Desperate Housewife Syndrome… Signs and Symptoms

Do you ever feel tired, worn out, and broken down? Is it starting to affect your ability to be a mom to your kids, wife to your husband, and friend to your friends? This post will help.

Also, here’s some encouragement for the emotionally exhausted mom.

Long before anyone filmed anything on Wisteria Lane the desperate housewife syndrome was in full bloom.

All over the world women were wearing pajamas at 11 am wondering how the women around them seemed to find time to match their fingernail polish with their outfit.

Outfit?

When was the last time I wore an “outfit?”

Do jeans and a t-shirt count as an outfit? I think an outfit probably has to have a cute belt, cute shoes or cute earrings to make the cut.

Hey, I do have a cute headband on.

Oh, wait. That’s only to mask the fact I haven’t washed my hair in three days.

Times can get desperate at home. If you live far from your family like me then there are not always built in avenues for stress reduction and relief.

This syndrome can appear even if you love staying at home with the kids and they are well-behaved and sleeping fine.

Sometimes it goes past the surface “hot mess” and goes below where you begin feeling anxious, fearful, and even quite depressed.

You don’t want to feel this way and aren’t sure how to get past it. Hopefully this post will help.

Desperate (adj): feeling, showing, or involving a hopeless sense that a situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with.

Some Signs and Symptoms you have come down with Desperate Housewife Syndrome:

1. You wear pajamas most days.
2. You have abandoned daily habits you used to have. i.e. shaving, washing your hair, making the bed, tidying the house, etc. You don’t have the energy for them but do feel ‘blah’ without them.
3. You resent watching your husband leave the house each morning and are waiting for him at the door when he gets home, even though becoming a stay-at-home-mom was your choice.
4. You have no energy for connecting with the kids and often struggle being a present parent.
5. You feel insecure around working mothers because you don’t feel you have anything to talk about and because you’re behind on current and world events… though you are quite caught up on what’s happening on Facebook.
6. You seem to get angry at the drop of a hat.
7. You take their behavior so personally even though you know it’s silly.

Here are some ways to make your Desperate Housewife Syndrome less desperate.

It’s not easy, but you can do it, mama.

Process Your Own Feelings

Are you disappointed because you didn’t think life would be this way? Are you stressed because money is tight? Are you angry because your spouse is always late or doesn’t help out around the house?

Are you insecure because you’ve never gotten back to pre-pregnancy size?

Knowing why you are feeling what you are feeling will help to channel your feelings in a healthy way. Then you won’t accidentally take out your feelings on your children if you need to be taking them out on your husband.

The best ways to easily process your feelings and move past this are:

• keep an unedited journal where you can emotionally vomit (if you will) and then move on
• use guided workbooks (like my overwhelm guide printable) to help you learn how to get from where you are (A) to where you want to be (B)
• admit what you are feeling is okay and stop feeling guilty for feeling

Read: The Stay At Home Mom Schedule That’ll Keep You Sane

Take it easy with social media

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and goodness knows what other social media platforms make it easy to keep in touch with people we haven’t seen in 10 years. I mean friends. But what they also do is lead us down the comparison road.

Why don’t I always look that cute?

Wow, their girls are happy in their homemade pillow dresses.

They sure go out to eat a lot.

Are they always on flippin’ vacation?

People post about the top 3% of their life and we compare it with the bottom 3% of ours and are left feeling inadequate. Don’t kill hours on the internet.

If it gets unhealthy, give yourself some allotted time and then, mind your own business. Or get a hobby. Here are 60+ hobbies that are inexpensive and help you get out of your own head.

Dress purposefully

This doesn’t mean you can’t wear yoga pants. Although, honestly, there are pros and cons to yoga pants. It just means dress on purpose.

After a few of my pregnancies I’ve gone out to Wal-Mart or a local discount store like Ross or Bealls, and I’ve bought comfortable workout gear to wear around the house. It wasn’t fancy but it matched.

It was better than my 10 year old University of Florida t-shirts even though it wasn’t a full blown “outfit.”

Read: 5 Things Emotionally Exhausted Mothers Need to Remember

Here are some ways to dress purposefully:

• get rid of worn out daggy clothes (get postpartum clothes if you need to)
• pick out clothes the night before, it may be the difference between still wearing pj’s at noon
• buy realistic “home clothes” you can wear that are comfortable but still help you feel like you got dressed

Create good systems that work for YOU

It’s not about keeping a showroom home. In fact, this is not about how anyone else sees your home at all. It’s about you and how you function within your home.

In fact, there’s a common reason why our homes feel chaotic. It happens to all of us at one time or another.

When the house is perpetually messy and unorganized…. we feel like failures.

Feeling like a failure is half of what makes us enter into the Desperate Housewife Syndrome. The answer is not to say “I’ll ignore the mess and try to make myself not care and live with it for the next 18 years.”

Managing your guilt is done by prioritizing things that are truly important to you and not letting them slide.

If a messy house doesn’t bother you but dirty dishes do, then don’t let the dishes pile up. You can more easily find time to maintain a tidy house than to deep clean a filthy one.

Click > here < to sign up for my free email series on creating good home systems.

An Overwhelm to Order Binder (a homemaking binder aimed at creating systems) will also help you to go from a negative to a positive and stay that way.

Feed Your Identity

There are a few reasons that mothers often lose their identities. They are focused on meeting everyone else’s needs all day long they often neglect to meet their own.

They are home focused and bow out of hobbies or other social activities. This is fine for a season. But for a longer term, you’ll eventually start coming up dry every day if you don’t fill your own cup.

How to find your identity again?

• think about the things you’re gifted at and find a way to use them (even at home)
• journal your thoughts, feelings, desires, dreams, and read books that relate
• listen to music you love, watch movies you enjoy, and read information about things that feel “you”
• read your Bible, pray, and think about things outside child rearing
• try to make the most of interactions with others outside your life stage, this will help keep you grounded and focused on the big picture

And always remember why it’s important we build ourselves up…

Motherhood isn’t our identity.

Out of our identity we mother. 

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