positive mental attitude

Don’t forget to enter the Five Years From Now Blogoversaryfestathon Group Writing Project! And happy anniversary, Ryan!

In church on Sunday, one of the speakers was talking about what a difference a good attitude makes. He used an example from a Primary (children’s Sunday School) manual, which I’m way too lazy to try to find, so I’ll just paraphrase:

You’re moving and you’re afraid you won’t have any friends. How would having a poor attitude affect you in this situation? A good attitude?

The speaker left the hypothetical at that, but as I sat there, I thought through my answers.

Poor attitude: you’re pessimistic about making friends, so you assume that people you meet wouldn’t want to be friends. You don’t go out of your way to meet people. When new people meet you, you’re shy or just plain unfriendly, and they can tell you don’t expect to make friends.
Good attitude: you’re confident you’ll be able to make friends. You introduce yourself to everyone you see, you put yourself in situations to make new friends, you bring neighbor gifts around, and you look for people you can form long term friendships with. People see how friendly you are and return the gesture.

Rachel being super positive!!!!!!!! Your attitude can really dictate your reality. Both having a good attitude and a poor one become self-fulfilling prophecies. Having a poor attitude leads to self-defeating behaviors, while having a good attitude helps you come up with strategies to cope with the challenges coming.

At least half the time, I wake up in the morning already behind. My two older children are already up watching cartoons or playing on the computer, and the baby is crying for me to come get her. I’m not nearly rested enough, and I can just see the patterns of too much screen time, impatience and bickering starting to take shape.

But maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can stop the downward spiral before it starts. Some strategies to cope when I’m already starting behind would include:

Prayer.
Plan. Come up with a fun activity at home or out and about, so you have something to do instead of veg in front of the TV.
Eat well, maybe planning out meals and snacks for you and your kids. This sounds a little unusual, but catch-as-can grazing throughout the day contributes to that feeling of being out of control for me.

As I was drafting this post, I also came across a post by Jen from Conversion Diary on our steps for starting your day the right way—and she started out even further behind than I usually do.

What do you think? What difference does a positive mental attitude make? How do you cope when you feel like you’re starting from behind?

Negativity kills

They say that one of the most important things you need in a survival situation is PMA: a positive mental attitude. A self-defeating outlook is, well, self-defeating. If you don’t think you can build a shelter, it’ll only make it harder to build a shelter. On the other hand, if you believe you can build a shelter, even if you don’t really know how, at least you’re not adding more obstacles to your path. Blueprint. Whatever.

I’ve been in a pretty negative mood lately. Rebecca is teething—and this is way harder than it was for Hayden. (Think near-constant holding, squirming, nursing and interrupted sleep just weeks after we finally got her sleeping through the night.) Hayden, meanwhile, has developed a disturbing inability to sleep at night, too, but his waking is without apparent cause. Oh, and have I mentioned how much worse three has been than two so far?

My outlook has grown steadily gloomier. I began feeling my children and my life were completely out of control, mostly because I was obviously an inadequate mother. What else could explain the constant tantrums, child-juggling (and disappointing) and general overwhelmed-ness?

By Monday, I was walking in a no-sleep-constant-screaming-from-one-of-the-three-of-us haze. I was too down to care about needing a shower or the chest-high pile of laundry spilling off the couch (at least it was clean) or dinner or grocery shopping or anything else. I didn’t care if I slept, since I figured I wouldn’t.

And then Tuesday came (AKA today). In my feed reader, I came across an article on negativity and perfectionism. Sometimes the good is the enemy of the best, when we while away our days with good things but not essential things. But sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good.

As mothers, we don’t have to be perfect all at once. I believe that our lives on Earth are a journey, progressing towards (eventual, heavenly) perfection. God doesn’t ask us to make ourselves perfect overnight, or even all by ourselves. Even if you don’t subscribe to my church, I think everybody is trying a little harder to be a little better.

Sometimes we hold ourselves back from that progress by holding up a “perfect mother” (real or imaginary) as the standard, one that we’ll never measure up to. And because we don’t measure up, we beat ourselves up. But really, that attitude only defeats us before we’ve even begun to try. It doesn’t help anything to put myself down, so this morning, I rubbed the sleep from my bleary eyes and smiled at my (constantly) nursing baby.

Though I didn’t think about this at the time, I see now that this morning, I chose happiness.

Today wasn’t perfect, but it was a heck of a lot better than yesterday. And when it comes down to it, I think that general upward trend is good enough.