Cure For The Common Meltdown

Have you ever had one of those days when your deepest desire is for the world to stop spinning so you can get off? A day that starts off bad and snowballs until you want to crawl under a table and disappear? Unfortunately, all too often I ride the spiral downward. Once it's over, I shake my head in disbelief wondering what in the world just happened.

I'm an all or nothing person. If I start something, I finish it...laundry, dishes, my schedule. Stopping midstream and changing direction is not in my makeup. Turns out that may be making life a lot tougher for me.

Recently I read an article about identifying a meltdown-in-the-making and taking steps to avert it. The primary means of prevention is throwing my schedule out the window. If I'm amidst a meltdown, at the clinic or at home, I have to realize my agenda isn't being effective under the immediate circumstances. If my plan was working, I wouldn't be having a meltdown!

Just a few days after I read the meltdown article, as if on cue, my daughter got sick. When she's running a fever, her emotions are raw.  Her little world falls apart, and so does mine. Normally I would let her lie around while the rest of us plow through our day. To not do my laundry, or pick up the floor, or have the kids make their beds...unheard of.

Inevitably, this tenacious determination to stick to my schedule when a child is sick ends with all of us crying by the time Daddy hit's the door. My house is in order, but tempers are in disarray. So I decided to implement this new concept.  I threw my plan out the window and relaxed.

I have to admit, "relax" is not something I do well. I've heard that men have a "nothing box"; I've even seen my husband enact it. But I've never tried it, until now. I found my "nothing box"! And for this day, for these circumstances, it served us well. We all just hung out together. We cuddled, watched some shows, made our own card game (the sick daughter's idea during a perky moment), and made a pillow mess of the living room. I have pictures to prove it; I knew no one would believe I let my living room look like that!

My house didn't get cleaned. My beds didn't get made. My dinner didn't get cooked. But it was just one day. Well, it was actually one week. But all those chores are there for us to do this week.  As I work to balance my life, I'm slowly embracing the truth that life isn't about chores and checklists, it is about relationships.

I identified a potential meltdown heading straight for us. Rather than following my normal game plan, I made a new game plan for the meltdown. It wasn't easy. It wasn't comfortable. But it worked beautifully and was well worth the effort. The next time you feel a meltdown coming on, be proactive. Change your game plan. Do something different from what you would usually do. See where it takes you.