this took all day...

Awake at 4 am.  I get up and get a glass of water, go the bathroom, have another glass of water.  I clean fish food off the kitchen counter and I am  contemplating staying up as I am wide awake. It is only 4 am in the morning so I decide to go back to bed.  I lay there and finally around 5:30 start to fall back asleep.  In those moments before I fall asleep and the house is quiet, I often feel the most motivated and the most clear and start working on solving problems.  As dawn encroaches my anxiety starts to take over my confidence and I go from feeling clear and driven to drowning in fear.  This morning I decided that I would start with my daily writing do two things:  first I would say everything I am grateful and something that I am good and second, I would address one of my critical voices rants.  I would not go into exhaustive whine but enough to turn, face that voice and see if I can figure out how to tame it and redirect the energy back to feeling joy in my life.  

So here I go.  Things that I can be grateful for is the fact that I am blessed to be for the first time in my life with people that care about me and seem to generally enjoy being with me.  My boys, my guys, my new friends are all important to me and bring a dimension to my life that I have never experienced and it is heartwhelming.  

I am good at helping the ones I care about solve problems.  (wow it was really hard to come up with something at all)  I am able to find solutions and willing to help in anyway possible to get them what they need.  Ironically the critical voice that pops up immediately after I wrote that is that I am selfish and lazy and never do what I need to do to take good care of them.  I feel anxious often convinced that I am disappointing, neglecting, and not good enough to take care of them.  This is a theme with me...not feeling good enough - a childhood learned mantra that I need to wipe out of my head.  I may not be perfect and I do screw up but I do take care of them and need to pay more attention to the good things I do rather than dwelling on the negative.  

Example.  This weekend I did not go grocery shopping so Cam did not have a lunch for football - Bad Mom.  I did a crisis grocery shopping, made his lunch and dropped it off for him at school so he would be ok - made up for it Mom.  I did not know he would need a lunch this week and once I did I immediately rectified it.  I could have pulled something together from what we have in the fridge in time as well.  So in my head that went in to the FAIL column but really that is just beating myself up and should be in the good job column.  In my head I am still arguing with myself that I am bad for not having gone grocery shopping in the first place.  I am such a bully!