panic settling

There is a setting in my brain a little like a "panic switch."  It starts going off when I know I'm talking too much, sharing too much, just in general being too much to handle. The frustrating part is not being able to shut myself up. I can see the alarms flashing (metaphorically) in my head, but the words keep shoving their way out into the world. Permanent and heavy.

The Monster I Created

They were a monster I created. An army of angry woman armed with flaming balls full of the fury that I lacked the courage to feel or express. I could not blame them for their hate.  I had stoked it, fed it, fueled it. A gift given to myself. The emotions I had shoved down deep, finally free and reflected back to me in their dismay.

And now I was asking them to forget all that.  To move beyond the stories I had told.  Not to deny that they had ever happened, or to question their truth, but to bury the emotional impact, and separate the stories from the man at the root of them.  Because I wanted to love him again.  But how could I ask them to do the same.  They were a monster I had created.  They had heard the stories I had told.  And they were unwilling to forget. 

Glimmer

In desperation, at the lowest of lows, head throbbing, feeling cracked like my heart, I utter prayers to God. I try to make sure to word it correctly. Must not let details get in the way. Lord I need you. I need your Spirit to fill me from within. Only Your love and light can fill the vortex inside of me and the cracks in my shell. Lord let me sleep, I beg you. And when I wake in the morning I pray I would be new and fresh, sustained by you.

This morning is tentative. The headache is gone as is the fever that has lasted 5 days. Inside is a tiny shred of hope. I am careful to hang on to that shred and put the rest out of my mind. If only for a little while.

This cycle. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is my way. And I always wonder when will be the time that I fail to reach out to God in time. He waits for me. I must trust that he also reaches out to catch me so that I don't fall for good.

Broken

I was broken then and I am broken now. It doesn't matter how long I play the part of someone whole, it doesn't matter how many friends I make and keep. The emptiness inside is always there like a vacuum threatening to crumble me from within like a vortex of pain, ugliness, and self hate. I try to be positive for a time, and it seems to work. But when shit starts hitting the fan I begin to falter. The negative takes hold. Then I regret the negativity and self-hate slices itself a fresh wound.  I ooze and bleed raw emotion desperate to find someone or something who can swallow it. Like a sin eater. And people go running. As they should. I would do the same.


And I yell and scream and tell myself to stop, but the pieces just keep cracking more and more, the shell I've molded revealing all of its weaknesses. Pieces of clay improperly and incompletely jigsawed together. They held up for a time. Each piece balancing softly on another, giving and taking even seeming to flex and flow, taking life like a champ. Until the pull from within grows and one crucial sliver slips inside, and when the next piece pulls there is nothing there to lend its edge.


And so here I am. Sick for days. Horrified at how well my husband manages his duties as well as mine. The house is running more smoothly without me. Its not even a question, its a fact. The world has seen too much of the dark chasm inside, and so I am ashamed and withdraw from them as well. It may last, or my neediness may kick in and send me running right back to try to find a way to restore their affirmation. Their belief in me. At least someone can believe in me.  I'm not ready to run back at the moment. And so I have Googled dark questions, looked for dark answers. Contemplated the end. Contemplated uprooting my family to start over somewhere else where no one knows yet.  Contemplated staying with someone who breaks my heart over his cold stone one just so that my kids can have the hope of Disneylands and families and the shell of a real family in their future. But I'm pretty sure even they know this family doesn't operate like the rest of them. They know they are missing out on things while their father and mother hide from ourselves and each other. Like playing chicken to see who will succumb to what first.

Frozen

Watched Frozen today with the family but we had to split up. Sadly I will remember this cute movie as the one I sat through and cried.

Roots

This week I started a Bible Study with ladies at my church. We are studying a book called "Stuck."

It's a little intimidating because its a much more personal bible study than I realized it would be. Immediately we were talking about, duh, what has you stuck in your spiritual walk, and in life.  I was quite comfortable when it was my turn, to offer up my own examples of places in which I could say I've been stuck: Self confidence, worry, and trusting God for all of the things...not just the big things.  That seemed pretty safe and inside of my comfort zone...

And then when I got home I plunged into the individual study portion, and realized that I am going to have to go waaaay deeper... and possibly do  so in front of people I am not sure I'm comfortable with, like a few coworkers from the preschool, in addition to a group of women I am just meeting, and may forever be know to by what I say in the study. Yikes!  So I put the book down and decided I'd get back to it in a few days.  And then the next day came, and suddenly I felt like God showed me the root of each of those issues. The one I would have to tackle before anything else in my life could change.  Its huge, and if feels impossible.  But I was reminded of a quote used in the study by A.W. Tozer:

  “As God is exalted to the right place in our lives, a thousand problems are solved all at once.”

So...maybe its what I've gotta do.  Here's the deep down, core of most of the problems I face in my existance... I have spent my entire life with the deep down belief that somewhere in my core, I am fundamentally broken. I have fought sadness, anger, depression, frustration all toward God because of this, and finally somewhat believed I had settled on acceptance that I was created the way God wanted to create me.  Broken. For some unknown reason or purpose.  But the pain still festered, and over the last year as I have watched Gabriel struggle with many of the same issues with ADD, insane sensitivity, and an emotional intensity matched pretty much only by me, the festering has built into a volcano, seeping destructive lava, mostly in a slow dribbling, aching flow, and at times erupting in monumental and catastrophic displays of fury.  This is the thing I am going to have to deal with.  And just as I began to think that there is no way I can deal with this in a Bible Study setting, delaying the inevitable even further, Dan confronted me in a rare moment of clarity.

He may  not be perfect, but he sure is putting up with a lot.  Out of the blue, and out of his second bottle of wine last night, he had the sudden epiphany (knowing nothing about my Bible Study topic), that I'm going to need to deal with the fact that I believe I am flawed and broken before I am going to be able to deal with any of the surface issues and struggles that have been plaguing me.  Ba-Bam. Convicted.

So I'm going forward. I am still skeptical that a summer bible study is enough. I am skeptical that I will be willing to put enough on the table to really get what I need out of the study.  But apparently its time to put it to prayer, and challenge God to make it happen.  I need to trust and believe that I am no more broken than everyone around me, and that God created me not just how he wanted me to be, but that he made me to be OK, and whole.  Gah!

The Tea That Broke The Camel's Back

Its sad, and slightly amusing, that one tossed batch of sweet tea can be the trigger that made me fall apart.  To be fair, I've been falling apart quite a bit lately, and I know some of that has to due with not being on my medications. The medication battle is an ongoing one.  I forget. I have to plan on feeling sick for one to three days in order to start back up.  That's if we have the money to buy them... which, when we take an impromptu four day vacation to Carlsbad and spend $700 on hotels, we are bound not to have the money... but that was only the most recent unnecessary expenditure that found its way ahead of meds in the priority lists.  Oh my goodness we are so bad with money. So so bad.

Back to tea.  I had just brought the kids back from a failed attempt at geocaching.  They were tired, disappointed, hot, and did I mention tired?  I had been so excited to open up this new adventure for us, and we didn't even find the cache. In fact, by the time we got to the right area the kids were so tired and we were so far from the car, that I knew we couldn't even spare the energy required to hunt for it. Not to mention I wasn't sure it was even still active, since my attempts at signing up for a geocaching.com account and loading the site onto my Android had failed miserably.

I sent the boys up to play with devises in bed for quiet time, and spent a good 30 minutes getting Sara to sleep after one of her epic screaming and crying fits.  And then I saw that Dan had tossed the sweet tea I had just made. Not good enough. Again. I get bored with routine. I can't eat or drink the same thing endlessly, and so I had tried to switch things up. First I made a batch of sun tea using blackberry tea for half of the tea bags.  I think its delicious.  Dan does not.  So I promised him I would make another batch.  Only, when it came time to add the lemon and sugar I remembered that I had used the last lemon on the blackberry tea.  Suddenly I had an idea that I thought was brilliant!  I had been using lemon oil in my water to add flavor, and thought it would be a perfect substitute!  I tried one glass first so as not to spoil the whole batch, and it tasted perfect!  Or so I thought.

About Two hours later Dan took another sip of his tea, which I had noticed gleefully that he had been sipping away at.  But something in that one particular sip caught him awry, and he twisted up his face and scrunched his nose in dissapproval.  "Did you use lemons that had maybe gone bad when you made this?"

Are you serious? I swear no one else on the face of this earth would have been able to tell the difference between a few drops of lemon in his tea instead of the juice of two lemons. GAH! For some reason this irritated me to no end, but I didn't really let it fester until after the geocaching fail. Suddenly I  found myself feeling like I am no more than wasted space.  Good enough to maybe keep the kids alive, and occasionally put passable food on the table.  But other than that, I fall short everywhere.  Not good enough at housekeeping, not good enough at laundry. Definitely not as good at cooking. Not good enough at keeping the kids on task.

This is a huge ridiculous pity party. I totally get that. But aside from getting myself out of the rut of negativity, how can I stop feeling like I fall short, especially from Dan's perspective?  Some days I feel like we are doing it. We are making it. We are spending family time, having game nights, laughing together, laughing with the kids, and then some days I feel like we are a ticking time bomb. Faking it for as long as we can until the facade finally cracks, or time runs out.  I have been so negative lately that I have ditched facebook for at least a month in an effort to stop myself from blabbing my negativity to my friends.  I have even become too much for them. They would of course never say it, but I feel it.  And if I were to say that to them they would be put in a position to tell me I'm wrong whether they mean it or not. And even if they did I doubt I'd believe it.

In order to try to get back to positivity, and living in the moment, I have decided to sort of shut the world out for a bit and focus on my family.  I suppose I had some pretty valiant images in my head of what that might look like, and our geo-caching fail this morning snuffed those out pretty well.  But I need to keep it up. The change isn't going to happen overnight. My attitude has created cycles within the family that will take time to unwind and undo, and if I give up at the first failure, or even the second or tenth, those cycles will never be broken.  For now I will come here to lay out my struggles and vent my darker moments, while posting successes and positivity in the more public places.

Here is what I need to remember as I take this time of refocusing:

1) No matter how useless I feel, taking myself out of the picture will never help my children. I may feel like I am failing them, but being here allows the opportunity for good, while removing myself from the equation is only one possible outcome. Negative.

2) I have not been talking to God, or spending any time in prayer.  Before I run around trying to prove myself, I need to spend some time with Him. Reflecting, searching my heart, and allowing Him to provide me with strength and purpose.