Comedy Through The Chaos: Parenting Edition Trusting the Process (and Pausing Before You Panic)

Good morning. Hello. Hello. That doesn't belong there. That belongs in here. Hi everybody. Happy Saturday to you. I'm Ms. Shannon Paul. I am a comedian, corporate speaker, voice actor, event emcee and benefit auctioneer. So a variety of word related things. I'm also the proud parent of an adorable 17 year old kiddo who happens to be high supports on the autism spectrum. We as I say, often hub out of the great state of Minnesota. Hello. I have to have to get my hydration prepared. So he is outside.

Being a very Minnesotan kid right now. I don't remember. Let's see, I think it's like in the 30s right now. Hi, Jules, how are you? I know I'm running a couple of minutes late, but I had to get my kiddo settled. I'm trying to figure out what the temperature. Alexa, what's the temperature right now? Let's see what the weather is. Hello. I appreciate you calling me sunshine. I bring sunshine to a cloudy ish Minnesota day. But I always think it's interesting because I didn't grow up in Minnesota. I moved here with my family, my sisters and my mom and I moved here in 1996 and we've been in Minnesota ever since.

But my son is very much a Minnesotan, so he is very happy that we have swung all the way into fall and that we are getting fall related weather and temperature. And he actually has been asking me about snow. So he's outside and very teenager boy related thing. Like he's not cold. He's not cold. Oh, your mom's an ND all right. Yes. So it might snow on her. In North Dakota they usually get their snow before us. Yeah, it could. It's weather Will weather in this part of the country. Hello, Risa. Good to see you.

So for we're starting with a conversation about the weather because my kiddos outside right now with no jacket as he is prone to do. And I think it's 39, maybe 40 at the most. And so he decided he didn't need a jacket. Are you feeling invigorated? You came back inside. Came here to get your back scratched. All right, you do that. So welcome to come to do the Chaos, the parenting edition. As you can see, I at least beat the initial criteria of parenting that kid who is behind me. So we're gonna go in here so I can talk to y' all for a while.

Mom needs minutes. Look at that. Look how smart he is. He closed the door on himself. Good for him. So I'm gonna come over here and talk To y' all for a little bit about today's edition of Comedy through the Chaos. What I wanted to talk to you about is the concept of trusting the process. And I know that regardless of where you are in your parenting journey, whether you. Whether you are a caregiver or wherever you are in that, a lot of what's tossed at us is, hey, here's a change that we think may be for the best, but the anxiety leading up to that change can be very daunting, you know, kind of thing.

Yes. Snow in northern Minnesota yesterday. Oh, yeah, I saw that weather come across the thing. So I don't think we're gonna snow here in this part, but I saw central on the list where there might be crappy roads at least, so. Which is very similar to, I think, what we're dealing with as far as the process. We have a process of how do we prepare for winter here in the Midwest. But I think as parents and caregivers, we also have that process of, okay, we've gotten into this routine. Routines are lovely.

They make it comfortable for us and the people that we care for and care about. But then we have to throw that off sometimes in order to try and make some sort of change. And so, at least in my processing, sometimes the anxiety leading up to the change is just as bad as the change itself. So you end up front loading all of the anxiety. So what I've been dealing with over the last couple of weeks here is that we are doing a med change here. And it's not a take off something, it's an addition of a thing.

And this particular thing has a stimulant base to it. So a little bit of tmi, and you know what, it's not doing great, you know, kind of thing. It's been, you know, my kiddos 90% happy, but I can see that this is throwing them off. And so I have been doing my best to trust the process to know that sometimes things get better before they get worse. Sometimes things get worse before they get better. Sometimes you try it, they just stay bad and they go off the rails. And sometimes things work swimmingly and they do end up being okay.

That's the thing that, that we needed in order to make this next milestone leap. But the thing is that if we don't trust the process to at least give ourselves enough grace to go through that, you can't tell which one of those off ramps you're going to be on. And so I have to remind myself all the time, you have to give it a shot. Here's how you've learned from the previous processes that you have gone through. Here's how you can navigate this particular change. Here's how you can even collect the data as a caregiver and as a parent so that I can see whether it's working, whether it's something that's worth continuing to try.

Like, what I've decided right now is that we've been a week on this new med. It still seems to be throwing them off. Maybe now's not the right time to be able to make this change. So I'm going to slow it down until the next time we go through a break in school is what I've decided. I'm like, so it just has one less moving part. But I'm able to make that decision because I've gone through the process before. And so the process isn't the problem. It's allowing myself time to go. Okay, you know that there's a couple of things that might happen.

Don't immediately presume that everything is going poorly. Don't immediately presume that there will not be some change. And sometimes what's something that you can use to affect things in a way that you can tell whether it's the change or whether it's the process. And you have to end up reevaluating the process some is all. So I know I just threw a lot of things at you. So I'll use this tangible example again and just kind of tie it back to what I've been dealing with with my kids med. So this Wednesday that just passed, it was a big emotions day for us.

You see, he's been doing really well about self regulating, doing some stuff, but we were having a hard time that morning and just had a couple of failed to launch moments. And on Thursday. I'm sorry. Hey, Andi. Mack. Good to see you. So on Wednesday, what I had agreed to do is that once I got him off the school, I was gonna meet up with my partners over at the Twin Cities Film Fest because we're switching offices. And I said, hey, I'll come help you pack and move some boxes and some other stuff.

And I had agreed to do that the week before when things seemed a lot calmer and I had more space. So we end up in big emotions land and navigating all of this stuff. And so I'm trying to get him to launch, I'm trying to get him calm, I'm trying to figure out what is that's throwing him off and what I can do to support him. But at that whole time also running in the back track in the background is the back, the soundtrack I have in my head of my high functioning anxiety that's always running. You're letting them down.

If you have call them and tell them that you can't do it, it's going to make it so hard on them and you're going to this and you don't want to let people down and you don't, you don't, you don't, you don't. It's running in the back of my head the whole time. So finally at around I was going to be there. I said I'd be there from like noon to 2. We are still in the midst of big emotions. At 11:45am, 11:50am we click on to noon and I'm like Shannon, you just gotta just say you can't make it. So just go ahead and just text them and tell them you can't do it.

So I text them in a flurry, you know, of emotions, you know, kind of thing. I get my kiddo calmed enough that I can go and text. I said I'm so sorry, we're having a big emotions day, we're not going to make it to school which means I can't come help you pack the stuff. And I'm like so sorry. And I send this big text message. So my, my, our office manager, our friend, she writes back and she's like, oh, you didn't see the email? Yeah, we got all of that done. We didn't need you to come in anyway.

So I got to exhale. So I wrote back, hey Rick, how are you? I wrote back even better. What is the best outcome that the, the whole situation that I had been stressing, being able to attend, letting them down, it took care of itself. The universe supported me in a way that I didn't even know it was working itself out to do. And so yeah, there's some email in there floating around. I hadn't had time to check my emails A certain I could barely have time to figure out if I had hydrated or if I needed to go to the bathroom.

I had time to do nothing. So I certainly hadn't done that. But it's so interesting how when we're in the midst of these processes and what we're going to do, whether, hey there. Whether you give yourself enough time to see if there is an off ramp there, if there is support available, are you powering through something and doing something on your own when you really have support and Things that can assist you, or if nothing else, one little thing to take off your plate so that things don't feel so heavy, give you a little bit of time to balance things out, to really focus on what matters, which is maybe your parenting situation that you have right now and maybe your mental wellness that you have right now.

All of those things. Exactly, Jewel. Sometimes the universe grants us a reprieve right when we need it. And so the fact that I was able to release that guilt that I really didn't own anyway, but because of the way I work, I had been seeping in that, that whole morning about, oh, my gosh, I feel so bad. I'm letting them down. I hate to do that. And then it turned out to be fine. And so I wrote back, I said, I'm so glad that you guys are taken care of. I said it was stressing me out to text you and say I couldn't make it.

And she wrote back, oh, gosh, you're so sweet. I'm over overreacting internally with what the outcome is. And I think we do that a lot because we're so focused on whatever it is that's right in front of us at the time that we don't have any space whatsoever to look around that obstacle because we're wedged in so aggressively. So gotta go see what that noise is in a second. He sounds happy about it, but that doesn't mean I'll be happy about it. So I encourage you to do a couple of things this week in your parenting journey, in your caregiving journey, in your self care journey.

One, explore the concept of what are the processes that I really need to focus on right now, and which of those things are you really good at? Like, you're accomplished at your practice that you know how to get through them so that you can go, well, when in doubt, I can always pick up this little process and use that to help me get through this next little moment. So I encourage you to do that. The next thing I encourage you to do is go, all right, now. What am I layering on top of that process that's making it more difficult for everybody and making it so that I don't really have time to see what the next step could possibly be.

You know, for me, it's the acknowledging over and over again. I'm like, you let your anxiety get in the way. Your ability, your. Your. Your superpower of helping other people is great, but sometimes you have to turn that off so you can help yourself and do that as well. And then Honestly, just also look at the options that you have in your circle to be able to go when in doubt. Can you help me unspool this process that I'm working on right now? Because sometimes it's so great to get other eyes on it and to be able to do it in a moment of peace.

I'm going to be able to do it in a moment of how can I grow from this whole thing? How can I make this better for the people that are in my circle, including my kiddo and myself? So if we do it again, I do that a lot in my house. Like what I, what, what possibly might have fallen over in there. I am constantly moving things around and going, you know what? That was something that I thought was actually going to be a benefit and it's turned out to be an obstacle. So I guess I'm gonna move it and figure out something else.

So I encourage you to do some of that. So should we go see what the kiddo's doing before I sign off? And then I did put a. If you go through the chat, you can see an update to the wood pile adventure that we have in the front yard kind of thing. You gonna help me take this garbage out? I'll worry about that in a second. So if you have some time over the next week, that's what I encourage you to process. For anybody that joined us late, we were talking about how sometimes the process is great, but you're so much in the midst that you don't even have time to work on it.

And especially to trust what it is that you're working for. For me personally, like I said, I'm going to put a pause on his particular med because I've been through this process before and we're going to circle back to it because I do think that the goal of what it is might be of value. But right now the initial outcome isn't worth this. The, the setbacks that we're having right now with some other things. Like my priorities right now need to be, are you as much as possible able to self regulate not only here with additional caregivers, but also with his staff at school?

And it seems to be a distraction when it's really something that's supposed to overall help his well being. So we'll wait until I have time to see. Well, if you're on it a little bit longer, will your body adjust? Will some of those other things do it? So I'll try that when he's not in as much of a stressful situation and Honestly, neither am I. So encourage yourself to do that. Trust your processes, but also trust your gut as to where you are in the process and when you need to reevaluate. And also, hopefully you continue to trust us that we will be here for you as much as we can and try and provide a few additional supports, some resources, if nothing else.

Maybe a slightly different perspective than what you have going on in your current situation and we appreciate being able to ping things off each other. I always appreciate all of seeing you in the chat, Jules and Rick, and everything that you share. It's always great to see you as well as we continue to build this community. So we will work on that and the goal today. I have a fundraiser this evening that I'm a part of, but in the meantime it's catching up on laundry and moving at least a couple more wagons of wool chips before the snow flies in my part of Minnesota.

So I hope that the day treats all of you well. If it doesn't, shame on it. Not shame on you. Thank you, Andy Mack as well. I always appreciate seeing you as well and so I'm glad that this was was a value for you. So we will hopefully see you back here on Thursday at 2pm Central. Jules, I hope that your mom's travels are safe. I hope that everybody who is out there as winter comes up on us, that we continue to figure out what we're going to do during these transition periods. And in the meantime, we are here for each other.

So be well, everybody. I'll see you again soon. It.