Project Sunday/Ya-Ya’s Out
The weekend is coming, and I’m looking forward to it, but also dreading it. I really want to increase peace and happiness on Sundays for myself, my husband Mike, our 11-year-old son Ax, and our 2-year-old pup, Brownie.
Sunday is the one day a week where we are all available to be together as a family doing family-type stuff. We all love each other and like each other, and yet so many Sundays are filled with fritzy conversations and logistics that I don’t enjoy, and I’m pretty sure they don’t enjoy either.
Most Sundays I wake up already conflicted between family chill time, my meeting, and my favorite yoga class. As I write this I see now a low-hanging OFI (opportunity for improvement) which would be for me to discuss with the pack and decide the night before which of those three I’m doing and stick to it the next day. I have my morning plan for all the other days, and that works for me.
On Sundays, because it’s “special family time,” I’ve been not having a morning plan, trying to be good, available, flexible. And that trying to be good, I’m pretty sure, has been making Sundays worse, not better, for all of us.
And here’s another piece of knowing: My menfolk consistently want to snuggle, blob, and chill Sunday mornings. That’s what they want to do. It’s not a surprise. I’m lucky because they insist that while my willing presence for these activities is welcome and a plus, it is not required.
In fact, they have expressed a preference for me to “get my ya-ya’s out.” The ya-ya’s being a certain kind of antsy energy that physical activity tends to mellow out. Some days I have more ya-ya’s than others. Some days I find it tough to co-exist peacefully with the people I love the most and want to be able to be with the most.
And so then I go burn off those ya-ya’s, that anxiety, which feels a little too intense for easy like Sunday morning snuggle time and I come home tired, which feels a little too low for fun family whatever-ness, like a little wilted and needing to push through, pedal to the metal style just to stay in conversation. Like I want a bath and a nap.
It’s so unpleasant, this uneasy feeling of inner friction when nothing external is a problem but everything external feels like a problem. It’s not their fault. It’s not mine either. But it is my work, my choice, to do everything I can to connect with more peace and ease on Sundays, to not get so tangled up, to perhaps stop trying so hard to be that imagined flexible good mom/wife and be the good mom/wife I am. Something like that. At least I’ve given up on pushing them to be what they’re not — early morning hikers. I’m gonna keep going.
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