I am a few days behind on writing as usual, but I am particularly behind on a couple that required a bit of thought before they came to me. And I realized today, the condition of my heart, and my whole being all the way down to my very soul is that I am tired.
Honestly I think I have been tired since I became a mom. I wasn’t aware of what kind of tiredness was waiting for me when I became a mom. I have felt slightly bitter about being a mom. It’s not that I don’t love my kids–I would obviously die for them. I love them so much, and I would do it again because they are wonderful little people who are turning into amazing big people who will help save this world. But I understand why some people just don’t want kids. I wasn’t aware of how much work it would be, and even beyond that, I was not aware of how much your heart could break becoming a mom and trying to be even just an average mom, let alone the best mom.
I feel like my kids are going to read this someday and they are going to feel bad about it. They might even be angry. But I have to write the truth about what is happening to me.
It’s been 8 years since they came along, and the last 8 years have been full of contradictions: I love them, but I don’t always like them (the feeling, believe me, is definitely mutual). We have raised them to know that family are people you always love, but you don’t always like them. Like, with my mom, I love her, but I didn’t like her, so I had to end our relationship. Same with us. We love each other, but we might not always like each other. And when it comes down to it, if one of us is being toxic to the other, I would hope that they would be able to have boundaries that are strong enough to do what needs to be done to save themselves.
Tears and laughter–especially lately. Tabitha made me fall over laughing just this morning talking about how there’s another color in the rainbow that she needs to put on her rainbow to make it right, info red (infrared). I felt bad laughing, but it was so unexpected. Orson made me cry last week a lot by just ignoring me, sassing me, and just plain not listening and being a jerk about it.
The amount of time I spend doing things for them just seems to be unappreciated in a lot of ways. One of the reasons I was crying was because I was just tired of doing everything in the house. I get up, I clean, I do laundry, I fold laundry, I hang up laundry, I pick up things that aren’t even mine and put them away. I think I might understand why my mom was so crazy sometimes–I can understand what she was going through as someone who constantly did everything for me. The difference was, she wouldn’t let me do anything because she thought I couldn’t do it the right way–her way. I try not to do that, but it’s hard.
And then when Sarah, Lula and Tyler were murdered, it just added an aspect of tired I wasn’t expecting. I have spent the better part of the last almost three months since they were murdered thinking and feeling and experiencing grief and i am just tired. I am tired of being sad. I am tired of feeling misunderstood for my grief. Adding this to the tiredness I already was feeling for being a mom, it just kind of broke me.
So how do I feel seeing and bearing the condition of my heart? I hope I don’t hurt anyone’s feelings with it. I didn’t write anything I wrote here because I don’t love my family. I love them with all my heart. The reality is that what the world asks of mothers is so similar to how the world views grief–there’s a certain way you should act, and if you don’t do the things expected, in the way you are expected to do them, and you don’t experience them that way, well, you are clearly doing it wrong.
What I need to do is actually start taking better care of myself. Even when the house is a mess, and the kids haven’t put their clothes away, I need to just do something for me. I am taking a mixed media class at our local art center, so this is the first one I am going to do, just for me. If anything, all this tiredness tells me I need to recharge myself to be worth anything for anyone else.
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