This is most definitely a cry for help, a call for validation, a plea for comfort. What THIS IS MOST ABSOLUTELY NOT, is a call for advice or an invitation for criticism. This is literally me not feeling able to express what I am feeling effectively to the people around be and turning to strangers on the internet to feel a sense of community.
So here I go. What’s on my mind today leading me to stop all the lifeing and adulting I’m trying to appear good at, to write this.
Today started with a crisis, a family member thought they were dying. I woke up to pee at 4:30 am, trying to go to sleep again so I could wake for my 5:30 am, and here is this person with an odd pain, about to call all the emergency services and I’m lost even before I’ve found my witts. The family member decided exercise would fix it, told me not to worry about it, and was off to start the day. I’m mildly traumatized now laying in bed wondering how I will find the strength to deal with funeral planning, and learning to live without this family member.
I did not make the alarm, or the alarm after the alarm. What I did not miss was a phone call that should have been a whole lot of blessing but just came at an odd time. But the person offering the opportunity walks with GOD in their soul, because they helped me figure it out, and now I can say that blessing was well received, and in between panic and rage, I had a good moment to settle into being grateful that good people exist.
Then comes the chaos…my eldest child, whom I would love to say is the product of his environment and not my obvious epic parenting fail, proceeded to try his best to get under my skin. This is a regular occurrence, I’ve grown accustomed to the accusations of not being enough. the indignant insistence that my responses to his behaviors are somehow proof of my own incompetence at humanity and his various infractions against me being justified because nobody else will lift a finger, a note, or a pot spoon in my defense. And why should they? It is after all a problem of mine of my own making and such my yolk alone to suffer. NO?
All of this while making breakfast and the cup of tea I forgot to drink. I was making breakfast though, not because it was part of my routine but because my dad is staying with us. He’s on medication, recovering from a major illness. I think this experience, the hellish details you will probably be able to read about during my next mental breakdown, has been the most significant event of my life so far.
You see, my parents are the most solid and steadfast people in my life, my dad more than my mom, because until now he has always been there. Always present and willing to step in and help which has been a thing through all other storms in life has been a comfort. Hell, it has been one of the immutable truths of my existence, my daddy is that rock that stands against all things and prevails.
And he almost died. And there was nothing I could do about it.
He’s recovering, but if any part of that depends on me being even competent at anything is more responsibility than being a small business owner, one of the hoard of the unappreciated (Teacher), a woman, a mother, and a wife. Well maybe not being a mother, that’s huge, and while the one kid seems to be an alien or pod person, the others are pretty okay ish so I figure I’m holding my own in as much as anyone can hold their own in that arena.
So with the weight of all of that, and the taking of the middle child to school and hoping that today is the day she is the picture of perfection to the teacher to whom she has not been the picture of perfect studenthood, the potholes, the rasta men who seem to like to take ought with my driving choices despite there own daredevil antics on the road, on the way to the job that has me in a state of cognitive fatigue and all other aspects of adulting…there was this dude who decided to angle his car not quite into oncoming traffic to allow his kid to pass across, instead of taking the kid to the pedestrian crossing in front of the school. Decided to loudly and obnoxiously verbally abuse me for not taking his slight angle and almost outstretched arm as a red light and a soul-deep obligation to fit into his desires and convenience.
I am not at all regretful in saying that I stopped calling him some of the filthiest things my mind was able to come up with in the moment, which in hindsight wasn’t the best I could do given the span of my vocabulary. But I think what happened in my head is the most important.
I started berating myself for not handling stress well. It’s something I have heard said about me time and again, and I guess something I have internalized to be true. Even as I sit here and the lady inside my head grumbles that that man should have dropped his kid off to school like a good parent, instead of releasing the child into oncoming traffic should be flogged with a cassie bush, I am here contemplating how I could have taken it better.
W T F self.
Yh that’s all I can manage right now. Thanks.
Random_Michelle 