Coming out

A while back a friend of mine e-mailed me describing some stresses she was having with her family life. She introduced the topic by saying she'd been catching up on my blog and didn't know how I could manage to be so "zen" about everything, even when it was hard. Immediately I sat down to reply, wanting to disabuse her of any idea that I somehow manage to maintain perfect calm and balance in the thick of this parenting and married life.

It's important to me to be an open, honest person, and not to pretend that my life is a bowl of cherries when it feels like a bowl of shit. I believe that we liberate others to be themselves when we can show who we really are: imperfect homes, parenting mistakes, relationship struggles and all. How intimidating and unapproachable are those people who seem to have it all together, who never admit to the struggles that frankly, we all face in our daily lives. I want my friends and family to feel safe revealing the good, bad and ugly with me, to know they can leave their dirty socks on my living room floor because I offer a place of comfort over a place of perfection. So I try to tell the truth, without veering into negativity, because I am blessed in countless ways.

That being said, I think we all present different faces to different people depending on the context and relationship. If we could be a fly on the wall in most people's homes we would see sides of them we have never seen. It's not a matter of not being genuine, it's a matter of having boundaries and of choosing how I want to be perceived, and what I want to put out into the world.

When I started this blog, I wanted it to be an honest place to talk about the struggles and joys that go with parenting and trying to live in accord with my values. But I also wanted it to be a positive place, a place of reflection, and a place where readers could find solutions or at least some small comfort that they are not alone, and it is not as bad as they thought. It's also important to respect my family's privacy, so you will never see me writing here about marital issues, and my extended family's personal problems, or certain aspects of my child's life (especially as he grows). That doesn't mean those things aren't happening and affecting me daily.

Still, I generally try to stay positive, to practice gratitude and to give of myself to the people I love and to my community. I make it a priority to maintain my inner peace, so whenever something throws me off balance, I like to try to address it right away. The problem is, as life moves forward and changes, often the balance point shifts, and I lose sight of the fact that I am toppling down, down, down into burnout and exhaustion. This is what has been happening lately, and if you had been a fly on our wall this week you would have seen a side of me that even I haven't seen since I was a teenager, a person filled with rage, throwing things, crying, out of control. I blew my top.

There is no-one to blame in it, nobody intentionally made me angry that day. What happened is this. I got pregnant in early February. That cat's out of the bag now. As happens in early pregnancy, my body started sucking my energy down into my womb, building another person, new organs, blood, and a volatile cocktail of hormones. I became tired and testy, and I craved solitude and quiet time. But we were moving. So I packed, cleaned, ran errands and arranged details. I also decided to take on night weaning because I saw it as the first step in a process of getting the Boodge into total sleep independence before the baby came. Sleep became severely disrupted--pile on the exhaustion.

After we moved, many friends and family came to visit to check out the new home and offer help where they could. It was lovely to see them all, and generous of them to travel and give their time to help us. I am grateful, and to show my gratitude I worked hard to suppress my craving for solitude and peace and to hide my exhaustion and irritability. Instead I cleaned, made yummy meals, and forced myself to be cheerful and loving with my guests. And I did feel cheerful and loving. But when each person left and I had a day or two until the next, I felt myself decompressing, trying to soak up the emptiness of the house and the safety of being with my little family.

There's another side to all of this, which is part of who I am. We all have ways of coping with stress. If you study psychology, you learn that there are some pretty typical patterns. There's the person who buries their head in the sand, or runs away somehow through work, substance abuse, shopping, or whatever his or her drug of choice happens to be. There's the person that creates more drama and chaos, so that all resources and attention go their way (this can be a great way to stop parents from fighting when you're a kid). And there's people like me, who go into super-caretaking mode, unconsciously stuffing my own needs away and instead making sure everyone and everything around me is getting what they need to make this stress a bit less stressful. Because if they're OK, I'm OK, right?

I used to be much worse than I am now. But still, when stress hits, it's easy to revert to old habits. Plus, my whole life was shifting--home, town, and body. Hormones are affecting me in ways I don't understand. That makes it harder to consult the inner compass and see that I'm straying off course.

So the last of the visitors left last weekend and I felt my soul reach for "me" time. But then my son had little wee naps and refused to go to bed early but woke up at 6am anyway, and so my days dragged on in exhaustion, I got no time to myself, and my resentment began to build. Finally, on Thursday, after finally getting the little dude to sleep only to have him wake up the MINUTE I finished doing what I had to do and sat down to relax, I blew.

It was ugly. I scared myself, and probably also my husband and child. And I felt embarrassed afterwards. But I also realized that I had let it get to this point by ignoring, suppressing, telling myself I could do it, just a little longer, just hold it together. Eventually, the body and soul have to send a clear signal, and mine did. Two days later, I came down with a flu.

So here I am on the other side, reminded that I am not superwoman. I realize that some of the long term parenting practice I have, such as nursing my babe to sleep and always being the one to comfort him in the night, have got to change. There's a new kid in town now, and the little peanut is already carving out some space for him/herself. And Mama needs her space too. As a dear friend told me the other day, I'm the most important one, because I'm the Mama. But that is so hard to believe, with all the sacrifice of self that motherhood demands, and all the cultural mythology of the perfect, all giving mother that is out there.

It's time to make some changes, set some boundaries, and ask for help. And I have begun that process. It shouldn't be that hard, but for me, it often is. I feel guilty, and I get down on myself for not being the person I could've or should've been. I wonder, just as my friend who e-mailed me did, how other people can handle it all so well when I can't. But I suspect everyone has moments like these.

So I guess I wanted to share this with you all, not to invite your pity or sympathy, but just to admit the truth, and hope that you all recognize that truth in yourselves too. Hope that I am not alone. And to remind myself, and you all, that the expectations we set for ourselves in life are just expectations, and just our own. It is only a matter of giving ourselves permission to be human, and to do differently. I hope you can be better than I have been lately at listening to that voice inside you telling you what you need to change. It's always in there, but it is all too easy to ignore.