EIM: Tired

I am so tired.  

I have spent so many days, hours and energy taking care of other people.  Always being on alert to their feelings and preferences and wants and needs and and and and and and and and it never ends.  

I am so tired.  

I feel quite fragile inside actually.  I want to go away; I want to go somewhere that I can wake up each day and do nothing but take care of myself.  I am terrified and scared and deep in my soul I yearn for that space.  I think I can keep soldiering for a million years, but I just don’t want to anymore.  

I was 19 with a bulging belly and standing right on the precipice of exile.  I wondered what it would feel like to be hated and I wondered what it would feel like to be so banished that I would need to create my own everything, but it never happened.  I was almost there, but although it was threatened, it never happened.  

As a mom, I was so patterned and committed and incredibly savored with the recipe for success.  I was invisible and used to being dumped on, used to listening intently for the need.  So careful; I paid such careful attention to the slightest whimper and as soon as it came, I disappeared.  

I want to hear waves and have nothing better to do than create a schedule each day.  I have 5 kids, one very small so that could never happen. I really don’t want that to happen, but I need that to happen. 

I have mothered for more than half my life and I never even had a choice.   I love those little people, and yet, I would have loved to have been given a choice. A real choice. I can soldier for a million years, but I don’t want to.  

Recently, I felt so good after getting my hair done. Polite adult conversation and healthy touches created a resolve to be a centered adult and better parent, healthier partner.  Later on, I was having a great discussion and interaction with Dana, and then I started to notice the time.  She would be expecting me, she would be upset if I was late, and I am upset to have to again put my needs aside, and we keep getting put in the pressure cooker.  This is the heavy weight of hypervigilance. 

She and I jumped right in together on that damn precipice.  I asked a clarifying question, divorce brought in, too many tears, too many problems and not enough solutions.  

“I don’t want your solutions!” she says.  “I want your hug.”  

I cannot muster a hug. I am the huggiest person in the world and this is one of the most huggable humans in the world and I still don’t have a hug-- not one hug.  

I deteriorate in seconds; the resolve and the bettering and the health dissolving like sugar in Coke, and what’s left is the dying soldier.  

I don’t like this song “Look up” by Joy Oladokun. I don’t want to look up, or go up the sky is bluer and bluer until it’s black and desolate and full of nothing and no way to get grounded.  I don’t want to be a pessimist, but I am, at this moment, I’m a realist– I just realized how incredibly fragile I feel inside and how much I want discipline and resolve but can’t for the life of me muster it. 

I just want to go and live in a beautiful town in Italy with quaint houses and crooked roads and nothing that even resembles a city.  Where fishermen bring in the catch, and the task of the day is to walk down to the market and purchase the fresh delicacy and consume it by the fresh water that brought it in.  I am blessed and I have it so good. I do, I truly do, and my insides are a little bit broken and a lot of bit sad.  I have been sitting in this chair for years now, trying to climb out of the deepest pit I have ever been in, and today, almost five years out, I am very fragile and delicate. The idea of discipline and resolve are still far out of reach.  Maybe it’s time to read Shipwreck again, that once gave me the most flesh of any substance out there.  Each day reading bits, just taking the smallest bite was enough nourishment for just that day.  

In some ways the pleaser in me has become worse.  More acutely attuned to the babies that came from those empty spaces. They were precisely what kept me acceptable in the eyes of—.  I would be nothing without them, their expectation and contribution have become so minuscule.  I was not enough, but they were… and now what?

I am so tired.