Restoration Hardware: Thoughts on Healing from a Sleepy Mom

How do you recover from painful experiences or seasons of struggle?  Do you get lost in the hustle of “doing?” Do you get anxious and overwhelmed by the narrow path forward? Do you ever feel like the setback you now face will wreak havoc on the long game of your life and you’ll never be able to make up for lost time? 

I do.  One hundred percent.

Writing and exercise have been the two most important tools in my tool belt throughout my journey of recovery.  They’ve been my pocket of hope and sanity to snugly retreat to when life feels out of control. 

Today, at exactly five weeks postpartum, they seem like a far off luxury.  My whole world turned upside down in the most delightful way with the birth of my son, and yet, I’m not sure who feels more like the infant, he or I.  My existence has been boiled down to the primal steps, breaths, and sleeps of a new creature in a distant land. My identity—undoubtedly shifted from therapist-writer-coach to Executive Milk Factory Manager. 

I am cranking out words on my laptop for the first time in over a month while the house is somewhat quiet—during his piecemealed nap—hoping they make a teaspoon of sense. 

All of my go-to coping strategies and self-care rituals have temporarily vacated the building, just like the 12 pacifiers I seemed to misplace in the last week. 

In fact, alone time is more valuable than a clever blog post, so we’ll keep this short. 

In my lucid, highly-caffeinated moments, I’m struck with two opposing words: restoration & disease.  

Call me dense, but I’ve never stopped to entertain the roots of those words.  “Rest” for restoration and “dis-ease” for disease.  

In order to experience true restoration, we must soften into rest. I’m not talking about lying down for 15 minutes checking emails and making to-do lists for the afternoon.  I’m talking the deep, agenda-less, squishy kind.  For all you type A personality people out there, this might sound like a living hell. I get it.

Yet, if we swing over to this opposing word: “disease,” we find a rather scary predicament.  The lack of ease and rest in our bodies will actually create sickness if we don’t open windows of rest for our weary bones. 

I’ve been guilty of striving my way through self-care and recovery.  The temporary high of this activating energy feels good but doesn’t do the deep work that only true rest creates long term. 

I’m learning to let go of the normal demands I put on myself in these young days of motherhood: the cleaning, planning, working, creating, and doing (even good doing) are on the back burner.  The holy spaces of rest and odd stretches of sleep—my healing balm during this transition time—are everything.  

In the long run, learning how to rest well, moment to moment, combats disease in our lives, both physically and emotionally. 

Perhaps the first step is to reframe how we think of rest. It’s not lazy, a waste of time, or selfish. It's at the heart of wholehearted living. It's what allows us to approach each day from a place of worthiness.

Food for thought: what does deep, healing rest look like for you right now? 

(Spoiler alert: it doesn’t have to be napping!  Although it’s 9am and I’m already jonesing for one.)

Alright, my short window of productivity is over…I hear a tiny human crying in the next room.

Until next week, rest well my Dear Friend…

Love & Gratitude,

Katie