Confession time: I am not the best at resting.

Those of you who know me in real life are probably laughing right now because you know this is something that I tend to struggle with. I just don’t sit well. I don’t like to sit, I don’t enjoy lounging around and especially if I can see or am aware of something that needs to be done, I physically cannot just sit there and ignore it.

The day before my birthday, I started my second postpartum cycle and so I spent my birthday in a lot of cramping pain. So, I was taking Motrin pretty much around the clock. Well, the night of my birthday, I got so lightheaded I could barely stand up and it scared me to death. I thought I’d accidentally overdosed on the ibuprofen even though I knew exactly what time I’d been taking it and I was taking a normal dosage.

The next day, I felt okay all morning and then same thing happened the following night, even though I hadn’t been taking ibuprofen. I was so lightheaded that I thought I was going to pass out while I was holding Eisley, which was completely terrifying.

I called my midwife and she had me go get blood drawn, but everything came back normal. When it just kept getting worse each day, I went to urgent care and they did a bunch more tests and everything still came back normal. So they told me if it happened again, I needed to go to the ER because it was just not safe for me to be home by myself with the three kids, climbing up and down the stairs carrying a baby if I was on the verge of passing out.

The next day, Jon took off work and I just went to Mom’s house and laid around (see note earlier) and right after lunch, I got so lightheaded again. So Mom took me to the ER, where we waited for what felt like years, finally got put in a room and then waited for years again. In the meantime, they couldn’t get an IV started in me until they’d blown a vein (my arm seriously looked like there was a baseball stuck in my elbow. SO painful – it took two weeks for the bruise to completely fade) and they’d tried all my other veins several times. I think I did pass out for a couple of seconds when that happened. After a lot of tests, the doctor came in and recommended me to go see a cardiologist because he was worried something weird was happening with my heart rhythms.

They got me in pretty quickly and after looking everything over, the doctor told me it looked okay to her and that she thought I was just in some pretty major fatigue. She told me I needed to sleep, I needed to eat, I needed to rest and I needed to drink water.

All very easy things to do when you consider the three kids part. 😉 Eisley was in another non-sleeping, wanting to nurse 12 times a night phase, I had just finished up a deadline and even with everything going on with me, there was still school with Nathan and normal life stuff that needed to happen. I’d probably been averaging around 3-4 hours of good sleep a night and trying to write, which I know takes more out of me, even though I can often convince myself that my work time is rest time because I’m sitting down (such a lie). I had been getting up at 5 (occasionally earlier) to work on deadlines even after not sleeping all night and just with everything, I just got completely, 100 percent run down. I think that all of the stress and events of the summer and fall finally caught up with me and I just couldn’t handle it anymore.

So, we went into recovery mode. Mom and Dad were so helpful and they came over several times to help out while I tried to nap. Jon took over the nights with Eisley and she started sleeping close to 10-12 hours at a time within three nights. I started making sure I was eating breakfast AND lunch and wasn’t just existing on two cups of coffee until 2pm every day. And I put myself on vacation, slept until the kids woke me up at 7:30 and forced myself to sit and read or lay down while the kids were napping during the days.

Within the week, I was doing much better and now, three weeks later, I’m pretty much back to normal. I can tell when I’m pushing myself too hard and I still get a little lightheaded if I don’t take the time to make sure I’m drinking enough water and eating enough protein, but I learned some valuable lessons. One, I’m not in college anymore and I can’t exist on coffee and carbs for days on end like I could before. Two, I have a lot of little people (and one big one) who do not function well when I’m not doing well, so it’s very important for me to make sure I’m taking care of myself as much as I’m taking care of them. And three, the biggest thing that Jesus whispered to my heart through all of this – even God rested.

So important for me to know. It’s OKAY to rest. It’s GOOD to rest. It’s even commanded in the Bible to rest. God knows we can’t do everything all the time and keep up with everything all the time, so He has us rest. I know as moms we tend to look at everything going on in the world and on Instagram and Pinterest and think we need to have it all together, but even those people don’t have it all together. We can let things slide. We can have a dirty kitchen, the kids can still be in their jammies at 3pm and honestly, kids love it when dinner is frozen corn dogs and microwavable veggies.

I’m learning to give myself a break. If this is something that you’re struggling with, I hope you’ll give yourself the permission to take a break as well. Because God has already given it to us, we just need to let ourselves do it. A hard, long, kind of scary lesson for me to learn. One I hope I don’t forget.