I’m so worried about the upcoming holidays. My husband and I have three young children, all of our family lives nearby and everyone wants to spend time with all of us. It’s really hard to do this because we want to establish our own family traditions with the kids too. I don’t want to disappoint anyone but my mother-in-law keeps asking if we will commit to her celebrations and I can tell she’s annoyed by my delay in responding. What can I do to solve this dilemma?
– Worried Mom
First, I want you to take care of yourself right away. This is a lot of pressure and I suspect in addition to all of your work and home duties you are feeling this stress weigh heavily right now. Taking a walk or doing almost anything physical can help lighten this emotional load. Meditation and breathwork is also an awesome addition to physical activity as we learn to be present with our priorities and how to navigate all outside pressures.
Turning to the substantive matter at hand, your question raises more questions about how things are structured now and how you have historically managed all the attendance requests. Since I can’t know those right now, I want to answer for you, and others, more generally, about how to manage all of this now and in the future no matter how it has occurred historically.
First, boundaries are critically important in all relationships. This means facing what needs to be managed and making decisions for yourself and your family that work for you and them. By family, I now mean your nuclear family: your husband, you and your children. Everyone else, who is likely very important to you too, is outside the inner circle of decisions and these boundaries. I say this to point out that so many of us have trouble establishing this priority especially if we are very close to a local family too. This isn’t a suggestion to push anyone out, but rather to teach us how to prioritize ourselves and our children to meet our needs first. If we don’t do that, in my professional and personal experience, no one is well-served. So, decide what you want for you, your husband and kids and then look at options to see others as this primary plan allows. Of course, planning may require some flexibility and resilience in timing but especially with young children, prioritizing your traditions and their rest and yours comes first. Other family members should understand this and those that don’t may be asking for things that in your life right now, just won’t work. You will teach people how to treat you so creating a framework now will support so much of your future family life.
Next, talk to the people who have asked you to do something to see what they want and need and how you might accommodate their request or do something different. This may seem obvious but how many of us avoid dealing with difficulty and end up satisfying no one in doing this, including ourselves. You mention your m-i-l has been asking and you have avoided her. This may make her feel unimportant and you are clearly uncomfortable with this approach too. If you can take the step of responding and asking to talk to her, I think you will find the solution is easier than you imagine. The first conversation, however, should be with your husband, who may necessarily be the primary contact with his family. Decide, with him, when you want to be at home (or wherever) with just your nuclear family and when you are willing to include others. If your family has made a request too, make sure your husband knows that and you can decide together how to prioritize these “asks” and make decisions for this holiday season. You can even decide to do one thing this year and another next year, in order to make things seem fair to all of your family. In the perfect world, extended families figure out a way to be inclusive of others too to make things easier on families with young children. If that’s not possible, you will still need to divide and conquer and maybe even make hard decisions about how things will be done. If this is hard for you, be sure, again, to enlist your spouse to help with communication. Be clear when you do and firm in your boundaries, as discussed above. None of this requires you to be unpleasant, of course, and if someone is upset you can always agree to talk at a later time when someone is less upset.
Finally, notice how you feel when you have prioritized your family and spouse. Although taking the first step to do so may feel hard, it is likely a big relief to address it. The critical key to success is releasing the feeling of pressure and overload family stress might bring to you and your spouse too. It is one of things I see, professionally, that creates stress between spouses and upon the children too. By creating a team for your nuclear family, you can successfully prioritize yourself, your spouse and your children. This, in my professional opinion, creates the greatest trajectory for success.
Cherie
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