Just Keep Moving: Sandra’s Story — Part 1

We're getting into a difficult, it's funny.

Everyone talks about the preteens and right now we're there.

She's still very good, but it feels hard.

But then when I reflect back, right, everything feels hard.

I think that's just mommying.

So it's all right right now.

The nice thing I like, so I'm also an educator, and I'm a high school educator.

I'm a high school educator because I prefer to have learning happen through conversation, which you can't really do with a young child.

So we had a moment last week.

It was probably, in my eyes, my worst moment where I let my emotions take hold and we were able to sit down at the end of the day over dinner and talk it through and understand why mommy got so upset.

She was able to speak her side of everything.

And then we come to kind of like an agreement at the end.

Okay, well, if we know that this is what mommy expects, Then we're going to work on that.

And I hear you and I'm going to work on me.

It always sounds good when we have those conversations.

And then when the emotions come back again in a heated moment, you try to breathe through it and not have that.

feeling of uh what did I just do but right

it's hard though because we're constantly working on ourselves and they haven't yet learned that and so it's a lot on our plate the self-regulating is very important I'm learning that myself with an almost two-year-old but I know we're going to get into a little bit of your therapy journey later on in this conversation so I'll pause that and then just circle back to you described yourself as reflective, compassionate, resilient, and becoming.

Tell me what the word becoming resonates with in your journey of life right now.

Well, I think, so where I am now, where I think I am now, is figuring out the next stage.

I find myself at possibly the end of my main career i've been an educator for over 25 years i'm burnt out i'm transitioning into the what's next i also have a doctorate level of education so i've stepped into the world of teacher colleges there's not a lot of money in professorship with my daughter being 11 and a lot of years before college and college being a lot of money I'm trying to figure out who am I becoming, not just in this mothering journey, because I still don't think I'm there yet.

I don't.

I'm sometimes shocked that I'm a mom.

Same.

I sometimes, even with our puppy, I'm just like, we have a dog? She's sick.