“A stress ball is a malleable toy, usually not more than 7 cm in diameter. It is squeezed in the hand and manipulated by the fingers, ostensibly to either help relieve stress and muscle tension or to exercise the muscles of the hand.” quoted from wiki.
A stress ball is a stress relief. It is recommended to locate it on your workstation, so that whenever you get blatantly bashed by your boss because of your laziness, you can always reduce the stress the easiest way.
When I look into the eyes of my 2 months baby, I can say that my baby is a stress ball. She is the source of stress relief when I get back home; all the tense of workload in the office, a chain of needless meetings, and battered sparring of different ideas between colleagues are vaporizing in the air.
To me, baby is as good as physical therapy. There are five ways she can reduce my work stress;
- The way she smiling. The miracle of smiling is that the moment I see my baby smile, all stressful thoughts are gone.
- The way of responding to me. When I clap my hand softly on her right ear, she turns and looks at where that sound came from.
- Her pupil enlarge when she sees me. She would recognize me as her parent when she widens her pupils. I think.
- Her eyes are fixated on me. Once she looks at me, she never takes off. That’s mesmerizing.
- Sleeping in a cutest way. Putting her both hands on both cheeks makes me laugh a lot.
I know that you can’t use baby like a stress ball, because I had squeezed the baby one time like a stress ball, and she went crying over an hour. That’s a lot of stress.
On the other hand, baby can gives you the stress you can’t imagine such as;
- Still crying when you fulfill all the checklist. I often frustrated when I did all the checklist to soothe out my baby, and fail to stop her crying.
- Wants to be hugged all the time. She has one behavior that I don’t understand. She turns on her crying sound when I put her on bed.
- Crying out loud at least three times at night. It’s really stressful to find out that I am overslept and late for work.
Ok, now she gives me stress. I was thinking that if I complaint about how stressful I am when taking care of my children, and then let my stress seduced my feelings, I am going nowhere and stay on a very airtight situations.
Eventually the stress I will burn me out. But if I refused to let the stress eats me alive, I may have chance to understand and manipulate it.
How I handle the stress when my baby did the three things above?
- Set my mind. Now I have to set my mind that making milk in the middle of night is not that bad. May be it’s not bad at all.
- Forgive her. Just forgive my baby for every stressful situation she made. It’s nothing personal. She just want something, yet she don’t know how to express.
- Go with the flow. Sometimes your heart filled with torment when things don’t go the way you want. It’s okay if I late for work for three times, it’s okay if I can’t watch my favorite True Blood, it’s okay to miss lepak at Kedai Mamak with fellow friends. None of them are important, and there’s not a single tangible object that is above my children’s priority.
My baby is a stress ball. That’s my opinion. What’s yours?
