EP 81: When You Feel Like You’re Only Treading Water

Sometimes life’s responsibilities seem so overwhelming and inescapable that you feel like you’re barely treading water. How do you cope when the going gets tough, and your energy’s already depleted? Here are seven strategies that have kept me afloat during the busiest, most exhausting seasons of mothering 12 children and managing a increasingly busy household.

Feel Like You’re Just Treading Water?

Full transcript for Episode 81

EP 81: Help for When You Feel Like You’re Drowning

Hello, Friend, and welcome to episode 81 of Loving Life at Home.

Today I’m tackling a question that came in from a subscriber last week, but it is representative of a lot of other questions I’ve received over the years in the same vein.

She writes:

Hi there, Mrs. Flanders,

My question is, how do you do all you do?! I too am a homeschooling mom, with three kiddos… I work very part time… [but] I still feel like I am constantly drowning. Help!

Warmly,

[and she signs her name]

But this letter could’ve been written by countless other mothers – including myself during certain seasons of my life – moms who feel chronically overwhelmed by the responsibilities of raising children, keeping house, giving attention to husband, and maybe even juggling other responsibilities, like full-time or part-time employment or women’s ministries at church or community service projects and extra-curricular activities for various family members.

On good days, they feel like they’re just treading water. On hard days, they feel like the undertow is about to sweep them into a watery grave.

Barely Staying Afloat

That’s not a pleasant sensation for anybody. I remember taking swimming lessons as a child, and on the last day of class, my teacher stood in the pool about five or six feet from the edge and told me to jump in and swim to her. So I did, but every time I got within an arm’s reach of her, she took a step back, and back, and back again until, before I knew it, I’d swum the full length of the pool.

I suppose that proved she did her job, but I still think it was a mean trick! And I still remember the overwhelming sense of panic I felt while flailing about in the water trying in vain to reach that moving target.

If my teacher wanted me to swim to the other side of the pool, she should’ve said “swim to the other side while I stand here and watch” instead of saying “swim to me.”

It doesn’t really matter that I proved myself capable of getting from one side of the pool to the other—I wish that swim instructor would’ve explained her plan ahead of time, so I would’ve known what to expect, instead of feeling like she double-crossed me and violated my trust.

A Never-Ending To-Do List

But… back to that letter from my subscriber: She wrote it in reply to one of my weekly “Flanders Family Freebies” newsletters. I’ll include a subscription link in the show notes, but each Wednesday, I send out a new themed link-list of free resources, and in that same newsletter, I normally include a short review of whatever book I’m currently reading, a link to my latest podcast, sometimes a new recipe my family loves or new printables I’ve created in response to reader requests. And then I always end the newsletter with a short to-do list of personal goals I’ve set for myself that week, along with a progress report on the previous week’s goals. 

And just so you know, those last two items are more for my benefit than for my readers, as the extra accountability helps me accomplish way more than I might otherwise. Sometimes I finish all the items on my to-do list. Sometimes I don’t complete any of them. But most of the time, I’m able to mark a few things off the list and carry the rest over to the following week.

Of course, the risk of sharing personal goals is that women who are in a different, more demanding season than mine might see my list and wonder what in the world is wrong with them, that they’re struggling to stay on top of a much shorter list of responsibilities. I suspect that’s what prompted the letter I read at the beginning of the podcast today. And it is representative of a lot of messages and comments I get these days.

So I thought perhaps a little time travel might be in order this week – to give you a glimpse at what kept me busy when my brood of kids was younger – long before I had the bandwidth for podcasting or blogging or writing books or sewing quilts or painting murals or taking exotic vacations. Back when the bulk of my energy went to keeping lots and lots of little children clean, dressed, fed, and reasonably safe.

I had a discussion with one of my married sons last week that underscored the need to address this topic. Three of my daughters-in-law – including his wife — recently delivered their fourth baby. And my son said to me, “Mom, you’ve always said having three kids was the hardest, so we thought things would get easier after our fourth was born, but it hasn’t! Most of the time it feels like we’re just treading water.”

There’s that phrase again! Treading water. Barely staying afloat. Just trying to keep from drowning. Not sure how long you can keep it up.

Four Kids, Five and Under

Well, first of all, I have to set the record straight, because my son was misremembering. I’ve always said that, for me, having FOUR children was the hardest. The first baby was the biggest adjustment, to be sure, but I personally found that having FOUR was the most physically draining, not THREE. Once number five was born, I began to see a little light at the end of the tunnel, and I didn’t feel so exhausted all the time.

Although, to be fair, it wasn’t actually my fourth baby who ran me ragged. It was the child who turned two a few months after his baby brother was born. My thirdborn had been a super easy baby – he slept six hours a night from the day we brought him home from the hospital and seldom fussed about anything – but once he turned two, it was as if he spent every waking minute dreaming up ways to put himself mortal danger. He got into everything, but he was extremely quiet and sneaky about it. So I couldn’t turn my back on him for even a second, or he’d scramble over our chain link fence in the blink of an eye, bolt down the alley, and climb into our neighbor’s yard to pet his dogs.

Or he’d climb up on the workbench in our garage, punch the button for the automatic door opener, then run over and catch a ride up on the moving door, whereupon we’d hear him screaming for dear life while hanging by his fingertips from the ceiling of the garage.

Or I’d buckle him into his car seat after shopping a garage sale – that was back in the day when car seats only had three point harnesses instead of five – and he’d silently worm his way out and escape unnoticed through the driver’s door while I was buckling his siblings into their seats, and I wouldn’t discover until we were halfway home that he was no longer in the van with us!

These aren’t hypothetical guesses. Every single one of those stories actually happened. And they happened while I had four children and the culprit in question was only TWO. Is it any wonder I felt continually exhausted during that season of my life.

I remember my husband telling me another time after one of our three-year-olds slipped out of the car unnoticed and got left somewhere, “We don’t have any business having any more children, because we can’t even take care of the ones we’ve got!”

Thankfully, two things are true: First, my husband and I have always prayed that God would make up for our lack as parents, and He has been so faithful to do that. And second, God was willing to entrust us with more children despite the fact we often felt like miserable failures, especially in those early years. We aren’t completely immune to such feelings even now, although experience and perspective and having a long track record of God’s abundant mercy and grace goes a long way toward ameliorating any feelings of defeat Satan would like to saddle us with.

Besides, unlike the swim instructor from my childhood, Jesus gave us fair warning about the trials to come. He said in John 16:33, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

And James tells us, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” (James 1:2-4)

Just as it would’ve helped me as a child in that swimming pool to understand that my teacher was not trying to terrify me by backing away as I made my way toward her, it helps to know that God has a purpose for every hardship we endure. That He is actively working all things together for our good and His glory, as Romans 8:28 promises us.

Those truths have really helped me during my seasons of treading water. But God also promises to give wisdom to all who ask (James 1:5), and He was also faithful to help me find ways that made the load seem lighter that I’d been called to bear, so instead of just empathizing with your pain, today I’d like to share some practical ways of dealing with those difficult seasons when you feel like you’re barely able to keep your head above water.

Here are…

7 practices that provide relief:

My first tip is:

1 – Don’t Compare

I’m not sure if Jon Acuff or Tim Hillard or somebody else said it originally, but it’s true: “You should never compare your beginning to somebody else’s middle.” I love that. It’s such a good reminder that each of us is at a different place on life’s road, and that’s okay.

2 Corinthians 10:12 puts it this way: “When [people] measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.” That’s because you can always find somebody who is worse off — or better off –than yourself in a particular area, which is why such comparisons lead only to pride on the one hand or self-loathing on the other, neither of which are healthy or God-honoring attitudes.

And we can all fall prey to that temptation to compare. I remember sitting on a panel of homeschool moms for a Q&A workshop at a local event many years ago where we were discussing homeschooling in high school. And I know that the reason I was asked to participate is that I’d already graduated several of my kids, all of whom had gone on to college and then medical or dental or nursing school and they’d done well and were very successful.

Nevertheless, I was sitting on stage listening to the other moms answering a particular question and waiting for my turn to speak on the topic, when one of the moms to my right mentioned the fact that she had taught her kids Latin, and my head started spinning so fast, I felt like it was going to fall off my shoulders. I was thinking in a panic, “Latin! Why didn’t I teach my kids Latin? I had three years of Latin in high school. I loved Latin. How are my kids going to survive without Latin?”

But you know what? I had my hands full just teaching my children the basics. And by God’s grace, that had obviously been enough for them to obtain college degrees and land very promising careers. By the way, I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but the colleges here love homeschooled kids, because they are generally very honest, hard-working, and self-motivated. In fact, they’re self-motivated enough that, if they were interested in learning Latin, they’d be able to do it without my assigning it as an elective on their high school transcript.

The moral of that story is, don’t waste time worrying about what other people are doing or not doing. That is between them and the LORD.  Instead, keep your focus on Christ and on glorifying Him in everything you do, just as 1 Corinthians 10:31 commands: “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” I love that verse, and I’ve painted it very prominently on the wall of nearly every house we’ve ever owned. It helps keep my focus where it should be: on Him, not on my fellow humans.

My second tip is to…

2 – Lean on the Lord

God has promised He will never leave or forsake us (Deut 31:6). Whatever it is that He’s called you to do – whether mothering a houseful of little children or living as a single woman when you’d rather be married or studying hard to earn your college degree or trying to regain your health after a cancer diagnosis or grieving the loss of a loved one or packing up your belongings and moving  to the other side of the globe — You don’t have to do it in your own strength!

We can say with Paul, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!” (Philippians 4:13) The LORD equips those he calls! And we can trust God to fulfill the promise He made in Isaiah 40:31: “Yet those who wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.” Don’t you crave that kind of strength? I know I do!

Psalm 50:15 says, “Call upon Me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.”  Ask God to multiply your effort, just as He multiplied those five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand. Pray that He will not only make your strength sufficient to the task at hand, but would provide an abundance left over…He is so able and willing to do that!

Isn’t that the kind of life you want to live? Where people look on and marvel, saying, “It doesn’t seem humanly possible for one woman to accomplish so much,” to which you can then answer, “You’re right! It’s all by God’s grace. I couldn’t do any of it apart from His blessing or His empowering, inexhaustible strength, or His miraculous, sustaining, unfailing grace. God equips those He calls! And He stretches and molds and matures us in ways we never dreamed possible! To Him be all the glory and praise forever!”

The fruit appears on the branch, but the nourishment always, always, always comes through the vine. If the branch is cut off from that supply, it’s not going to produce anything. It’ll just wither and die. So make sure your life is firmly rooted in Christ and that you are leaning fully on Him each step of the way!

Then, my third tip is to…

3 – Prioritize Rest

When I first became a mother, I got some very good advice, which was to “Sleep when the baby sleeps.” Those seasoned moms probably knew from experience how tempting it would be to tend to household chores while baby was napping, but God designed our bodies to need rest, and we should use the opportunities He provides – as few and far between as they may seem to the breastfeeding mother of a colicky newborn — to attend to that very basic, very important need.

Back when I was a college student and sometimes felt tempted to skip my early morning classes in favor of sleeping until noon, Proverbs 6:10 would start playing over and over again in my brain — “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, then your poverty will come in like a vagabond and your want like an armed man.”

This same verse is repeated almost verbatim in Prov. 24:33-34, so you know it’s one God wants us to remember. And sure enough, I could never stay in bed long once the Lord brought that verse to mind. Those words would dog me until I finally sprang up and got busy.

But there is a balancing verse in Psalm 127 that He’s often used to reassure me in those bone-weary days of nursing babies and chasing toddlers and – even more recently —  homeschooling high schoolers and fighting cancer and coordinating a family calendar that seems perpetually packed with extra-curricular activities. And that balancing truth is this: “Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; Unless the LORD guards the city, the watchman keeps awake in vain. It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors; for He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.” (Psalm 127:1-2)

The Psalmist then immediately launches in to talking about children being a blessing, as if to underscore the fact that those previous two verses apply to mothers, too. Don’t you love that? Isn’t it beautiful?

It reminds me of the promise we find in Isaiah 40:11, “He will feed His flock like a shepherd; He will gather the lambs with His arm, And carry them in His bosom, And gently lead those who are with young.”

Like the good shepherd He is, Christ will “gently lead those who are with young.” Raise your hand if that means you. Aren’t you thankful for that?

Jesus expands on this thought in Matthew 11:28-30. There He says, “Come to Me, all you who are weary and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Isn’t that a reassuring promise? It floods my soul with peace and calm, just to read it! 

When I was first starting out as a mother, I remember thinking very uncharitable thoughts toward my babies when they’d cry for hours at a time, then I’d finally get them to sleep and drift off myself, only to be woken up again, half an hour later with another crisis. I was perpetually sleep deprived and felt like I was running on fumes.

But a funny thing happened to me over time: First of all, I changed from being a night owl into a full-fledged morning person. Second, I learned the art of power napping – and still practice it nearly every afternoon – just 10 or 15 minutes right after lunch is enough to recharge my batteries for the evening ahead. And third, God totally transformed my attitude toward those midnight feedings.

Whereas before, I’d inwardly fume, “Doesn’t this baby realize how desperately I need my rest?” – mainly because I didn’t always take that sane advice to sleep when my baby slept – but my attitude slowly began to change, and by the time I had half a dozen or more children, I began to enjoy and look forward to those midnight feedings, when the house was quiet, and have that special one-on-one time with my baby that was so elusive when the rest of the family was awake and needing my attention.  

What’s more, by the time I weaned my very last baby – after spending 25 solid years pregnant or nursing or both – I continued to wake up between 3 and 4 AM, and that became the time I would write. To this day, I don’t require a lot of sleep, although I am doing my best to get at least 7-8 hours of restorative sleep a night, because I know it is so vital to good health. And because now the verse that plays through my head when I’m tempted to get up in the middle of the night to work on a project is Psalm 127:2 “It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors; for He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.”

My fourth tip is to…

4 – Use Time Wisely

Psalm 90:12 reads, “So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.” Here again, we need a balance. Sometimes, we feel like we’re drowning, not because we’re in a particularly demanding or stressful season of life, but because we’ve squandered too much valuable time in mindless activities—like scrolling through social media or binge-watching Netflix or fill in the blank with whatever time-waster the Holy Spirit might currently be trying to convict you about.

It is amazing how much you can accomplish when you lay aside the distractions. For instance, our family hasn’t owned a working television since around 1990. That’s not because we don’t like TV, but because we like it too much. In fact, we watched so much of it during our first couple of years of marriage that our TV set – which had been a wedding gift — actually overheated and actually blew up, with smoke and fumes and everything!

And, at the time, we really couldn’t afford a replacement, so we just did without. And we soon realized that we were far more productive when that thing wasn’t on keeping us distracted. And we were far better rested, as well, because we weren’t staying up to all hours watching late night comedy shows.

Rest is important, that is true. But not all rest is restorative. And sometimes laziness and distraction – or excessive “self-care” or “me time” — masquerade as rest and recuperation, but they aren’t the same thing at all.

I feel a little conflicted about the term “self-care.” Because on one hand, we do need to take care of our bodies and steward them well. We need to sleep and to bathe and to exercise. We need to fill our bellies with nourishing food and get some fresh air and sunshine.

And the fact that Christ commands us to “Love you neighbor as you love yourself” (Mark 12:30) assumes that taking care of yourself is the default setting for most people.

But on the other hand, in recent years I’ve seen this reasonable level of “self-care” morph into an unhealthy attitude of self-indulgence and responsibility avoidance and that is not a good thing. And it’s had a devastating effect on both marriage and motherhood… but that’s another podcast for another day.

The point is, we want to steward wisely every gift God gives us, including our bodies and our time wisely, knowing that “from everyone to whom much has been given will much be required” (see Luke 12:48) and that each of us will someday “give an account of ourselves to God” as we’re told in Romans 14:12.

My fifth tip?

5 – Get Back to Basics

What if you’ve already cut out all the time wasters, and still feel like you’re in over your head?

I remember setting some very ambitious goals for myself and my family in January of 1995 – I think I had about 7 pages of New Year’s resolutions. My husband had taken a year off from the residency after his internship year – that was the year of training where he was working 120 hours a week. So he took a year off, starting around the time our fourth child was born, and just practiced general medicine three days a week.

That gave us all a much-needed break when we were feeling burned out. And so, now that we were feeling more rested, we rang in the new year with all sorts of plans about all the things we were going to accomplish with our newfound time and energy.

But then my husband returned to his residency. (It was either that or have the army ship him off to Bosnia). And it became apparent almost immediately that neither of us were going to have the bandwidth to accomplish much of anything on that long to-do list.

So we scaled our ambitions back dramatically. Our primary goals became two-fold: to SURVIVE, and to preserve some vestige of SANITY.

And if you are in a difficult season, you may need to dial it down, scale back, and cut the fat as well. Nobody can do it all. Nobody. When He was living on earth, even Jesus had to take breaks. He didn’t preach 24/7. He didn’t answer every question He was asked. He didn’t heal every single person who was sick.

Instead, He regularly withdrew by Himself to be alone and pray. To rest and recharge.

What’s more, He cut through all those massive lists of dos and don’ts the pharisees tried to saddle people with and boiled the law down to a two-fold goal: First: Love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and second: Love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30)

So there’s a good precedent for just focusing on the basics. It works for homeschooling, too: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Do a good job of teaching your kids those three foundational skills, and it will be so much easier for them to learn anything and everything else they need to know.

My sixth point is closely related to both the first and the fifth:

6 – Give Yourself Grace

Sometimes the reason you have a hard time keeping your head above water is that you’ve weighed yourself down with unrealistic expectations.

If you spend any time on Pinterest or Instagram, you might get the idea that everyone else has magazine-worthy homes and gardens; homecooked gourmet meals three times a day; toned, muscular bodies that are bikini ready even two weeks post-partum; and angelic, well-dressed children who never throw tantrums or wipe their boogers on the wall.

Of course, you are seeing only a curated snapshot. Let me say it again: Nobody can do it all. But even if they could, that wouldn’t obligate you to follow suit. It is okay to relax unrealistic standards and simplify processes where you can. I covered some of the ways I’ve simplified and made my responsibilities more manageable in Episode 53: Microsystems for Home Management, which I’ll link in the show notes.

Proverbs 17:1 tells us, “Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.” And Proverbs 15:17 says something similar: “Better is a portion of vegetables where there is love, than a fattened ox served with hatred.”

I don’t cook many gourmet meals today, and I rarely ever did so when my children were little. Instead, we subsist mainly on huge pots of soup and/or big, hearty tossed salads. But when my kids were little we’d fill our bellies with fresh fruits and veggies – like grapes, berries, carrots and celery sticks, plus cheese and crackers and nuts, eaten off paper towels from a common platter in the middle of the table.

Actually, that sounds a little like a charcuterie board, doesn’t it? But we were eating that kind of raw, easy-to-prepare and easy-to-clean up meals before charcuterie became bougie.

But maybe the pressure you’re feeling to perform doesn’t come from Pinterest, but comes from trying to live up to the standard your own mother or mother-in-law set. I see that a lot.

My own dear mother is an immaculate housekeeper. And she’s also a born organizer, a great cook, and she always kept our family’s clothes beautifully pressed. She even irons and organizes colored tissue paper – the kind people put into gift bags? She reuses it (just like I do), but she irons hers first, so that it looks brand new – and it is so pretty to open up her gift-wrapping cabinet and see it all folded, stacked, and organized by color, right under a tension rod she uses for organizing her ribbon, also in rainbow order. Contrast my mom’s beautiful giftwrapping to mine: If you ever get a gift from me, I can almost guarantee the recycled tissue paper is going to be considerably wrinkled and dog-eared.

My point is, I would’ve worn myself out and felt like an utter failure if I tried to do everything exactly to my mother’s standards. There is no way my house – with 12 homeschooled children running in and out of it all day long, doing lessons at the dining room table and science experiments on the back porch and art projects in every spare corner – no way that house was ever going to be as clean as Mom’s. Partly because she only had two children and because we spent most of the day in a school classroom (although I proved myself fully capable of generating big messes with my art projects in the hours I spent at home).

Also, while almost every meal I remember from childhood was served with salad, bread, entrée and two sides,  nearly everything I cook for my family is served in a single pot. I am pretty organized, thanks to my mother’s patient training, but with a dozen kids and two dozen grandkids helping themselves to everything I’ve neatly stored away, things can get disorganized in a hurry. And don’t even get me started on ironing! We do still own an iron and the kids or I will occasionally use it for craft or sewing projects, but I rarely ever press anybody’s clothing, much less the tissue paper for my gift bags!

So if you still feel like you’re treading water, check your expectations – for both yourself and your family – and make sure you aren’t trying to live up to somebody else’s standards that don’t make sense for you.

This is also important when it comes to child-training. We definitely need to teach our kids basic life skills, but – especially in the beginning – that will take effort on our part and the results will likely be less stellar than if we’d simply done the job ourselves.

That’s okay. Just come along beside your kids. Commend their efforts. Don’t go back and redo the chores after them. Just trust the process, that they will improve with experience.

And that brings me to my seventh tip…

7 – Keep Up the Good Work

Celebrate forward progress, no matter how small. Sometimes it feels as if you’re moving only inch by inch. But Stick with it.  Persevere – “Don’t give up or grow weary in doing good,” as Galatians 6:9 admonishes us, “for in due season you will reap.”

This is true in so many areas, but it is especially true in child training. So don’t despise the day of small things.” (Zech. 4:10) The LORD is watching. He sees and knows. Serve your family as unto the LORD.  Do all those mundane tasks – the meal prep, the laundry, the diaper changes, the dishes, the teaching, the child training, the things that will inevitably need to be done again tomorrow and the next day and the next – do them with a cheerful heart as an act of worship unto Christ.

I was recently reminded of a quote from holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote: “The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” Isn’t that true? Your own attitude is something over which you have complete control – and that ability to choose how you’ll respond to your surroundings is something nobody can take away from you. So choose wisely.

These seven practices will help you get through the bone-weary days of mothering young children or getting settled into a new house after a move or recovering from a major illness or a difficult delivery or a miscarriage or a financial setback or a terminal diagnosis, or whatever other kind of trial you are currently facing.

No matter what circumstances have contributed to the feeling you are barely keeping your head above the surface, the solution is the same: refuse to compare, lean on the Lord, prioritize rest, use your time wisely, return to the basics, give yourself grace, and keep up the good work. So give that strategy a try, then let me know how it’s going.

The Word of God is full of wisdom for every facet of life, but we’ve found it especially helpful in building a happy, healthy marriage. For a fascinating look at how science has confirmed the superiority of God’s design, check out my book Love Your Husband/Love Yourself.