Bigness

Sometimes bigness is exciting.  But sometimes bigness is pretty darn exhausting.

April and I had a great meeting with our husbands the other night (we usually do meetings over Skype but they were in town this week and it was so fun to do an in-person meeting and our kids had so much fun playing together).  As we talked and planned, the biggness of The Power of Moms was feeling very exciting.  We've got media opportunities and several big Retreats coming up, our site re-launch successfully completed, excellent traffic on our site, new products planned, our first teleconference under our belt, wonderful Board members helping with many aspects of the site, over 70 authors contributing great articles so we can offer a new post almost every day, a quickly-growing email list, a book we've compiled from our writing contest that we're almost done editing, more people signing up to do Learning Circles, Bloom and Mind Organization for Moms every day, lots of new trainers signing on to take our workshops and retreats to moms in many new locations, people requesting Retreats in England and Australia, a great new affiliate program unfolding that will take our offerings to way more people, kind emails and blog posts from many moms who talk about life-changing experiences spurred by involvement with our organization.  Jared and I are blessed with amazing partners in April and Eric and our hard, hard work for the past 3 years seems to be really starting to pay off with exciting, wonderful, big stuff that's really helping so many moms and families.  Our dreams are coming true!

But sometimes, like today, the bigness feels exhausting.  There's a lot more hard work to get from where we are the the vision of where we'd like to be. There are 100's of emails in my inbox and hanging over my head and a long "to-do" list to finish the preparations for the Park City Retreat April 16th.  There's the radio show I'm doing tomorrow that makes me feel a little anxious.  There are the many things I need to do to support and strengthen our board members and trainers so that they really move forward and hopefully  take more off my plate.  There are the articles I need to write for our Deseret News blog, the trainer materials that need to be finished, the chapters for the book that I need to finish editing, and the list of bugs that need to be fixed on the new website.  And the need to somehow do all of this while meeting my family's needs.  Exhausting just thinking about it.

I know what I need to do.  I need to focus on the exciting and good stuff and not on the stressful stuff as I count my many, many blessings.  I need to remember to choose faith over stress (like in that post where I wrote about how faith is the opposite of stress).  I need to prayerfully figure out what is most important to accomplish while my kids are at school, then do a better job of putting work out of my head and being really present for my kids in the afternoons and for my husband in the evenings (we end up working on Power of Moms stuff all the time and while having a shared project is great in many ways, it's hard too).  But these things are so much easier said than done!

I know things will be OK.  Someday, hopefully, Power of Moms will be humming along nicely without so much of my blood, sweat and tears involved.  But today I'm feeling overwhelmed.  And maybe this post will help someone out there who feels stressed and overburdened.  Life is hard.  I accept that.  And acceptance helps. And planning helps.  And prioritizing helps.  And praying helps.  But sometimes it's still just hard.

Maybe if winter would just be over that would help... Seriously, it's April!  Enough is enough!