ll be able to enjoy this fall, or next year that wouldn’t have been possible if pregnant.

Maybe you had a work transition that feels out of your control… How could more commute time benefit you? Are there audiobooks or podcasts you’ve been wanting to make space for? How might a work schedule change this leave room to try something new?

This weekend, we had a beach getaway that had been planned and anticipated for a year. It ended up being a super chilly weekend, where the beach was socked in the whole time. So, it didn't look like last year, or how we had hoped when we booked the trip. But it was an opportunity to snuggle, to play legos with my kids, and read and watch movies together in a way that we wouldn't have in our normal routine. 

The reality is that changes, even ones that we didn’t choose and wouldn’t have chosen, make space to try something different. It’s like the boat has been rocked, already. Now trying something new doesn’t have to be disruptive. And it might even give us back a little bit of agency in a situation that feels chaotic. 

Or in a week that we are getting weaseled :)

Inevitably, we as a family will settle into a new rhythm. But in the meantime, I want to be looking for what this new schedule makes space for, that I couldn't have done before. And, I want to invite you to do the same. 

So, I'd love for you to ask: 

1. what's something that isn't going the way you wanted it to this week? 

2. what does this make space for?