The Intolerance of Summer

So the first one is your ability to tolerate a specific stressful thing. So when you first have a baby and the baby cries, it is very intolerable, your body freaks out and you’re like, is the baby going to die? And it’s just so much when you first have your first baby, and then for some of us, for six kids we’re just like, oh, babies cry sometimes and then we check them and we solve their needs, but it doesn’t like to overtake our whole body. 

And so what we’ve done is we’ve increased our window of tolerance, our ability to stay calm and hold on to ourselves when a particular stressor, like baby crying, is presented and so this is the same thing about those people who do the ice plunges, right? 

And so they start, and maybe they can do it for like 10 seconds. And then they work their way up to being able to do a cold plan shelter called to do the cold plunge for, you know, two, three minutes. And so they’re increasing their window of tolerance to a stressor. And so we can do this. You can increase your window of tolerance to questions or toddler whining, or having to drive around all the time, all the time. Just any of these things in your life, any particular individual stress of motherhood, you can be like, hey, there are some steps that I can take to increase my window of tolerance here to tolerate this more. 

Now you may not want to, we don’t have to do that with everything, but it’s completely available to you. We can learn to be less stressed about anything. Right? I mean, I talk often about my being scared of spiders and if I wanted to, there are many steps that I could take to decrease my fear of spiders. 

And another way of saying that is to increase my window of tolerance, to the fear stress I have about spiders. And so, that one kind is the individual stressors. And so you could just sit down and go, hey, what’s feeling stressful about summer right now. And let’s just use a silly book, a common example, which is putting sunscreen on children.  

It’s stressful. This is not fun. Nobody was like, do you know what I would love to do today? I would love to put sunscreen on unwilling children. That sounds like the best. And yet it’s a big part of summer. And so you could learn to coach yourself. And be like, listen, we’re going to put some sunscreen on the kids. 

They’re not gonna like it. It’s fine. They’re gonna wiggle. They’re going to fuss. Nobody likes having someone else put sunscreen on them. And I’m going to do it anyway, and I’m gonna stay calm and I’m gonna use my cheery Mary Poppins voice. Like you guys what about we’re gonna have so much fun. At the beach today, just come put your sunscreen on. I don’t want you to buy my son. Right on. 

And in your mind, you’re like, this is fine. Of course they don’t want me to do this. This is so normal for children. I’m totally willing to put sunscreen on these kids. Right. You’re just coaching yourself to keep yourself calm so you don’t get upset and then yell at them. Okay, also most of the time that we’re putting sunscreen on everybody’s already a little hot and creaky.  

And so you can increase your window of tolerance by breathing and coaching yourself in your mind, talking to yourself in your mind. These two things. These two tools. Everyone on the planet should learn to breathe and talk to themselves in their mind to stay calm. Okay, so you can increase your window of tolerance to anything we were experiencing stress over in the summer.  

The second type of window of tolerance is our overall window of tolerance for all the stress that we’re experiencing. So there’s your ability to handle, you know, diaper blowouts, toddler, tantrum, sassy, teens, any of the things in your life. There’s your natural ability to handle that today? Okay. But if I gave you a migraine it would significantly decrease your window of tolerance for all the stresses combined. 

And so maybe normally when you have a precocious eight year old girl who likes to ask lots of questions, you can hang for that. But then if you have a migraine, all of a sudden your ability to hang for that stressor. Is much, much less and so you’re like, please stop. That is your overall window of tolerance. 

So things that affect your overall window of tolerance would be like not sleeping, which is a giant part of motherhood. Would be not eating, you know, you just haven’t fed yourself well, it would be having a headache. Having stress in your marriage or financial stress or health stress, yours, or one of the kids write these things that get added onto our plate. 

And now our ability, our regular ability to cope with things goes down. Okay. And so this is what I think most moms are experiencing over the summer. They took their regular lives and then we added all these extra stressors. Okay. And so for those of you who send your kids to school, a giant extra stressor is they are home all the time. But for both homeschoolers and non homeschoolers, there are camps and vacations and vacation Bible school and like the sun and it’s so hot nobody wants to go outside. 

And like I said, sunscreen and snacks and screen time and sibling fights. We have had so many. like bikes on booms. Boom’s on bikes is what I meant. The kids are riding bikes and then they fall over. They have a boom and that wasn’t part of my life three months ago as big of a way as it is now. And again, any individual thing is not the problem, but when we have this like a plate of stressors and we start piling things onto it, our ability to tolerate all of them together, goes down.  And so I think it’s at this point in the summer where we’re like, huh? I’m yelling a lot. 

I’m stressed. I feel unhappy. I’m not really being present with the kids, why is that? And then we beat ourselves up and we think, oh, it’s because I don’t have a plan. Like maybe, I like planning, I think planning can be helpful, but maybe it’s that we’ve added all these stressors and then we haven’t changed your life to match the incoming stress. 

And so the way that we increase our overall window of tolerance is we have to take some things off the plate, some of the stressors. So you have to sleep more. You have to try to spend some time away from the kids. You might Institute a two hour lights off quiet time every afternoon.  You might need to feed yourself better.  

And so there are all these tools that we have that we can use to increase our overall window of tolerance. You can also still use breathing and coaching herself all throughout the day. To just bring that stress level down. But as I’ve been coaching moms for these last two weeks, I’ve really noticed this up to, I think we started the summer with high hopes. And then maybe the chaos of the first couple of weeks of summer, we were like, well, you know, we’re adjusting. 

And now it’s just thinking like family drama. It’s so hot outside. What am I doing with my life? This is not as magical as I thought summer was going to be. I’m just hearing a lot of different versions of that, but I think part of it is we’ve added these stressors and we’re not compensating for the added stressors. We’re not increasing our window of tolerance by taking care of ourselves. Okay, and so I want you to make a list of what’s stressful about your summer.  

And I want you to try to solve whatever you can on that list. You might need to stop doing things.  You might need to say no to something you committed to. I was just saying that, the only shoulds that are real are, what’s listed in the catechism? And the law. Okay, there’s like what’s listed in the catechism you should do that. And then there’s the law; and even then there’s some gray areas, my friends.

Such as my daughter, often links to point out about speed limits. I’ll be like, we have to follow the rules. It should be like, what about speed limits? I’ve tried to explain, like everybody goes five over the speed limit but she’s very into justice and she wants to talk about that. So even in the law, there’s some gray areas, right?  

And so everything else it’s a social norm. It’s a social norm to bake a birthday cake on someone’s birthday. You don’t have to do that. There’s no laws about that. The catechism does not say that. It is not a salvation issue, my friends. You do not have to bake your child on their birthday. Now you may want to. You may like certain social norms. Social norm is putting up a Christmas tree at Christmas and a lot of us like that social norm. 

But even within that, right, there’s these two camps, like some Catholics are like a team. I don’t do the Christmas tree thing until the day before Christmas and some Catholics are like the team Christmas tree goes up the day after Thanksgiving. And here’s the thing; you can do whatever you want with your Christmas tree. You can be team Thanksgiving and you can be team Christmas Eve.  

It’s just a social norm and so I just think a significant amount of the things that we do over the summer. Our social norms and we think they’re rules. Now, if you choose to not participate in some social norms. You are opening yourself up to commentary from society. The social norms come from society. And so you might open yourself up to people saying, what do you mean you’re not sending your kids to VBS? We all send our kids to VBS, which is Vacation Bible School. I think he’d be like, yeah we’re not doing that.  

Like for me, this will be my first year that all the kids go. And nobody said anything, but if somebody was like, oh my gosh, all your kids are going so you’re going to volunteer this year? I’m gonna say, no, I’m not. Not doing that. And it might be a social norm that once your kids are all in VBS, you volunteer. And I usually help them out in some ways. But I don’t go, I will not go this year and volunteer at VBS.  

And I’m willing for some people to have some thoughts about that. And so I just think when it comes to summer and we’re feeling kind of stressed. I want you to look at your individual stressors and go, can I breathe and coach myself through this? It isn’t that big of a deal. I can handle this better. I can increase my window of tolerance for kids shenanigans.  

And then, there’s can I increase my window of tolerance? For my whole, like all the stressors, my whole life, my day-to-day life. And that’s usually the self-care thing. And I just think that’s, you know, at least two hours with no children somewhere. And eating well, sleeping well, drinking water, just like the basic stuff that most of us just kind of don’t want to do.  

And you don’t have to do it. But then be like, that’s part of the reason why I’m extra stressed, just because I added stressors and I didn’t address any of them. So we just shrunk the window of tolerance.  

The other thing I want to say about summertime is that most of us have like completely vilified screen time, which I get, and I don’t like screen time. I don’t, I’m like, Ooh, I’m watching our screen time. But I also just want to remind you that many of us, myself included, watched five hours of cartoons. Every summer and maybe not even just cartoons, it was like a wheel of fortune. And the price is right and like duck tales, maybe like, Old Batman. 

We watched so much television. Okay. And we’re all doing just fine. Is it ideal? No. But let me tell you what isn’t ideal either is you losing your mind over the summer and screaming and everybody.  And so I am here and I consider myself a pretty successful adult. I’m like in society, I’m doing things. I have some kids and I watched a lot of television over the summer in my childhood.  

And so balance it out front and I think one of the things that’s so difficult about modern society is the number of should’s.  The number of social norms of warnings that now live in our mind are so much. And so we’re just really beating ourselves up over everything. But then we’re losing our minds and I just don’t think that’s a great thing to model for the kids.  

And so you can decide. And first of all, giving the kids more screen time may not make your life any easier. But it might; I am a big fan of old television shows. I will say things that are slower. So television now is just like wham, bam, should be fast. Everything is super hyper, and so I love little bears. I love blue planet,  maybe those old shows like Duck Tales. I mean, I know there’s probably some squirrely things from the nineties, some weird messaging, although they weren’t doing a lot of LGBTQ things then yet. But, they’re just slower. The older shows are slower. 

Maybe reading rainbow, Mr. Rogers; my kids aren’t going to that. And so, you know, you might just find something slow and maybe your big kids are like, man, we don’t want to watch that. And you’re like, yeah, but that’s what I’m putting on.  

And another thing that you can do, like I mentioned, is institute a quiet time. I’m turning off all the lights. We’re going to train the children to speak like mice, you can do something quiet, you’re on this couch, you’re on that couch, you’re in this room.  

I love so many choices right now. For a lot of you, your brain feels trapped and stuck. In summer and you’re like, I thought this would be great and it’s not great and I’m really struggling and I’m yelling a lot. I just want you to know that you have lots of choices, my friends. We can individually increase our window of tolerance to the specific stressors. And then you can also increase your overall tolerance by taking care of yourself and leveraging other tools with the kids.  

Okay, you got this. I love you, I’m praying for you, you’re not ruining your kids; you’re not a horrible mom. We are the good moms. Okay, it’s okay for children to be bored during the summer. It’s okay for you to sign them up for back to back summer camps if that’s what you want to do. It’s okay for them to watch television.  

When I think of things that aren’t ideal I always remind myself, none of us are living in the garden of Eden. That’s probably the best we should all go to live there, that’s the best childhood.  And since then, all of it has been compromised. Okay, but you will be held accountable to the Lord for your anger, we want to get that under control. And most of you really want to not be angry. And anger is just a stress response because our window of tolerance distress is not big enough. It is completely changeable. I promise.  

And you can just take a deep breath and you can handle it, all right?  

I love you. I’m praying for you. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.