I don’t say too much about it, but my life has been under a considerable amount of stress over the last two years.

It began when the company employing my husband shut down it’s office here, leaving him jobless. This job loss happened just as we introduced our little guy into the world.

Stressful? Yes. But I still had a job, one I could was doing from a remote office (i.e. home) which meant no need for pumping, daycare, or any of those things that would no doubt stress me out in the early months of the little guy’s life.

Then, a few months later during the last week of December, I got a call informing me that I wouldn’t have a job to come back to.

More stress.

Fortunately, both my husband and I had lived fairly simply when compared to our collective incomes, so we did have some savings. That along with our unemployment helped us survive for a while.

After a year and a half of searching, my husband found a contract position. It paid less than we needed to pay all of our bills, but it was something. At a certain point, we began the process of seeking help from our mortgage holder – which would be an entire series of posts in itself.

Much more stress.

For the past year or so, we’ve been living in a limbo-like state, unsure if we would continue to have a roof over our head. The unemployment dwindled and as I continued to stare at ways of bringing in income that didn’t involve spending all of it on daycare, I started to let the stress eat at me.

I started to worry.

A lot. A few weeks ago, I kinda freaked out a little. The kind of freaking out where someone (in this case, my poor husband) says something and for no reason, you just start crying.

Nothing in our situation had really changed. I just hit a point where I allowed it all to build to a point of frustration that I let myself worry.

We talked. And prayed. And then I woke up and decided I needed to stop worrying.

And I cleaned.

Like, dusted places no one has ever or will ever see in my house.

Maybe it was the calm of a clean home. Maybe it was the ability to control some form of chaos in my life. Maybe it was because for the first time in months, I felt like I had tons of energy. Whatever it was, I felt better.

I was enjoying cleaning my house and wasn’t giving a thought to everything else going on.

And then we got some potentially good news. (I’ll share later)

I share all of this because I know that a lot of people have gone through an extra amount of stress these last few years. We can’t always help but have some sort of stress in our lives. But we can work at the worrying. I won’t sit here and say I’ll never worry again, but as much as I can help it, I’ll do my best not to focus on things I can’t control.

And maybe spend that energy on things that I can.

May your weekends be filled with less worry and more dusting.