Ya Gotta Have Faith...At Least According to George Michael

Since I've last posted here almost 1.5 years ago, a lot has changed.  I'm the mother of a high school freshman and a 6th grade middle schooler.  I moved...again.  I changed jobs...again.  Things are different, but good.  And yet...I find myself more stressed out than ever about life in general.

That job change means that I'm now self employed.  As the larger income earner between my husband and I, the fact that I don't have a steady paycheck that a nice company deposits in my bank account on a regular basis is scary.  It's working out so far but every once in a while, when I let myself think about it, I get a pit in my stomach about the possibility that my income could dwindle and leave us in a bad place financially.  Another sticking point with my work situation is that I work from home, so there are days and days at a time where I don't leave my house except to shuttle someone to or from soccer or possibly go to the grocery store.  To some this might sound like heaven, but the more time I spend at home, the less I actually want to leave, then I feel even worse...it's a vicious cycle.

On the home front, keeping up with my girls and their ever expanding extracurricular and social calendar is a full time job in and of itself.  This Fall, they both played on two soccer teams each - one competitive and one school team, which meant that someone had practice or a game almost Every. Single. Day.  Some days, they had a practice and a game, some days two practices, some days there were two games in two different places, or a game here and a practice there...you get the idea.  We're coming up on tournament season and I'm conveniently not thinking about the fact that there are multiple weekends in the near future where each kid is playing in a tournament in a different city.  Plus, Lily is starting school play rehearsals when school starts back on Monday, so we'll be adding that in to the mix.  It's always something, you know?

All of this leaves me feeling tired and overwhelmed much of the time. Yes, things could be worse - but they could also be better.  With that in mind, I had already decided that I was not going to do New Year's resolutions or goals, because I feel like that's just setting myself up to fail.  That said, I decided to have a couple of words to represent how I want to live this year.

The first word is:  FAITH.  I'm not a particularly religious or spiritual person and faith is something that I've struggled with mightily in the last couple of years.  I've only recently realized that I can have faith without it having to do with religion.  I can have faith in myself.  This year, I'm going to have faith that things are going to work out with my job and income because I work really hard and am good at my job.  I'm going to have faith that things will work out how they are supposed to, even if I don't understand it at the time.  I'm going to have faith that everything is going to be okay.

The second word is:  FUN.  I often find that I let my own issues get in the way of having fun.  Things that are supposed to be fun sometimes stress me out, maybe because they don't go exactly how I expect them to or how I think they should.  I can easily talk myself out of doing something I might enjoy because it's either outside my comfort zone or seems like too much work.  I've already started working on this with some successes and some failures, but the important thing is, I'm trying.

So, 2013 is the year of faith and also fun.  I wonder if George Michael would approve?

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