Stop beating yourself up

Last week a Twitter buddy sent through a message: “Hates the feeling that I’ve let someone down…”

My response? “Girl, we all let people down at one time or another. Pick yourself up and dust off. Ask for forgiveness & forgive yourself.”

Easier said than done and I’m Queen of Denial. Little did I know that by the end of the week, I really needed to hear that same message for myself.

I haven’t been staying on top of our finances like I should — and I had a bunch of stuff (ie everything) setup to automatically draft from our checking account. Duck hates that. He says it hurts more if you have to write a check, and well, you stay on top of it. I will not say he was right. So let’s just continue about me.

Morals of the story, something auto paid that I forgot was coming out — I bounced some things — incurred some outrageous bank fees — and have since turned off automatic payments for everything. Oh, and I’m going to be turning the finances over to Duck ASAP He’s been great and very understanding. He held me while I was crying and told me we’ll figure things out together. We’ll work through this. But, even after I had calmed down that time, I’d trail off in thoughts about the whole money thing. I’d start beating myself up mentally for not staying on top of things and trying to plot ways to make a fast million.

Do you beat yourself up over mistakes made? I can’t stop sometimes. Poor Duck. He handles me well when I get into these funky moods. I feel like I let Duck down. I’ve let myself down. Picking myself up and dusting off works until I take a step and fall back down again. Asking for forgiveness is hard, but gotten. I know God has forgiven and forgotten many, many sins and mistakes. Forgiving myself is next to impossible sometimes.

Yesterday Doodle comes home from school. I yelled got frustrated about her giving away all the food in her lunch. I thought she was at least eating some of it. I told her I wasn’t taking her to get Chick-fil-a right after school and she could just starve to death (ok, I’m not going to let her starve to death, but she was being real drama-queenish at this point). Then looking at her homework, she’d forgotten a book at school. Something we’ve gotten on her for doing many times and actually it’s been awhile since she forgot anything at school. Oh, and she forgot her lunchbox which was “probably in lost and found.”

She went back to her room and slammed the door. I figured she was just mad about the “starve to death” comment. I made her a PB&J and took it back to her room. She was under her covers bawling. I apologized for yelling getting frustrated with her, and told her it was ok, to calm down. She went on about how stupid she is and how she’s always forgetting things and she’s never going to do anything right. I later found out that she had been in an argument with some of her friends and she just really wasn’t having a good day at all.

She’s just like me. I have no clue how to deal with it either. I know the thoughts that are going through her head. I know it’s hard to stop them. Someone else telling you to “pick yourself up” or “stop beating yourself up” or “forgive yourself” doesn’t really help because there’s no how to do those things. Duck shared some good words with her though — we love her — everyone makes mistakes — you’ve just got to learn from them and move on. Mostly I think they were for me too because at this point I was beating myself up for being a horrible mom and losing my cool.

Stop beating yourself up.

Think I’m going to have that tattooed on my forehead backwards so I can read it in the mirror every morning.