A Moment’s Peace: A Mom’s Guide to Creating Calm Amidst Chaos

Your turn for carpool. Dinner unmade. Orthodontist appointment started fifteen minutes ago. Cell phone vibrating. Conference call scheduled. Txt from husband: co dwnsizing again.whos nxt? How can one more minute, one more worry, be squeezed into your day?

If your life is anything like mine—and what mom’s isn’t?—at least some part of the scenario above rings some bells for you. What would you do for a moment’s peace? Lock yourself in the bathroom? Leverage your house? Sell your soul? Anything? If you’re an average mom, you need a moment’s peace more than anyone else, and if you’re an average mom, you probably feel like a simple moment of peace is also entirely beyond your reach. Let’s face it, as wonderful as it is, motherhood can sometimes feel like a continual series of interruptions, your every thought and task fragmented as your attention is continually pulled in different directions.

Not so unlike my experience—not only as a mother, but as a nurse in a large hospital working in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the heart-wrenching section of the hospital that houses critically ill infants.

It was my first job out of college, and it was overwhelming. I was twenty-two years old, green, fresh out of school, and scared.The hospital was a place of great intensity, as everyone in the NICU busy with their assigned tasks and I was just expected to perform. I guess it happened instinctually, just like being thrown off a dock in the deep end of a lake and being told to swim.There’s no time to stop and think about the pros and cons of whether you know how to keep yourself afloat—you’re operating on survival instinct. But as hectic and frightening as it was, those early days in my nursing career taught me a critical lesson: how to keep a cool head and allow intuition to move through me and get the job done.

Extracted from A Moment’s Peace: A Mom’s Guide to Creating Calm Amidst Chaos