A while back, I came across these artistic representations of mental illness as little monsters. I can’t remember who first sent me their way, but I really resonated with the idea. Especially that anxiety is a little, hairy living being. In my mind, it latches onto the back of one shoulder and hangs on to different things in my life, whatever is providing the most interest and fuel. Recently, its entire existence was being fed with our marriage problems. We are still cautious, but the crisis seems to have passed. Anxiety got hungry and after just over a week of calm, it latched onto my self worth.
The last four days have been tough.
(Photo Credit: P. Furniss)
One could argue that as a mostly SAHM with a part-time job that I wear scrubs for, my personal style doesn’t matter. And really, it doesn’t.
I leave my house to go grocery shopping and take my kids to activities or to the library. I go out on dates with my husband or leave the house by myself about twice a month. And when I say go out by myself, I usually mean, solo grocery shopping. I go to church on Sunday. Otherwise, I’m almost never Out In Public.
A lot of life feels like a struggle right now. Home school burnout has been bubbling up for a couple of years now. There are a lot of littles in our house. I get overstimulated. I’m struggling internally because I have everything I need and almost everything I want, and I’m still anxious and depressed.
Life feels hard, and no matter what I wear.
(Dead Horse Point State Park. We stopped there after going to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah on Road Trip 2016. If you are planning a road trip and Utah is on it, stop here. It was breathtaking.)
Recently at the library, I walked up to the counter surrounded by the kids, each holding their own pile of books. The librarian greeted us, and without saying anything else, turned around and pulled my inter-library loan books off of the shelf behind the front desk.
I hadn’t given him my card, he just knows who I am.
It felt really good to be known.
I just quit Facebook a month ago. Most of my closest friends live far away. My local ones friends I see sporadically at best, almost always with kids in tow. Life feels really lonely.
“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” – Seth Godin
Nearly every afternoon I’m sitting on the sofa, recovering from the morning, while my kids have quiet time. Whenever we are at home, we have almost two hours where they do quiet activities in their rooms while I rest downstairs.
My big girls have taken to planning and implementing a curriculum for the littles during this time: they read poetry, art books, and stories, and the littles complete worksheets the girls have made for them with questions like, “What type of bird is this?” next to a drawing of a bird, or “What color comes after orange?” with a rainbow drawn next to it.
Sometimes quiet time is quiet, and other times I spend too much of it going up and down the stairs asking someone to stop screaming, or stop kicking the wall, or stop jumping off the furniture. Sometimes I’m so tired and it’s so quiet, I manage to fall asleep.
The golden hour of afternoon sunlight coincides with quiet time at this time of year. We often don’t start until close to two, and so the time stretches toward four, and the sunlight passes by the windows and makes everything glow.
(Photo Credit: Kimona Paramour Photography)
The end of our trip to Tobago was amazing. It’s easy to be adventurous when your time is limited. I can be up for anything with only 72 hours left to go. Until we have our plane tickets in hand for our next trip, which we hope to make in about a year, we can’t know for sure when we’ll be back.
Every chance we have to do something special needs to be grabbed and squeezed for all it’s worth. We can recover when we get home.
