What I would say to you.
I’ve been reminded this week- while feeling pushed right up to my edge, no space to move or breathe for days on end- that:
The levels of frustration and overwhelm in me impact on how I can respond to frustration and overwhelm in others.
That big emotions bubbling in me, waiting to be seen and heard, will rise up to meet big emotions in others asking me to see and hear them.
That how supported and resourced (or not) I feel becomes how much support and resource I can provide for others.
That my experience of enough or not enough ‘space’ is what it is. Inconvenient, different, more sensitive than usual. It just is.
That when I live my days and weeks with no space to stop, breathe deeply and listen in, my quick shallow breaths, from one thing to the next, change who I am and my way of being in the world in a way that I can’t live with.
They’re watching these days and weeks too. They’re watching and absorbing how I am, how I manage the hard, too full weeks, as much as they’re watching and absorbing my habits and rituals, my way of being and taking care of myself when things are flowing well. They are watching me as I shift between the two, as life pulls me one way and then the other.
This week I felt the challenge, the difficulty, the conflict within me of having no room for the things that I need to keep me upright. I wanted to resist and fight, I wanted to find a way to avoid and exclude weeks like this from ever happening again. I wanted to control and solve the problem so that I could never feel what I have been feeling again.
Before I could explode with the energy of that resistance and fight, my husband poured two cups of tea and sat down beside me. I talked to him and told him how it feels and he just listened. He created a space for me that I just couldn’t find a way to create for myself this week. He offered to hold me upright for a moment so that I could see straight and gently lift the lid of the pressure cooker before it flew off and hit the ceiling.
He hasn’t always known how to do that for me and I haven’t always let him. I had to learn how to do it for myself, learn what space actually felt like and that I deserved to have it. I worked to create and protect it for myself for a long time, with others supporting me, before I was able to show him how he can help me and support me in times when I’m not able to do it for myself.
He supported me and heard me and then he also reminded me that there will always be hard, busy, too much weeks. That this life we live and want to live is full of things that are important to us. That the invitation and appeal of not living life to the full to avoid feeling life too much is not the answer, is not real.
I got through the week on that moment, that support and that reminder.
The reality is that without enough space I cannot do it. I cannot live a big, busy, full life and also be the parent who hears her children in their challenges with understanding and acceptance. I can not do both of those things, all of the time, all by myself. But I can do them both.
Space allows me to be the parent they need and the parent that I want to be for them, so I prioritise it where I can. When there is no space though, rather than fight and resist that fact, I’m being reminded that I can focus on finding and accepting support, until there is some again. Because everything shifts, because my energy is better spent in acceptance than being sucked into resistance. Most importantly because that is what I would say to you 
