CwL Ep 146 When it’s time for a change – Worries! (Part 4)

Hey, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life, and if you are too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you are here. Enjoy.

During Covid, my kids and I would often go for morning walks. We would go for a walk along the beach and then we’d get a coffee, hot chocolate, some pastries on the way back, and then they’d get started with their home learning. It was a really beautiful little routine, and one morning my daughter had asked for a piece of bread before she left because she was really hungry and anyway, I gave her a piece of bread. We walked across the street and there’s a brick wall across the street and she was holding my hand and then she just kind of pulled away and I let go of her and she went practically horizontally with her head meeting at first into the brick wall. She went smash into the brick wall and she fell back and was totally limp.

She didn’t even cry. She was awake, but she didn’t cry and I was panicked. I picked her up in my arms and ran across the road. There was probably 15 metres to my home. By the time I got to my gate, I was starting to feel the numbness around my lips and that weird saliva sort of thing that you’ve got going in your mouth when you realise you’re just about to faint. This is, I shouldn’t be laughing. It’s a serious story, you think, but it’s actually, well, it kind of is, and it’s kind of funny. I’ve got her inside and she had a huge, huge, huge bump on her forage and it wasn’t even popping out. And when you look for the egg, you want the egg because that’s the body doing what it needs to do to protect things. It wasn’t coming up and she was really not okay, and neither was I. So by this stage I said to my son, get mommy an apple. I lay down on the ground and I put my feet up against the wall. I knew I had about 20 seconds before I was going to faint unless I really got down low. I put my daughter who had had this massive thing happen to her against my belly. By this stage she had started to cry, so I had someone on a mission for ice and an apple for me, and I made my other daughter run across the road to my boyfriend at the time, just lived across the road and

I knew I needed extra hands on deck because I was going to pass out at any moment. And he walked in

and shook his head like, what the hell? Okay, what’s happening here? My daughter was screaming, I was trying to calm her down, but every time I tried to sit up, my head went all wobbly. I was going to faint. I’m really, really not great around blood or injury of any kind. My family will tell you a funny story of the time I established my toe. I’ve fainted on a bus. I really, I am not great. I’m not the person that you want around in an emergency because I just don’t cope all that well. We ended up getting me off the floor, but I had another adult there with me to help me. I got myself together to the point I could drive her to the hospital. She was okay. She did have a concussion, but everything was okay. I was massively embarrassed, but it is a truth for me that I have needed other people in my life to help me through those moments. So whether it was my husband, whether it was my recent boyfriend, my best friend’s, a nurse, ICU, nurse with kids, she’s great on the scene of stuff, I often send her photos of things, what is this rash? Chickenpox.

Oh dear. Anyway, I am going to take my children overseas

For four and a half months on my own and I am not going to have another adult there. And it’s a real genuine worry for me. I know in my logically that there is, I’m never going to be in the middle of nowhere, but I am making decisions about where we go knowing that help will be available if I need it. I worry about what happens if someone is unwell, even if that’s me. I shouldn’t really put it out to the universe because we’re all going to have an amazingly healthy well time, but it’s likely that over the course of that time something might happen and I’ll have to figure it out on the fly on my own. And I feel nervous about that. It’s a big part of the reason why we are going. Well, it’s not a big part of the reason. There’s lots of people for me to visit around the world and we’re basically going visiting and that feels good to me.

Knowing that at some point at points along the way, there will be people not just for that, but I mean I also worry. So we are just going to go through a list of things that now I’m on the other side of the decision. There is also the reality that this is really going to happen and one of the things I know I’m going to get sick of the kids. That’s like, that’s not even a worry. That’s just basically a given together all the time. Some mama needs a break sometimes, so how am I going to get that and how can I best navigate all of us together because we’re all going to get sick of each other. That’s going to happen. I mean, it was a big thing. Do I really want to hang out with my kids full time for all that time and have a beautiful friend who went and did a year around Australia with her kids and she said it sort of took about five weeks or a month to get into the flow of everyone being around all the time.

So I am expecting that there’s going to be a transition and then we’ll find our groove is what I’m expecting. But I mean, the fact is it is the kids and I together a lot of the time and they feel a little bit tortured by the covid years and all of that time that we did spend together. And in saying that, one of the other worries that I have is like, oh, I’ve just said yes, two more. Oh, homeschooling so less important for the girls. Their structure is completely different, but my son will still need to be doing assessments. We will still need to be moving him through his core subjects, not his electives in year seven. And I mean, that’s not my most fun thing to do as a mom. So I’m currently looking at ways in which I can get support from him outside of me, but I know that that will also play a role in my enjoyment levels of this.

My God, there’s some brilliant, brilliant Facebook groups out there. I joined World Schoolers Facebook group. It is just filled with people who are just doing things differently, taking their kids around travelling, and kids my kids’ ages, not just young kids. A lot of people do struggle with teenagers who just want to hang out with their friends, which is another reason why I know now is really the time for us to go and do this. But look, a part of me is curious about whether this could be our lifestyle. You know? Never know until so curious about that, but also a little bit daunted by the home learning thing. I mean, I’m even just worried about being on my own and at airports with tired kids, just tired kids in general is annoying to me. We are pretty big on sleep around here. I am. It’s a definite priority for me, and I know that there’s going to be times where especially for my youngest, it’s going to be it.

It’s be a bit more challenging. So I am working on thinking calm thoughts and knowing that I’ll be tired too, that there’ll be moments that we just have to get through together, but we just got to get through and we’ll end up in a bed somewhere and that’s going to be okay and all part of the learning experience. I actually think probably I have been so routine with my kids around sleep that it will be great for them to experience knowing that we can be a bit more flexy with it when we need to, especially because I think we are going to be going, well, I shouldn’t really be giving details of an itinerary that’s awful fully locked down now, but it would be my hope that we would experience Scandinavian summer. I lived in Sweden for a while and it was in the cold months, which was just so totally magical and so outrageously different to anything I’d ever experienced before it was being in a fairytale.

But I really want to go back and see one of my really good friends in Sweden, and I’d love to see parts Norway as well. Anyway, it doesn’t get dark. How are they get them to bed? I don’t understand this concept and I think it’s going to be really, really good for the kids and I to experiment with being a little bit loose with that sort of thing. But it’ll be interesting. I’ll either be like, whoa, never experimenting with that again, tired kids are a bitch and we’re maintaining bedtime. I mean, I think that they’re just going to be tired a lot of the time anyway if we are out and about and doing stuff. But as I said earlier, this trip isn’t about moving around and sightseeing all the time. It’s certainly not the pace that I want to go at all the time, but there will be moments where absolutely we are jam packing things in.

One of my biggest worries was that I would just run out of steam. I would think that this was a really good idea and then once I was in the reality of it, I’d be like, what the fuck have you actually done Lisa? Now that could still very much happen. I’m riding a bit of a high at the moment, but I know that there will be times where I’m probably questioning my life choices and there’s a part of me that just thinks, can I maintain it? Maybe that’s why people do go for short holidays because that’s, then you want your bed again, then you want home and routine. Anyway, as I said, I can always come the frig home, but it, it’s is this thing that has kind of sat with me. The way that I work, the way that I live is there’s so much that I have to do consistently all the time as a sole parent, but I get so jack of it and I work more and live more in, I have sort of sprint times and then I need downtime.

I really do need a lot of downtime in order to recoup my energy, and it’s why I talk about rest a lot. I think when I realised that you can’t run on adrenaline always and that we are not actually robots who can just perform day in, day out, I have ended up having an amazing relationship with myself around rest and being able to tune right in and knowing what I need. It just, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. So I am absolutely going to be doing that while we go. It’s why there’s going to be times for being in other people’s homes. There’s going to be times where we need our own space. There’s going to be times of being in the big cities and exploring all that they have to offer, and then there’s going to be times in a countryside or beach town. So yeah, making sure I’ve got that sorted, but God, if I just disappear for a little while, it’s because I’m just sticking my finger up at myself for giving myself this massive task. I always end up coming back. I think really, I don’t worry about it at this point being the wrong decision. As I said before in the previous episode, there is no right or wrong.

I just know 100% that I needed something. I needed something. I knew it was time for some sort of change. I couldn’t create it for myself here. I couldn’t shift my vibe in a really big way in order to feel excited about everything again. I mean, I love my work and what I do, and I’ve felt really disconnected from it. I’ve felt really

Like I need to reconnect with the purpose and like I said, riding harvest. It was a real moment where I realised, oh God, I’m not that Lisa who started this thing. Some, there’s something else, and it was a amazing line in the sand moment, but it was also the breeding ground for knowing that we get to make things mean, whatever we want them to mean. I took that to mean I needed to honour in some way this moment in time, and I needed to listen to what, to myself and what I was calling for, and it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have all these worries that I, I’m not massively concerned about the decision that I’ve made, but I’m backing myself. I’m choosing myself, and this is the right decision for right now, and whatever happens from here, and I hope you’re going to stick with me on the ride. It’s perfect because life certainly is not perfect, but this decision, it’s the most perfect thing for now. Someone’s at the door. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you soon.

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