Lost

(This post comes with a disclaimer: I am not depressed and I am not looking for sympathy here, empathy maybe but not sympathy. I simple need to get some of this out of my head. Any support will be appreciated, but please know I am aware of all the good fortune I have, and appreciate the life I lead. This isn’t a whine or a cry for help, I’m just trying to push all this negative energy out of my brain.)

I’m lost these days.

I don’t know what it is, or why I can’t shake it, or how come I’ve lost my way, but I am lost. I am lost because I feel alone. I am lost because I don’t like the person I am right now. I am lost because I am not where I am supposed to be.

Depending on how much of me you can tolerate, you may or may not know what has happened in my life throughout 2011. I try not to blog too much about all the things that have happened, because I want to blog about my life as a mother. Of all the things happening this year, the one place I feel good is in motherhood. While there are days or phases or experiences that I don’t love, or that I don’t feel like I do well at, overall Everly is the light of my life. She is the reason we make it through, the reason I bother to get up in the morning, the reason I haven’t gone off the deep end completely yet. Everly continues to grow and develop into this amazing person. Stubborn, head strong and opinionated just like her mother, she consumes me with joy and love. She is funny, she is silly and she is brilliant. The way she learns, the way life is fresh and exciting every day, and the way she has so much unconditional love is humbling. Even on the hardest days, when we just can’t get in sync and everything we’re doing is going wrong, I still want to wake her in the night because being apart from her for those 10-12 hours is too hard.

I don’t even reflect that love and joy enough around these blog parts, I know that. This is part of my problem, and part of what I don’t love about myself. I’m often told by people that they love my blog for it’s honesty and humour, and that is great. I pride myself on being honest, realistic and straight forward but, being this way doesn’t win any awards in the ultimate mother category, and it doesn’t get me an invitation to the “happy fun awesome mommy bloggers” club. Not that I ever expected one (or care to have one). I fear that I come off as cynical, angry or negative about being a parent, and that is not how I feel about that at all. There are however struggles, and that is something I have an easier time writing about; it’s actually kind of why I write. I need to get things out of my head and somewhere else, before they drown me.

I’m a sarcastic, somewhat snarky, totally bitchy person, this I know. I always have been, and always will be. That said, I used to also be a happy, fun loving person that laughed at things daily and made a point to treat people with kindness, and show my appreciation for the life I have made. I do believe you can be a snarky bitch while also being a happy person; the two are not mutually exclusive. I know I can have that dry sense of humour while also reveling in the joys of being a mother. I know you can have it all, but right now, I am failing at it. I’m failing at that and a lot of other things.

Anyone who has Tweeted with me knows the gist of my troubles. My dad and step-mother of 25 years got a divorce at the beginning of 2011 due to infidelity on her part, and things haven’t stopped falling apart around me since. I returned to work after my year off, only to realize I’m not sure what I’m doing here. Right before I went back to work, my husband lost his job. That was 9 months ago, and the prospects are still looking pretty grim. He continues to apply, have interviews and then not get hired. His industry is crumbling, and his already shaky self esteem has taken a hit. We are now trying to sell our house in order to afford to keep living, but no one is buying it. We worked our asses off; blood sweat tears and cash we don’t have went into getting that place picture perfect, only to have a bunch of people tell us the house we love so much just isn’t good enough for them. The whole things is depressing.

On top of all the major things like divorces and lost jobs, came all the usual things that happen in a year. Loved ones fell ill, good friends suffered hardships, we had a stolen car, a sick dog, and no less than 957 other seemingly small disasters occur. The things that break a person don’t have to be big, they just have to be hard and incessant like that. It’s actually worse when they are just a collection of small things, because then no one really understands why you’re having such a hard time managing them. No one understands how each thing chips away at you slowly, because no one else can see them all lined up in a row, staring at you, threatening you.

So I’m lost. I am struggling day in an day out to keep it all together; in fact I’m struggling just to breathe, and frankly I’m not doing very well at it all.

I am not being the model of a woman, of a mother, of a wife, of a friend that I want to be for Everly. I am not showing her how to grab life by the throat and kick it’s ass, and I’m not showing her enough about the simple joys. I used to be a great friend to many people, but I’m so busy in my own head, feeling jealous of things that are simple for others or being too wrapped up in my frustrations to be good to my friends. I’m sure they miss the fun me, and the me who was there for them. I am just so distracted and swallowed up in myself to be myself, if that makes sense. I spend too much time in my own head to be properly present to Everly and the others around me, and that just adds to my feeling lost.

The plain and simple fact is that I just can’t seem to find my way through all of this. I’m exhausted by the struggle. I’m angry at the way I’ve failed to handle the things in life that so many other people go through. I am just so overwhelmed with both the anger at myself and at the world that sometimes, I find it hard not to scream, cry and break things (and sometimes I do).

I’ve gone on this long, blaming 2011 for all the problems in my life, and waiting for it to be over. I spent the first half hating life, and assuming that an entire year cannot be so awful to 1 family. I waited for the arbitrary date of June 15, to mark a change and push the trajectory of our life towards the upward swing. And then it didn’t happen. Instead of things getting better, they just got worse. So now I sit and wait out the rest of the year, and hope that 2012 brings us something better. I hope that, but I also live in constant fear that it won’t. It’s not even fear so much as just knowing things aren’t going to change.

I’m not the person I used to be, and I’m not the person I want to be. I don’t like myself. I don’t like the way I handle the every day challenges. I don’t like the fact that my patience is worn so thin that I am having trouble handing even the simple problems these days. I don’t like that I experience so much of life in a state of frustration and that I’m missing out on the good things being overwhelmed by the bad. I don’t like that the cry bubble is constantly wedged in my throat, or that my face tells the tale of an unhappy girl.

I struggle to keep it all together. I am a mother, a wife, a woman, and it’s my job to keep everything running. I must bare the brunt of all the troubles in my life, so that others can live in a happier, more content state. I want to take it all on, push it deep down inside and never let it out. I don’t want to tell people how I’m feeling because I know that compared to a lot of the struggles other people go through, mine pale in comparison. We have a roof, we have food, we have love and health, and that’s more than a lot of people can say these days. Honestly, I have no right to complain.

I work extremely hard to try and make the ends meet, and though they continue to slip further and further away from each other and the knots get harder to tie, I’m trying. I feel like I’m trying to swim backwards up a waterfall made of molasses, but I’m goddamn trying. I’m trying to work and run a house and make my toddlers life amazing and make my husband love me and make him and I happy. And it hurts to fail so much when you’re trying so hard.

I’m lucky enough to have a husband who participates and contributes to the daily tasks of life as much as he does. He isn’t the type to call things “women’s work” or to sit back and let me do a brunt of the chores. That said, I’m still the mother and the wife and the woman, and classic gender roles still do rear their ugly heads. While I haven’t touched laundry since he stopped working, I am still responsible for getting a lot of things done daily, and I guarantee you he doesn’t know what diapers she uses or what size clothes she wears. Despite being the bread winner, there are a ton of tasks that are still mine and I sometimes start to wonder how I’m ever going to keep it all together. It’s overwhelming wearing so many different hats, and wearing them all so poorly.

Sometimes I don’t even keep it together. I break things, I burn dinner, I forget to buy milk or diapers, I yell at my husband, I cry at nothing. Things just slip and fall apart. And then I’m angry at myself and resentful of how my life has turned out and I start to get angry. Angry at the cards we’ve been dealt, angry at our inability to make lemonade out of lemons, angry at it all.

I used to actually buy into that bullshit that everything happens for a reason, but there is no reason for all of this. There is no reason for any of the things people struggle through. Some people are lucky, some people make better decisions and some people just get screwed over and over. I really think it’s mostly a numbers game.

So I’m lost. I’m lost because I’ve lost a part of what makes me me. I’ve lost my optimism, I’ve lost the ability to look forward to things. I’ve lost the simple joys. I’ve lost myself.

If anyone see’s me somewhere out there in the ether, please let me know. I kind of miss the person I used to be. The person I liked.

Tagged as: Advice, Happiness, Mom Fail, Mommy Rant, Why Oh Why