Stress As the Shot Across the Bow

Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy desserts, but not junk. It has to be really good; it’s how I keep my consumption level down. That’s why my favorite café and bakery, The Black Cat, is such a den of delicious deviousness in my book.

I was doing readings at The Black Cat one Saturday. It was well past noon, and the place was packed. I was reading client after client and hadn’t eaten since very early that morning. I didn’t want to bug the kitchen staff; they were behind as it was and people were pouring through the door. So I thought, “Heck, I’ll just grab one of their raspberry bars.”

Now this is not just a raspberry bar; it’s a piece of gustatorial Heaven, with a rich crust, perfect real raspberry filling, and a crumb topping. I pulled one off the baking tray in the kitchen. I wolfed it down and went back to reading.

In retrospect, it was probably two servings worth and hadn’t been portioned out. But I was too busy, too stressed to notice.

Within the hour, my heart started to race as if it was training for the Kentucky Derby. I was shocked and thought to myself, Why is this happening? What’s going on?

I took a wild guess that I might have had too much sugar in one sitting, and I went pelting over to my smartphone to get on the web. Sure enough, a hefty hit of concentrated sugar like that can and does up your heart rate, as well as your blood pressure.

Wow. Two things I already knew I needed to watch and, boom, I did a Double Dose of Stupid. All because I was too stressed to pay attention.

Now, I’d been told that “you shouldn’t do sugar,” and we all know that sugar is not the best thing to put in your body. But, I never took it too seriously until I got knocked in the head (or the pulse rate) with the incontrovertible proof.

So, from that point on, sugar became something really, really rare for me. I use sugar in my one cup of coffee in the morning because it’s better than chemical alternatives.

The rest of the day, I concentrate on taking in good quality protein, fruits and veggies, a little dairy, and nut butters.

Desserts are relegated to Date Night, where Carle and I share one dessert, and I take just a few bites. On special occasions such as Valentine’s Day and our anniversary, I may even indulge in an entire dessert just for me.

But, any other time, all I have to do is think about the terrifying feeling of my heart trying to jump out of my chest to remind myself that living healthy is better than a few mouthfuls of Demon Sweet.

That’s your perfect example of “stress as a shot across the bow.”

That particular phrase comes from naval parlance; it speaks of aiming a cannon shot across the bow of a ship, causing a small explosion in front of it and forcing it to stop. Nowadays, the phrase means “a warning to stop doing something.”

It’s one thing to pull the occasional all-nighter to finish your doctoral dissertation, plan a wedding, or open a business. Those are rare to one-time occurrences.

But when such time-crunch stresses are always front and center in your life, a shot across the bow is waiting to happen.

Jackie has three kids at home, ages two, six and eight. She also runs a small farm with her husband, which is how they make their living. She’s up at dawn doing the family account books, working on herb drying, and getting the family in gear for the day. She sets Sally up in her play area and then starts homeschooling six-year-old Mike and eight-year-old Paige. In between these activities, Jackie continues farm chores and responds to customer requests on their online store.

“I love my kids, I really do,” says Jackie. “But because I homeschool, there are constant demands on my time. I don’t get the break from my kids that most parents do; they are in my face and space 24/7. And Mike and Sally are young enough that they don’t understand boundaries the way they will when they’re older. So I just — deal.”

When she hasn’t put any time aside for herself, Jackie runs out of patience and ideas. But she simply bites her lip, drinks another cup of coffee, and continues on.

Or she did — until last November.

“Last fall, I just lost it,” she admits. “I was on my fourth cup of coffee since 5 AM. Mike was arguing with me about why he had to weed the vegetable patch and water the goats and do his reading exercises. ‘Farms are just dumb,’ he yelled. ‘I want to go to school like everyone else. Who cares about a farm, it’s just dirt and smelly animals and I want to be rich and nobody gets rich on a farm!’

“Now, our farm is small, but it makes us a living. I gave up city living and a lot of luxuries to marry my husband and take on this project. It’s important to me. But I was completely exhausted, at the end of my tether; I just didn’t have it in me to explain it to Mike.

“I slapped him. I did what I swore I’d never do to one of my children. I started screaming at him, and I was shaking so badly that I knocked my coffee cup onto the flagstones. It crashed. Sally started shrieking and crying, frightened. Paige comes running in from the backyard, wanting to know what was wrong. She walks in to see me hysterical and her two siblings howling. And then Brendan, my husband, walks in, takes one look and asks me, ‘What the hell happened?’

“I was so upset I couldn’t even tell him at first. Paige took care of the littles while Brendan and I went out to the barn to talk. I finally admitted that I couldn’t do all of it, something had to give.”

That morning was Jackie’s shot across the bow. She knew she wanted to be a good and loving mother. She wanted to see her kids homeschooled. She wanted to run her farm. How could it all get done? Jackie had to admit that she couldn’t do it alone. She had to explore other alternatives and lift some of the burdens.

“There are other parents around here who homeschool,” she said, “but I never thought of them as a resource. I thought everyone was as stressed as I was.” Jackie and Brendan reached out to the half-dozen families in the area who were also homeschoolers, and there is now an ad hoc group that co-teaches.

It means that Paige and Mike actually go to their neighbors’ homes for lessons three days a week. One day a week, Jackie has another six children to teach what she knows and loves: science (her college double major was ecology and biology). Mike is happier with more socialization time. And he is learning just how “cool” living on a farm looks to the other kids.

“It’s made a huge difference for all of us,” Jackie sighs gratefully. “I have a little time to myself now. I don’t feel as pressured. The kids are happier, which means I’m happier. But if I hadn’t lost it that morning last fall, I have no idea if we would have ever made the necessary changes. I was just too immersed in the next crisis to see what was needed.”

For both Jackie and me, the unrelenting stress, which had gone unchecked, resulted in situations that woke us up to the damage that loomed in the future.

In my case, it was serious health compromises. In Jackie’s situation, it was emotional and family fracturing.

But both of us also saw that “shot across the bow” as a wake-up call to look at our lives and make the changes we needed to get through the long haul happily and productively, without sacrificing either ourselves or our families.

Look at your own life right now. How many places does stress take precedence over what you think you should (or know you need to) do for yourself? How often does that happen?

If it’s more than once in a blue moon, that’s your shot across the bow. Time to trim your sails and change your course.

You can do so by looking at the circumstances that brought about the shot:

• What can you change?
• What can you let go?
• Who do you have around you — whether family, neighbors or others –that can help you realign what’s going on?
• Most importantly, where have you been so stubborn, so fixated, that you allowed this to happen?

Answering those four questions can turn the Ship of You around, sailing away from the stress-makers. And if a ship doesn’t sail in a certain direction, the shot across the bow isn’t in close range. (That’s the whole idea around “smooth sailing,” no?)

The shot across the bow is always the first shot, and it’s always just a warning. Be sure to take heed so that the next shot doesn’t take down your LifeBoat entirely.