43rd Birthday: Reflecting On The Last Year

As I celebrate my 43rd birthday, I find myself reflecting on the journey of the past year. It’s been a period filled with growth, challenges, and ultimately, a great deal of personal development. 

From Farm to Town Life

One of the most significant changes in the past year has been our move from the farm to town life in Goondiwindi. For almost a decade, our family lived on a farm near Moonie, engaged in a agricultural business we ran with my parents and family. However, in 2023, we made the challenging decision to relocate to town during the school terms, and then full time in town in 2024.

The Freedom and Challenges of Town Life

I’ve greatly enjoyed being able to grab a coffee in town, an indulgence that seemed so simple yet luxurious. It’s the little things you notice the most.

Working with a personal trainer has been another highlight. What started as a weight-loss journey evolved into something much more profound, impacting my physical, mental, and emotional well-being. 

While town life has its perks, it also brought its own set of challenges. Adjusting to the separation from the farm was tough. My connection to the land runs deep, and leaving behind what we thought would be our forever home was heart-wrenching. 

Growing Through Personal Challenges

My personal journey over the past year has been marked by several health challenges, including a knee injury that required multiple surgeries. This taught me patience and the importance of prioritising my well-being. It also made me realise the significance of daily movement and a balanced lifestyle for my mental health.

Solo parenting has been yet another hurdle. With Adam at the farm during the week, I have been in charge of parenting the boys and being there for all the after school activities. 

I’ve realised that I’m easily overstimulated, especially from the chaos when my boys come home from school. Discovering that I'm a highly sensitive person has helped me understand why I become easily overstimulated and what steps I need to take to manage it.

Support Systems and Personal Growth

Reaching out for help has been crucial. Whether it’s hiring a cleaner or having someone assist with house chores, these supports have been invaluable. They have allowed me to focus on my children and my personal growth without feeling overwhelmed by daily tasks.

Additionally, mentors and health practitioners have played essential roles in my journey. Focusing on foundational aspects like sleep, hydration, nutrition, and mental health has been life-changing. 

Embracing Creativity and the Big Picture

This year, I’ve also made space for my creative side, whether it’s through singing or simply going for a walk and allowing my mind to wander. These activities nourish my soul. 

Reflecting on this past year, I’m filled with gratitude for the journey and the lessons learned. Each challenge has been a stepping stone to deeper self-awareness and growth. As I step into another year of my life, I carry with me the understand

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Transcript

0:19

Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of Me Plus Motherhood. I'm so delighted to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Today's a special episode because it's my birthday. I'm 43 today. I cannot believe it. Today's episode is a little bit unstructured. And a lot of sharing because I've been doing some reflection and I want to share with you in the past 12 months, things that I've enjoyed, things that I've found challenging, things that have helped, and things that I've learned. Let's start with the things I've enjoyed. I've enjoyed Netflix. We've spent the good part of the last decade living on a farm near Moonee in South East Queensland, about 30 k's west of Moonee. That's been our home. However, in 2023, we made the decision as a family that our four boys and I were going to live in Gundawindi in a rental house in town during the school terms. So For the first half of my last year, we were living in town and still going out to the farm on weekends and spending all our time out there on school holidays because Adam was still based at the farm and we were still In full blown farm operating mode, um, with our cropping business on a property that we ran in conjunction with my parents. So it was a mixed farm of cattle and, and cropping. We were managing the entire property, but our business as in mine and Adam's business was cropping, brought acre cropping, dry land. and then in the second half of my 42nd. year, no 43rd year. we have been living in town full time. We made the choice to actually leave the farm at Christmas 2023. we made the decision that it was time to go our own way, separate from my family's business. And so we are living in town in Gundawindi full time while we're working out our next steps. with that move, And being in town, we actually have, for the first time, taken on some subscriptions, including Netflix. And it's something that's been, and still is, such a novelty, after only having satellite TV at the farm for, Nearly nine years and watching a lot of Impaja and just all free to air TV. It's been a real treat to be able to upgrade to a smart TV and have really good internet connection and enjoy Netflix. I've also been enjoying working with a personal trainer slash coach. I went to her with the desire to release some weight, but it has become so much more than that. And in one of my other little headings here, I'm going to talk about have been my main takeaways from that, but that's been, an amazing investment for me, not only for my physical health, but also for my mental health and my emotional health. Something else I've enjoyed, Being able to have coffee in town. Although working with my personal trainer, I have cut back my coffee intake. I was creeping up to three coffees a day and I now have one. So I buy a coffee on my way home from dropping the boys to school, which is very luxurious. Only three to five minutes down the road from where we live. And on my way back home, I will get myself a coffee and I enjoy it immensely. I often just go straight to my office when I get home and. get some things done. once I finished my coffee, I'll then go and do my morning whip around. I call it like 15 minutes of kind of tidying the kitchen, putting a load of washing on usually, and just getting things sorted after having dropped the boys to school. But I really like enjoying my coffee. and actually tasting it and being present with it while I'm in my office and then coming back and doing those things, the house kind of things. And I try to just put a time limit on that. So, 15 minutes, for example, so that I don't end up going and doing lots of other things. It'll be like, this is my whip around time. Bam, done. And then back to work. I've also enjoyed the ease of being in town, being able to get to appointments and take our children to things very easily. I've also enjoyed the freedom from farm commitments, although that's also been a challenge that I'll talk about. It's the ease of town life has been really refreshing after not having lived in town for quite a long time. So that's been nice. I've also really enjoyed fostering a deeper connection with my clients over the last year. And as always, um, really love my work working with mothers to help them release the shoulds of motherhood, to help them feel unstuck, to help them embrace the best version of themselves, to align with their values, to reconnect with. What they really want and how to bring more of that into their life. I've really enjoyed studying and learning. I am a lifelong learner. I did stop studying my psychology graduate diploma that I had mentioned previously that I was undertaking, because on the 31st of July last year, I had a knee reconstruction on my right knee and at that time decided that There was no way I was going to be able to keep studying it while I had my rehab and I needed to put my wellbeing first. So I put that on hold and eventually actually cancelled it. I just decided it was too much at this stage of my life. And I'd bitten off more than I could chew and that any learning I was going to undertake, I would prefer to do short courses and smaller bite sized pieces of study. And so I'm back studying with. Sophie Brock, a motherhood studies sociologist, and I'm also doing some training with the Farm Owners Academy, the Emerging Leaders Training through the Lincoln Institute, and I am embracing that wholeheartedly. I've enjoyed Bowen therapy. In the last 12 months, I have a newfound love for bowen therapy. I've always been one to, have chiropractic appointments and also massage from time to time, but I've added bowen therapy into the mix and I'm really loving it. If you haven't tried it, give it a try. Also working with an energy healer. We're very fortunate in Gunderwindi to have, I call her an energy healer, that's probably not a technical term. I know she works in bio resonance and bio magnetism and energy therapies. And that has been absolutely incredible for me., she has supported me and helped me understand myself so much more and, and how to connect with myself on a soul level. Rather than just getting my noisy mind interfering all the time. So that's been amazing. And I'm happy to share more about that at another time. If you would like me to, I've also enjoyed being a mom It's another thing I've found extra challenging, but I have enjoyed the privilege of seeing my boys grow and develop and growing alongside them and learning alongside them. I've enjoyed re imagining our life while we're in this pause between the Moving away from our farm. Um, at the end of this year, we're, our portion of the farm will be sold. And we're now making these new decisions about what we want our life to look like going forward. I'm calling it the re imagining phase because we're re imagining our life as a family., what we want for our career, we're thinking forward 10 years in advance of what do we want that to look like, what's important to us? What are our values? And. At the same time, I'm re imagining my business, which has come as a result of what I've learned in the past 12 months about myself and my need for more space, for more time to think and just re imagining the structure of my days and also the offerings in my business. Things I've found challenging, overstimulation, and I'll describe more what I've learned about myself and why it is that I become overstimulated so easily. It is, I think, the biggest challenge I face in motherhood, is feeling overstimulated. That by the time my boys get home from school, I can barely manage being around them because of the noise and the chaos, the movement, all of the questions, all of the talking. Sometimes I can even be like that first thing in the morning, feel overstimulated by them just being them, them just being children and not even necessarily arguing or yelling, but simply the, the onslaught of sensory information. I've found leaving the farm very challenging. It's been a difficult transition to make the decision to actually execute leaving and to now feel apart from the family business, which I've always loved. Always been deeply connected to with my parents and my siblings and I'm not playing the victim card because it was a choice. for some, you may think, gosh, you know, there's harder things in life and there absolutely are, but it has been, it has been a real challenge. my connection to the land runs very deep and I have found Leaving this, the space of the farm, leaving what we thought would be our future home, making the decision to disconnect from the family business, which impacts on family relationships as well. that has been really challenging and, a process I'm still working through, uh, in terms of grief and a sense of loss. There are also lots of positives that come with that. A sense of freedom is one of them in terms of making decisions for ourselves and separately as a family of Adam and I and our boys. there's lots of other exciting things about it as well, but it has been a challenging time. I've also found it challenging the not enough story limiting belief continues to replay in my life and observing more Where that shows up, noticing that it shows up in all areas of my life. the harsh critic who says you didn't do that well enough, or that could have been better. you could have done a better job at that nagging voice inside of overanalyzing and overthinking things and questioning. Was that enough? it is a limiting belief. That's the strongest for me. And. The one that I am monitoring, checking in with on an ongoing basis and ultimately shifting. How can I foster a feeling of being good enough? How can I believe that what I am and what I do is good enough? It's easy to say on a conscious level, But to really believe it when that belief was embedded early in my life and now 40 years later be shifting it at a very deep level. root level requires persistence, courage, a lot of awareness, and maybe it will be a journey that is ongoing throughout my entire life. Like it will be for a lot of you too, as well. it is definitely one of the strongest limiting beliefs I see in my work amongst mothers. The, I'm not enough. And we can identify the belief by digging deeper beneath the stories that we tell ourselves. And beneath the thoughts and the feelings, it takes time sometimes to get to it. But when you do, then you know, um, and you start to notice how it shows up and you can work on changing I've found being patient challenging. I am an ambitious person. I have lots of dreams and goals I want to do them all now. It constantly plays on my mind that. Life is short and I want to make the most of every day. I seem to have gone in cycles in my life of going really hard and wanting to do so many things because I want to embrace all of it and achieve all these things and then hitting a wall because I am not able to sustain it. I continue to find this challenging to know where I need to draw a boundary and where I need to set boundaries for myself and to understand that although I might be capable of all these things, I may not always have the capacity. And in this season of my life where I have four school aged children who need me. who really need me both on a mothering day to day level. They also need me on an emotional level and a thinking level and to be there with them in their challenges at times. And that, yes, it can feel like enough sometimes just to have them fed and put to bed, but that I actually choose to be there with them On a deeper level than that and to help them understand themselves and to help them support themselves, teach them how to support themselves in the way that I'm now learning how to support myself and that to do that, I actually need some capacity to be able to do that. I've found some health things challenging in the past 12 months. I injured my knee it was in May 2023. I had my ACL reconstruction in July 2023 and then I had another surgery in November. A follow up arthroscopy and manipulation because my knee wasn't healing how it should have., that's been a real challenge. After not being someone who's not had a lot of health challenges or injuries. Again, maybe minor in the scheme of things, but still a, still a challenge for me to be, not be able to move very much for a couple of months when movement has always been a way of managing my mental health and supporting my mental health. Finding ways around that of managing my mindset and, also putting weight on as a result of not being able to move very much. and making sure my, the stories I'm telling myself don't run away with me, that I can't do this and I'll never be able to do that. And what if this happens and catastrophizing. And then, um, Early in 2024, having some other health challenges with my gallbladder and various other ailments that have again taught me the importance of slowing down and that my body keeps the score and that is important. Really important that if wellbeing is at the top of my priority list, then I need to be actually living that value on a daily basis. I've also found a lot of solo parenting challenging. It's not full time, but there has with Adam being at the farm last year and me being in town most of the time, , I did do a lot of solo parenting and there's been periods in 2024 where I have done as well. I absolutely idolize those of you who solo parent full time. I don't quite know how you do it. It takes so much. strength and resilience to show up day after day without the support of a, of a partner. so I take my hat off to you I'm also proud of myself that I've learned how to do it because there have been times in my motherhood experience where I felt like I can't do it, that I'm not capable of doing it just because of how, you know, how hard it is. I'm proud that I've achieved it, but I've also on an ongoing basis found it difficult. Things that have helped me is always come back to decision making, reminding myself that when things feel icky or I feel stuck or trapped or have a ongoing uneasy feeling that I'm usually in a growth phase. I'm usually on the verge of a breakthrough. And I may probably need to make a decision about something. So that reminder and knowing and that understanding that I need to make a decision has been so helpful for me having help and support in my home because I can, because I'm in town and it's easier. And because I know again, what my capacity is, particularly when I have, my children on my own a lot. I have a fortnightly cleaner and I have two stints during the week where I have beautiful women come in for about an hour, hour and a half on a Wednesday and a Friday to help me keep up with washing and folding and ironing. And it is incredible because I find the clutter of washing and And never quite feeling like I'm on top of it. Very triggering for stress. So having that help, I made the choice that I can focus on meals, I'll focus on taking care of my boys, taking them to all their things after school, but if I can have that help in my home. And, Keep me feeling less stressed. It is absolutely worth the investment. Another thing that's helped is being focused on the foundations of life. And my personal trainer slash coach, Bell, helped me with this. Focusing on sleep, hydration, proteins, that's been a game changer for me, focusing on protein at mealtimes, having sufficient plant matter, daily movement and stress management. So putting those parameters into my world and on a daily basis, making sure they're being implemented. definitely not perfectly, and sometimes not even every day, but the majority of the time. Focusing on those key fundamentals, and then having health practitioners around that who support me with my health on top of that. Mentors and support. I have a couple of, a few key mentors and then other support systems like health practitioners around me that help me to be the best version of myself because in my work and my life, I do a lot of caring for others. So it's really important that I keep my cup full. Google Calendar and certain apps, notes on my phone, the health app. There's so many apps that I use on a daily basis that support me to be at my best as well, that I'm so grateful for, that we have technology. Zoom, Calendly, Slack, Asana, they all help me to run my life. Embracing my creative side through singing, walking, because I've not been able to play sport or run or do anything that involves any sideways movement in the past 12 months. Just simply walk, getting out for walks continues to be an important thing for me. Having faith in the big picture that everything is going to play out, surrendering and just keeping faith that all will be well in the end. Planning continues to be important and is something I have trouble being consistent with. There's another story I'm telling myself. I have trouble being consistent with. I'm going to change that story. I'm improving all the time with my planning and organization because when I stick to an operating rhythm with planning, my life and my health is so much better for it. Simple daily practices. Just this again, the simple things, getting up before the kids get up, making sure I factor in a walk, taking deep breaths, getting out in the sunshine, all these momentary choices. They are not big things in my day. They actually are easy to implement. Are they easy to be consistent with? Not always. Are they easy to do? Yes. Are they easy not to do? Yes, but they make a huge difference. The things I've learned, I've really been focused on understanding myself better, digging beneath the layers, understanding my body better, understanding why I'm the way I am. I'm holding onto weight around my midsection, even though I've engaged a personal trainer, even though I felt like I was doing all the right things and the weight wasn't budging. Understanding that that's a factor of stress and cortisol and my age and hormones and then finding support for that and being okay with it because knowledge gives us power. I've also learned this year that I'm a highly sensitive person. I'm going to record an episode. It's purely on this topic because it's been quite literally life changing for me to understand it. If you want to go and read about it, Google highly sensitive person Elaine Aron. Spelt A R O N. There's also lots of information on the internet about being a highly sensitive person. It's a trait. it's also associated with neurodivergence. Knowing that I am highly sensitive, life changing for me. And also explains a lot of why I am, I get easily overstimulated and therefore now what I need to put in place to manage that. Also understanding more about being a projector in human design. Similarly, I have seven open energy centers and I absorb a lot of energy from my surroundings and therefore, again, need to set a lot of boundaries in my life that I'm learning to do. I'm learning to let go of people pleasing, learning to take care of myself, learning to enforce boundaries. Not always easy, but important. I've learned that living by my values is the aim, but it's not always easy. And that aligning and making decisions by your values requires concerted conscious effort. I've learned that motherhood calls me to continually face myself, to grow into and out of myself over and over again. And that I'm learning and growing alongside my children. It requires me to keep asking questions of myself when I react to ask myself, what's my stuff in this? Where's this hitting my stuff? Why am I reacting and not responding here? that the greatest one of the greatest challenges motherhood would call me out on is facing myself in the mirror to face my own stuff. Because that is what I'm responding to usually in my responses as a parent. It's not often the children. It's often what's been triggered in me. So learning to ask that question and to actually sit with it, that's the next uncomfortable bit and then to address it. And that is why I do the work I do with moms because it's so, so super important for your experience as a mom and, and, and the experience of your family to be more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions and how they show up and how they impact. So that's my summary on my 43rd birthday. I hope there's some goodness in there for you. I would love to hear your feedback. I would love to hear what you took away. That's been helpful. Thank you for tuning in. And I can't wait to be connected with you again on the next episode. Go well.