Breakdowns and breakthroughs.

The house is absolutely trashed despite the fact that it was professionally cleaned three days ago. Utterly trashed. Now, I am not a neat person and my level of acceptably messy is far higher than most people I know. But I like to be in a clean house and I feel how much calmer my body feels when I walk in the front door and admire the sweet restfulness of a shining, tidy house. The slam of unease that comes as it gets immediately undone, as though I just hired professional uncleaners to come in and tear everything apart is intense. Almost so intense that I'm tempted to not have it professionally cleaned so the fall is not as severe.

I completely lost my shit with my kids yesterday. We don't have a lot of rules in our house, mostly because it has to be something that really matters to me to make me willing to have to address it one million kazillion bajillion times every day until I die. I mean, until their brains develop enough for them to remember the rules and to remember to follow them. One of the rules is that they are not allowed to play with food. This is partly because table manners are really important to me and partly because it makes me actually physically sick to see food disrespected and wasted as though it doesn't matter. Last night they were hyper and having fun and couldn't settle down and I asked them and then told them over and over again to stop playing at and to eat their food and then I fucking lost my mind and slammed my hands down on the table and yelled STOP IT! I made Daphne cry. They all stopped and stared at me. And then it all started up again. Eventually I started crying because I felt so powerless, so overwhelmed, so over it and so trapped.

I knew I was feeling out of control way before that. It came over me at 11 am as the result of a money conversation with its subsequent worry and fear. Coupled with the experience of feeling unseen, unvalued. Those are triggers for me that I am now wise enough to recognize. I knew I needed help but I didn't ask for it because. . . I didn't know who to ask and I didn't know what to ask for and because I thought that, though not ideal, recognizing how I was feeling would be enough for me to manage my way out of it. Nope.

Yelling at my kids makes me feel bad for many reasons. I don't like to scare them and I don't like the feeling of being out of control. There is some shame but I have to say there is less than there used to be. Because my anger and tears and yelling are true. And I would rather my kids see me lose it sometimes than for them to get used to me shutting down and turning myself off which is how I have handled my anger for most of my life. Still, as a wise advisor helped me see last week when we talked, that is not how I want to be parenting and the questions to ask myself are how I got there and what I needed to do to take care of myself to help me before I get that far gone.

It became so clear to me yesterday that I need help. I am working really hard in a lot of ways right now and I am out of gas. Flayed. Turned inside out. But whom do I ask? What do I ask for? These are things I don't know. Not because there is a shortage of people asking how they can help me but because it feels so hard to figure out not just what I need but how and whom to ask. This is why we need caves. Communal caves where I can be surrounded by people who can step in and take over when I need to be out.

The work I am doing right now is personal and it is deep and it is not financially remunerated. I feel really lucky to have the time and space to do this work and oh holy shit is it hard. It is recovery work. Healing work. Self-discovery work. It was begun some years ago and made necessary by the introduction of these four small people into my life and it is made harder by the presence of these four small people in my life. Every day this week I have been awakened by a screaming child. To be thrust into consciousness that way and then immediately carried by the waves of demands has been almost unbearable. Waves of panic and a desire to escape wash over me as my fight or flight systems roar to life. It's hard to shut them off.

I have always known I wanted to be a mother, as I've written here before. I was able to articulate as I got older that it wasn't just because I wanted to be a part of introducing new people to life but because I wanted to see myself, to know myself, as the changed version of myself I knew I would become through the experience of mothering. And yep! That has been the case. In a nutshell what I've been introduced to is that all the ways I'm managed my way through life so far no longer work. And I no longer want to live like that--numbed, pushed to the max, in survival mode. I want to be in this precious body of mine, tuned in to the sweetness and even to the pain. I want to be all the way alive. To love myself as much as other people love me. To not be so hard on myself. I want all of this. I want this because I want the same thing for my kids and I want this because what used to work for me is no longer sustainable.

I'm on the path. I have a lot of support although I need to figure out how to have more. My kids are thriving. This too shall pass. And now I'm going to go eat a donut and clean my house.