Your alarm goes off at 5:30 am like you planned, so you could go upstairs and get on the Peloton before the kids wake up. You snooze it and then you half-consciously realize that it’s storming outside. What is better than sleeping in the rain? Plus, you didn’t get to bed as early as you wanted last night so you really need the extra sleep. You decide you can sleep in today and you will just find time later this afternoon or evening to get your ride in. The next time you wake up it’s to your 18 month old screaming because they are covered in puke. It’s 6:45 at this point and when you go into their room, you realize they have a fever. 102.5 to be exact. Fuck – guess he can’t go to daycare.

You spend the next 2 hours getting your other kids ready for school, arguing about wearing rain jackets, wanting candy for breakfast, why they can’t take their baseball trophy to school in their backpack, and where that second damn shoe could be. Your spouse has important meetings in the office all day so he can’t stay home to help with the sick kid.  That means you’re left there with a mountain of work yourself, along with a very sick 18 month old. You call the doctor and get your baby an appointment that afternoon, you throw the kid some Pedialyte, toast, and a tablet, and you open your laptop hoping to get the highest priority items on your work to-do list knocked out before the next puke.

You spend the rest of your morning pinballing between feeling guilty that you can’t snuggle your baby when he needs it most, feeling guilty you can’t answer your boss’s instant messages for an hour after she sends them, feeling guilty you won’t get that client report completed that you promised would be done today, and resenting your spouse because they got to go off to work to have a productive day without any of these extra tasks or emotions. All while cleaning up vomit every hour because the kid just CAN’T make it in the toilet or the bowl or the bag you’ve provided them with.

You make it to the afternoon and take your kid to the doctor, who makes you feel stupid for even being there – of course it’s just a stomach bug that you have to wait out.

You go home and it’s finally nap time. You can finally get some things done while the baby sleeps. Except they can’t sleep on their own because they “need you.” So, you lay down with them and spend the next two hours trying to answer work emails and instant messages from your phone while your child sleeps with their bum directly on your face. Your stomach is growling because you realize you haven’t eaten a morsel of food yet today and as you’re wondering why you don’t have to pee, you also realize you haven’t had a sip of water. You try to get up to get some lunch and water, but you move too quickly and the kid wakes up crying. You lay back down.

By the time nap time is over, it’s 4:00 and your other kids are getting off the bus. One wants a play date, one wants a snack, and the young one is screaming because he no longer has all your attention. You spend the next two hours juggling more vomit, watching every toy in your house come out if its home by kids that aren’t yours, knowing you’re going to have to clean it up later, and preparing snacks for all the children in the neighborhood.

You look up when your husband walks in the door and realize you have nothing planned for dinner and all you’ve had today is 4 pizza rolls and a Coke Zero. Guess you’re ordering Chinese food. You eat your food in the living room in front of the television because it’s the first time all day your kid has been interested in anything other than you and then you battle baths and bedtime routines.

You finally get everyone down, collapse on the couch, and try to process what the fuck just happened to you. You think about all the things you were going to get done during the day today that didn’t get done. You were going to work out but that didn’t happen. You were going to have a perfect day hitting your macros, but the pizza rolls and Chinese food definitely don’t meet that goal. You were going to drink a whole gallon of water but instead you had a Coke Zero and a few swigs of your kid’s Gatorade. You were going to meditate but couldn’t find 15 minutes to get away. You wanted to read some pages of your new book you got but instead you cleaned vomit off the front cover of it.

You think to yourself how worthless you are for not doing a single thing you set out to do today. You scroll through Instagram and see your best friends and neighbors and influencers and people you went to high school with all posting about their productive days, the workouts they’re crushing, highlight reels of their kid’s baseball game, and pictures of the beautiful meal they prepared for their family. You feel like a failure and wonder what the hell all these people have that you don’t? You pour yourself a glass of wine and turn on the television to drown it all out and slip away from your reality for a couple of hours. Three hours and three episodes of Love Island later, you head off to bed, a bottle of wine deep, and already dreading the hell that tomorrow brings.

You may read this and think “holy shit that is so depressing, why is she writing about this?” The reason is because this is everyday life for SO MANY of us. We are all putting so much pressure on ourselves to do more and be better and constantly raise the bar that when we have days like the ones I just described, we end the day feeling defeated when we should be feeling victorious. Some days are just about getting out alive, and I mean that whole-heartedly.

I am writing this to remind you to give yourself some grace. Should we have goals? Abso-fucking-lutely. If we don’t have goals or things we’re striving for or intentions to get better every day, then what’s the point? But every day is not going to be a win. In fact, lots of days won’t be a win. We may even have strings of days or weeks that aren’t wins. Things come up in life – spouses go out of town, kids get sick, big projects come up at work that need more of our attention than we are used to giving, family members pass away, friends betray us, accidents happen, injuries happen. Life has so many highs, but it can also have so many lows. We have to know and accept that lows are going to happen. It’s part of life.

Now I want to share with you some hacks for getting through those days or weeks or months when we feel like we’re losing:

1. Focus on what you CAN control. Project at work going off the rails? Focus on your assignments and what you can do to make sure you’re doing your part, regardless of everyone else. Sick kid? Focus on taking them to the doctor when you need to, getting them medicine on time, making sure they stay as hydrated as possible. An argument in your friend group? Focus on making sure you are keeping your own shit together, keep your head down, stay out of the drama, and try to be there for whoever needs it in whatever way you can be. You fell down the stairs and twisted your ankle and can’t work out? Focus on upper body workouts, staying consistent on your eating plan, keeping yourself hydrated, and use the extra time to read a new book. You get my point here – bad shit is going to happen, but if you focus on the good things and what you can control, you’ll be able to get through it in a much better headspace.

2. Treat every day like a clean slate/stay positive. If you allow yourself to wallow in the bad, it’s easy to get stuck there for much longer than necessary. Giving yourself grace means having a bad day and then congratulating yourself for getting through it. “Wow, that was really hard, and here I am still standing. Go me!” This could still include making mental notes of things you could have done differently and then making a plan for the next day, without beating yourself up over it. In the example above, rather than going to bed and thinking “I suck and I am sure tomorrow will suck too,” you could go to bed thinking “tomorrow will be a better day – my husband is able to stay home and help me with the baby, it won’t be raining, and I already took the chicken breasts out of the freezer to thaw so they’re ready for dinner.”

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. So many of us try to be superheroes and do everything ourselves, feeling like asking for help is admitting weakness or failure in some way. This is so untrue and anti-productive. In reality, if we ask for help when we need it, we are setting ourselves up for so much more success! In the story above, I could have called a family member or a babysitter and asked them to come over for a few hours to stay with the baby while I worked. I could have called a neighbor and asked if the kids could go play at their house after school because I already had my hands full with a sick baby. I could have told my husband before he left for work in the morning that I wouldn’t have time to worry with dinner, so he was in charge of it. I could have called a co-worker and asked if they could cover one of my meetings for me and fill me in with notes afterwards. I had so many options for taking things off my plate and relieving some of the weight on my shoulders, but I didn’t do any of that. Asking for help when you need it is a sign of strength and confidence, not a sign of weakness or failure. We have to change the narrative around this.

I hope this is helpful and I hope that some of you can read this, see yourself in it, and use some of these strategies or tactics the next time you have a day you feel like you lost, a week from hell, a month you don’t know if you can get through, or a year that just seems to go on forever. We have all been through some hard shit and we will continue to go through hard shit until the day we die. There’s nothing we can do to avoid the lows of life, but there are lots of things we can do to get through them without losing our minds or “escaping” it by relying on alcohol/drugs. As always, if you ever need a shoulder to cry on or a listening ear sans judgement, I am your girl!

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