On Exhaustion, Anxiety, and Forgetting how to live

When I met Lance, I was fire: passionate with youth and purpose. Then, when Morgan came, and she was early, I had to set my alarm to nurse every 2 hours, from beginning to beginning, so, if she took an hour to nurse, that meant I had an hour to sleep before the whole thing started over. Even after that, she was never a good sleeper.  We always rocked her to sleep, so she got to the stage where after an hour of rocking, she would wake as soon as we layed her in the crib. I remember the devastating, paralyzing exhaustion like it was yesterday.  I remember the 4am desperation for sleep, so acute that I would curl up in her crib with her, just so we could finally sleep.

2 kids later, I survived somehow, but I still live in fear of that kind of tired. If I don't go to bed "on time", I lay there with the anxiety that I will not get enough sleep. Counterintuitive, I know. I have constructed careful boundaries by which I will get enough rest. I must preserve the energy to function. I must get enough sleep to get up and clean the house and mops the floors, so that the kids will have a nice place to drag stuff out and track stuff in, so that my husband can come home and wonder what I did all day. I am so jealous of my energy that I don't want to stay up and watch a movie with my husband. I don't want to go out. I don't want to invite anyone over, for fear that they won't leave. I am bound and ruled by anxiety and fear of exhaustion.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's ok, imperative even, for moms to set boundaries for the health and well being of her family, but I got beyond that somehow. Though my life is beautiful to the point of pain, I have forgotten how to live in it. I have stopped singing, even at home. My song, my passion, has been stifled by the daily, by just trying to maintain. Occasionally, it will rise up and flap wildly inside me, like a trapped bird trying to escape.  I feel it. I don't know how to let it out. I get melancholy. My husband chalks it up to female hormones.  We go on.

Hear me mama: it doesn't serve our families to live this way. It doesn't serve God. Motherhood isn't supposed to feel like groundhogs day: rote, mundane, redundant. I used to feel God made me for more. Sometimes, when I get this way, my husband fears that I wish I chose I different path, that I want a different life, but that isn't it. I don't regret that big choice.  It is how I've handled a thousand small choices since then that I wish I could, nay, must learn how, to change. I must learn to trust God actively for the needs of tomorrow, so that I can live today. I must learn to practice contentment and joy in the now. I need to change my perspective, so that I can appreciate His gifts. It only takes a moment for everything that we take for granted to be gone.

Of course, it is one thing to type, and another to live. We must condition ourselves to the discipline and practice of Eucharisto, thanks, grace, and joy. We must practice it, until it becomes our nature.

"Don't die with your song still inside you."
Sing we must, today.

The Long Road

A couple of weeks ago, Morgan missed the bus. We live like 2 minutes from the school; taking her definitely would have been the easier thing, but after an internal battle, I decided to allow her to learn from the consequences of dawdling. It was hard to watch her weep and wail and want to go to school (but it's so cool that she likes school that much, right?). Believe me, I have codependent tendencies. I wanted to rescue her, like my lovely, caring friend that is always running her daughter her band instrument and who probably thinks I am a cold hearted Nazi mother, but I refrained.

After she was clam, I explained that I was not angry, and that she was not being punished: the simple consequence of missing your ride, is not going to the place your ride was headed. I explained that as a mom, it's my job to teach that things that are your responsibility will be taken responsibility for by you, not me.  I explained that the consequence of missing one day out of 12 years of school is small, so small, but that the consequence of not learning to accept consequences for your actions as they get larger and more severe is huge. And at the end of the day, I considered that hard decision a mom win for both of us. I did the short term hard thing, for a long term investment in my child's charecter, and my daughter tried to see a situation from a perspective that was not her own.  If only a glimpse, I think she understood that I see a future for her that she can't immediately perceive, and that I have that future in mind when I do things, even the ones she doesn't like. I responded firmly, but without anger, and we went on to have a day that included both work and fun.

Lord, please help us to be more often as we were on that day: me, firm but loving, and my children, willing to accept correction, and help all of us mama's to look down the long road when we have hard parenting choices in our path.