Summer has already come and gone, quickly and efficiently. Last weekend was Labor day and we spent it on the lake with all the kids, some friends, and more kids in tow plus a few international exchange students to boot. At one point I sat at the bow of the boat as my husband drove dragging the tube with a gaggle of screaming children on it, our 2 year old in my lap with the wind in both of our hair and the bump, bump, rhythmic bump of the boat hitting the ever so gentle waves of the lake as the sky cast an orange glow of the not too distant sunset across the horizon in front of us. "There you are, dad", I thought ever so silently while wrapping my son in my arms even tighter. "This is what you felt on the lake? This is why you were a self described lake rat? Is this why my thrill seeker son and my defensive son both turn into angels on the lake?" I thought. I fought back the tears and the mourning. Trying not to let myself get encompassed by the overwhelming thought of grieving a near stranger and I simply felt him touch my shoulder and embrace me, much like he did the last time he saw me. "I love you, kid", I heard in my ear and I smiled.
Moments like this with my dad unsettle me in ways that make me reopen to our kids. With six kids coming and going through our home, we are a perpetual time machine. We measure time in days, custody, sleeps, school days, and work if not more. We juggle. Constantly. We are the masters of controlled chaos. And we have now been doing this for three years as a family under the same roof, not including the dating stages and the chaos of single parenthood before that. And we have my full time career where I juggle the demands of managing a department of 9 full time employees and 10 plus student employees. My husband has his own career and we have kids coming and going from various homes. One of the ex'es has yet again petitioned for more money, despite there being a decrease in their time and so we look at each other and think, "Par for the course, they haven't realized the big picture yet", and we settle in to the chaos.
With all of this comes the reality of my life. I grew up the daughter of a parent fighting bipolar disorder and a detached parent with alcoholism. I quickly become the parent at home once my older siblings moved out. Now I see how fitting this was and God's purpose because it has made me the mother I am. Not just to the children I birthed from my body, but those with other mothers who I love just as dearly while still respecting the differences and the roles I truly play. I look back at my life and the last three months realizing my own grasp on life has slowly unraveled. Not in any big, dramatic, Hollywood check into the mental ward way. But in ways I slowly identified I have been fighting since before the life I now live.
Let's rewind to 2003. I was in an abusive relationship and had almost broken free for the last time. We weren't married, nothing tied us together and I let him know as much. Rookie mistake 101. There is much that will be left out, because my children could eventually one day come to find this and read through it and at the end of the day all I care about is how much they are loved and how much I want them, regardless of how their father and I ended up together. So all I will say is eventually I stuck around, we got pregnant, married in the church's way so as not to be sinners,and I determined to love this man till death that I vowed before God to honer. And I did. Eventually a beautiful little girl was born almost 14 years ago, that blessed me to be a mother for the first time.
And the first inklings of what I've finally come to face in 2017 awoke. After a 39 hour labor, being left on pitocen for 12 hours past delivery with no pain meds, and throwing up nonstop I fought away the tears and self guilt that left me feeling like I was going straight to mom hell and asked the nurses . . .no begged them with tears to please take my daughter to the nursery so I could get some sleep. Every 30 minutes a nurse came in after that and checked my uterus and pushed and made me bleed and cry in pain. I finally told my husband the next nurse he let wake me up would die, I was that mad for sleep and full of anxiety and fear but knew I needed to steal away a few hours of sleep before the reality of going home settled in.
Over the next few months I settled into new motherhood, pleasantly surprised by the change in my husband. He was doting, loving towards our girl, almost obsessive with his bragging about us. A side I'd never seen, but a side I desperately (or was it pathetically?) needed. Months and months of abuse do not wear away quickly, even if only emotional. I couldn't walk through a store without holding my daughter, grasping her so closely to my chest I could barely breathe for fear someone else would drop her. I could envision her falling and her skull crashing to the floor. I would quickly put the thoughts out of my mind and focus on the list I needed to buy, trying not to be terrified by the overwhelming taste of anxiety that had suddenly and for the first time ever crept into my life. As long as I was holding her no harm would come, I would tell myself and I would carry on with the shopping.
It continued. In bits and pieces the anxiety pushed aside the thoughts of a careful and spiritually planned life I had envisioned. With each push, each abusive word, with each affair my anxiety grew higher. At times I could taste it, sometimes literally as the blood on my lips from him. She had colic, the kind that keeps you awake from 7 pm to 4 am and then never naps but 20 minutes of a stretch in your arms during the day. I thought I would go mad, but knew babies do this and so I would walk back and forth, nurse, walk, bounce and jump while holding her to get the baby gas to pass. My husband's days would draw out longer and longer and I was too consumed with caring for our daughter to give a second thought to who he was spending the time with, all while knowing deep down that's where he really was. And then the anxiety would grow. What if someone came into the house and found the knives and killed us all? I need to hide them. Yes, I knew they were irrational thoughts but I fought them virtually while dealing with them in a logical manner (or so I thought). If anxiety can't control you, it cannot ruin you and surely it means you aren't crazy. Surely it means your husbands affairs and abuse don't exist.
Fast forward to baby number two and the same thoughts and fear and anxieties crept up and overpowered me. My number one goal as a fresh mother each time was to protect them from the deadly, terrifying fears of the world they could not protect themselves from. Each and every time heightened by however many walls my husband pushed me against or however many women I would find added to his facebook, texts, or flat out flirting I'd find on his phone. One night I finally felt a soul ripping come to Jesus moment when I was face to face with his affairs and us splitting and pregnancy. I checked myself in. Surely, I was the crazy one. This is what he had told me for years and maybe I really was just so stupid and in denial and it really was me.
I stayed four hours. Four long, tear filled interrogating hours. As the four hours wrapped up I found myself huddled in the warmest blanked with two counselors hugging me. Begging me to go home, pack up my children and immediately head to a shelter for women of domestic violence as soon as I was assured my husband was asleep. "Do you have family you can stay with? You cannot go back to that. You're not having a mental break down. You are not suicidal. You have not expressed anything to us to believe you are a risk to yourself, let alone your children. Why are you here?" Because, I had so much anxiety my husband would kill not only me but my children I thought I was going mad because who marries someone like that? They discharged me, hopeful I'd escape that night but powerless to do much more.
My husband picked me up. He asked how it had gone. He cried and pleaded with me to stay with him. And I let the weakness of my pain overtake the anxiety that was trying to save me and my children from further damage. All these years later I can finally see. My anxiety was trying to save me. Just like it recently has.
I won't go through the rest of my history. It is here on my blog for anyone to read through. It isn't a history I like to relive. It is probably the main reason I have so much anxiety, living for years with heightened cortisol levels in a highly abusive situation with a borderline individual is like living in a live war-zone. Somehow I survived. But I forgot to get myself the help we need afterwards. Denying that history, that anxiety and being faced with it constantly and having to make nice with it spurred my anxiety into overdrive. Paired with the chaos of our lives, the chaos of our ex'es and trying to do it all right for the kids we love and adore . . .
I found myself back in the spiral. You see just because you look at a face and think - she is strong, she has it down, she's doing it. That doesn't mean we really are. My anxiety had once again gotten the best of me and for about 2 months I lost myself all over again. But for the first time in my life I was paired with someone who truly, deeply, whole heartedly, willing to pull me from the depths of hell loves me. And now I know I don't need that to only save myself, but to accept what a graceful, all encompassing blessing that type of love is to make the hurts of this world that much softer.
"I'm going to go in. I'm not sleeping again. Like back when the worst was the worst. And I'm having constant nightmares. And I'm tired. All the time. Like how do I function tired", I told him. Fearful admitting to this would hurt either of our custody cases. He put his arm on my shoulder, "Okay". Looking at me with eyes that said I'm here if you'd like to talk more and I'm here until you're ready to talk more. "I'm going to ask the doctor for sleeping meds and something for anxiety,".
"Okay". He said. Even. Comfortable. Without any fear. He trusted me. Or at least that is what came across.
"I have to take care of me and I'm tired in ways I can't describe and I just need the nightmares and wakings to stop". I plead my case and he looked back at me with eyes so crystal clear and without any hint of doubt that I finally stopped doubting myself. Years and years of anxiety. Years and years of abuse and high cortisol and chaos and fear. Piled into one space that was finally breaking free. And I broke in that moment in time. Every single piece of me shattered, I could not breathe. The nightmares the pain, the trauma that followed me everywhere I went.
I was hit with the resounding statement I made to him the night we both told each other we loved you. I said to him I was terrified that when I finally found someone I loved and who loved me back, I would be struck with cancer or some life altering disease and I would shortly thereafter die. Because I always knew my ex was not strong enough to support me through something as horrific as cancer. I'd always known it from day one. This was it, this is what was trying to kill me and I'd been fighting wasn't it? Same as it killed my dad. I thought it had been the preliminary cancer scare that pushed me to get a hysterectomy, but what if this was it? What if anxiety finally led me to my own destruction.
It's now been four and a half weeks since I went to my doctor and started on an anti anxiety meds. Big moment for me to even admit to, for fear people will think I have what my mom does or that the ex'es will use it against me. Instead of feeling shame though, I feel a sense of pride because I looked at my issues and after over a decade of hiding it from other people I am finally admitting to what my inner battle is. We ALL have it. Each and every one of us. Some are borderline, some are bipolar, some are anxious, some are addicts, some are afraid to live the life they feel they are destined to, but each and every one of us has something we fight and battle to the ground with. This thing they call anxiety is mine. And for the first time in 37 years I'm finding a strength and resolve in facing mine. Maybe it is I'm aging. Maybe it is I'm growing tired. Maybe it is the strength in my husband's resolve to love me regardless. Maybe it is how much I miss my dad and I never got to take him as my own. Or maybe it's watching this man see me at my absolute worst fighting the demons of not only the anxiety but the past and the present battle they bring to our home, and him still willfully, faithfully, over everything else choosing God and us. Maybe it is the fact he was baptized last week with my oldest daughter and I'm reminded to keep the course because there is more than this mere mortal life. I can't answer exactly what it is that despite being mid-battle with yet another ex and their battle and honestly I don't care. Because ultimately, there is no shame in the fact that I am fighting a battle so many other silent bodies are fighting, who are shamed to speak about it. I am facing my battle whole heartedly for what is is. And I will not be ashamed. This is part of life, or at least the life of a blended family and a past of survival.
I don't know how this will turn out. I do know that four weeks later I am feeling better. I am not one to go to medication, I've delivered five babies without a single drug and aim to live a more holistic life. That being said, when a body is diseased and needing meds to fight it - to ignore that need is not only stupid but it should be criminal. I'm done living that way where I think I can be better, smarter, wiser than the disease. Maybe the generalized anxiety disorder my son has is inherited. Maybe not. I can't say. Maybe it's from my gestating him so very full of anxiety. Either way if I cannot learn to treat it for myself, how will I help him to combat it himself?
So, I continue with the medication. I find myself breathing again. Something I've not done in a very long time. I find myself processing the trauma and fear and utter heart stopping anxiety of the pregnancy I carried after my husbands loss. I find myself saying no more to anxiety and enough to fear. I find myself settling in and ignoring the OCD stuff and leaning towards the mother I used to be who read every night with the kids and cuddled in with them, just because she could. And yes, even the kids that did not come from my womb. I find myself sharing moments with all of them and smiling I'd lost the last year. Today I got the 4 year old and the 2 year old ready for school and they both did not want to go. Both were crying to stay home with me, please! My guilt started up and I thought to myself how in the world I was going to get through this morning. Instead of shutting it out, I sat down and the 2 year old climbed into my lap and laid his head on my shoulders. The 4 year old looked over and said, "Me, too, mama?". I said yes and they both climbed up on me. My son owning my left side and our daughter owning the right side. My head just hovered above them while my body wrapped them in tight.
Here i was sitting with two kids who I loved deeply but with different histories and different moms. But it didn't matter. I ached deeply for both because it no longer mattered who was whose mom. And I stopped worrying with excessive anxiety how my reaction would be interpreted or read and solely cared about the children in that minute. Both kids just needed early morning snuggles and I thought, "Okay, you're finally back J". Because instead of rushing them through the morning and getting their 'tasks and schedules' handled, all I cared about was that they went through their days with their hearts full and warmed. THIS is who I am. This is the mom I miss. The one so anxious and distracted that she just shuffles everyone through the routine? No, I don't want to be THAT mom. I want to be the one who gives them the heart full of love, so that no matter what happens, what anxiety they face - they know. Because I will tell you, without knowing the love my husband and my sisters (who also played a huge role in me pushing for self help), I wouldn't have finally emerged from the hell of anxiety. It's been a LONG 13 years. I can't even begin to express the journey of these last 13 years while trying to hide my anxiety from everyone and every thing. But I'm hitting the other side, finally. This isn't a victory dance but it's more so a milestone. I'm not scared anymore. I'm not overtaken by anxiety. I'm living fully and hopefully, again.
We don't talk about this stuff in the light. We hide it and girlfriends have conversations in the dark about it. Afraid it will take away who they are or others will judge them. Or judges will take away custody. When really this is part of life. No different than diabetes or asthma. See a problem fill a need. Stop hiding in the dark. Start demanding yourself to be treated as enough. I am. And I never intend on going back to hiding in the dark.
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