Authentically Me: The Journey to Live with Purpose: Boundaries

I'm terrible with boundaries, especially when it comes to people I love. My parents were pretty strict with curfews when I was a teenager, and I'm honestly not very strict at all when it comes to my teenagers now. I feel like I've given them enough rope to hang themselves, but also enough trust for them to start to make solid decisions on their own. It's all about balance. But I know my boundaries aren't the same as what my husband would set with the twins if he was the one making all of the rules. We have different expectations and different boundaries, and usually that's ok. Sure, sometimes it causes a little conflict, but we can usually talk through it and meet somewhere in the middle on the big issues. The small stuff, I just don't sweat it. I trust my kids to make good choices, and I trust that if they make a bad one, they'll learn something from it.

I've learned in recent months that I'm also really bad with boundaries with friendships and relationships with my family (outside of my kids and spouse). Learning to find a balance to where I feel that I'm being supportive of my people, but also not letting the stress of other people's "stuff" weigh me down is really tricky. I have a tendency to take on the feelings and stress of other people, and then it creates chaos and stress and emotional meltdowns for me. It's not healthy, I'm aware of that. But I also have a hard time creating boundaries when I feel like someone needs me. But I'm working on it!

Boundaries are especially important to me right now because I've gone through a lot over the past 12 weeks since my RNY surgery at the end of April. I've gone through really awful days of feeling sicker than I've ever felt, and really emotional days where I questioned whether or not I made the right choice in going forward with the surgery. At the end of the day, a lot of my excess weight was the result of a few unhealthy situations in which I lacked boundaries with myself or others (eating for comfort, making unhealthy food choices, drinking alcohol to numb the pain or stress, feeling alone and eating things that reminded me of "better" times, eating junk food when the kids were asleep because I didn't feel like I had anything that was just mine during the day with mom life, etc.). So if I don't create healthy boundaries and habits, the weight I've lost to date and what I'm still planning on losing in the next year won't stay off. I need to create new habits and ways of doing life in order to stay on the path to being healthy physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. It's a whole package deal.

I'm happy to report that I'm officially down 50 pounds from my highest weight before surgery! It's been a little over 11 weeks since I had the surgery, and for the most part, I'm feeling good more days than not. I definitely feel a little lighter and am able to do things with more ease than I have in the past. I still haven't built a solid workout routine into my life, and I'm hoping to do that in the next couple of weeks now that I'm settling into my new job and have survived the first half of summer while working from home with the kids.