I don’t think I need to state out loud that I’m a stress monkey right now.  That’s probably obvious.  I have better days and worse days.  I’m not doing great but I’m not hiding in the garage all day.  I’m getting productive stuff done.  I’m mostly doing ok with the kids.  Except when I’m not.

And I’m really not doing very well with Noah.  This is one of the things that it’s hardest to talk about.  I’m not being very nice to my husband.  I mean, I do things for him.  I mostly don’t take everything out on him.  Except that sometimes I do.  And he doesn’t like it.  I suppose it is probably reasonable and all that he gets sick of me being nasty.  The thing is, I’m not sure what to do about this situation right now.  We are both under a fair bit of stress (young children will do that to you anyway) and we both have an enormous amount of work we have to do that we don’t want to do.  And I’ve had Big Life Events again this month compounding my lifetime of them that I’m not doing very well at suppressing lately.

Because the thing is, in order to be with my kids I really do have to suppress memories.  It is a conscious act of will to do it.  And given how I feel right this minute about being silenced, you know… this really sucks.  It is very hard not to feel resentful of my children just because they deserve the right to grow up in complete ignorance of even the word incest.  But they do deserve it.  It’s my job to provide that world to them.

I wonder if that is (at least part of) why my mom refused to talk about it.  I wonder if she believed that children shouldn’t have those concepts so we’ll just sweep it under the rug and it will be all better.  Naw, I doubt she thought about it that much.  But I think about it all the time.  I think about the fact that I don’t want to be a bitter, harping shrew like my mother.  I think about my vicious ex-boyfriend who threw it in my face that it was inevitable that I would be a nasty, bitter alcoholic who dies alone.

When I have days like today, when my anxiety is running high and I’m not medicated, these are the days that make me afraid.  I don’t want to lose my life.  I don’t want to lose my husband.  I don’t want to lose my precious baby girls.  I don’t want to lose me.  I don’t know how to get a handle on my anxiety sometimes.  And I am so very mean. 🙁

I’m not mean to Noah and the kids all day.  But I go pick fights on the internet and rant and rave about them.  I try very hard to manufacture a place for me to pour all of my unhappy feelings and stir them up. I don’t really have any place in my life where I can do that.  My options right now are to bottle up my feelings or scream at my family.  It’s not appropriate for me to talk about my shit in front of my kids.  It’s not appropriate for me to ditch my kids all the time so that I can go somewhere else and talk about it.  And really, I already feel like no one gives a shit.  They are done listening.  I need to stop whining because I am such a pathetic baby.

All I can do is write on the internet.  And hope no asshole comes along and tells me what I should do to deal with my anxiety.  Which isn’t to say that everyone who wants to help me is an asshole.  But there are assholes out there, let me tell you.  The thing is, even when it’s nice people.  They want to help.  They want so badly to help.  And when I say, no that won’t work then they say, “Well how do you know unless you try!”  My internal dialogue to that is FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU  Until you live with the monsters in my head don’t fucking tell me what I should do.  Because when you tell me what I should do you are telling me to be different from who I am.

It’s hard to explain why I have a hard time with advice without offending people.  So I feel like I shouldn’t bother trying to explain.  No one actually gives a shit why I don’t want advice.  I’m supposed to sit and smile and nod and say thank you.  That’s what polite people do, right?

Being polite hasn’t historically gone well for me.  When I am polite I have muddy boundaries.  I don’t know how to do polite and firm at the same time.  I know how to have firm boundaries or muddy boundaries.  When I am trying to be nice–they’re muddy.  And that doesn’t go well.  Because I ignore small incursions into my space and then there are more and more and then I blow up.

“Just be present in the moment.”  I don’t have anxiety because I am worried about paying my mortgage.  I have anxiety because I have had a shitty life and some times that is shittier than others.  I’m cussing a lot because I’m frustrated.  But I’ve been cussing way too much and way too close to my kids.  So I feel like once again I’m a bad person.

If someone tells me to be present in the moment in my life I feel like they are telling me that what I have been doing so far isn’t being present.  It doesn’t count.  I am present in the moment, motherfucker.  I’m talking.  I’m interacting.  I’m working.  I’m getting shit done in the moment.  I just also have a horrid stomach ache because somewhere in the corner of my brain I’m saying, “My mother didn’t love me enough to try to prevent me being raped and she didn’t love me enough to let me talk about it once it happened.  My mother doesn’t love me.”

I don’t think I’m grieving Uncle Bob.  I’m grieving my mother.  I kind of wish she would die already so this could just be at an end.  Hell, I’ll even take another suicide with a nasty suicide note.  It would at least be peace from this constant feeling of wanting to go find her and beg for her forgiveness.  I want her to forgive me for speaking.  I want to promise I will never every speak of it again.  I’m sorry.  Yes, I lied.

I want my mommy.  But I don’t get to have a mommy.  Not really.  Not this lifetime.  It’s too late.  I lean heavily on some of the women in my life, but it isn’t the same.  They are peers.  They are friends.  I kind of feel like forever, for the rest of my life, I just don’t get to have anyone I love and respect in that kind of role.  And that’s hard.  I’m not ready to be the female head of household.  I’m too young.  I’m too fucked up.  I’m not good at being the stable one for everyone to depend on.  Today I feel like a complete failure at my life.  What I am supposed to be as the mom here is the one people lean on.  But I’m not.  Because if you lean on me, I fall down.  And my daughter already knows that.

And that right there, that is the thing that is making it hard to stay at 50% interest in surviving.  Because I have already failed at the most important thing in my life.