Fuck, I’m tired.
When I wake in the morning I feel like I haven’t slept at all.
Guess a trip to the Doc is in order.
It’s probably just emotional exhaustion. At least that’s what they tell me each time I’ve gone in for fatigue.
So, many feelings. I feel like saying, “it’s hard being a parent,” is so cliché but holy shit, being a parent is difficult.
Loving someone so much and being terrified you’re gonna mess it up is not talked about enough. With each birth up to a year after each of my three were born I went through crippling postpartum depression and anxiety. These thoughts were at the center of my torment.
I never thought that I didn’t trust myself until I had kids. When I had kids all my self-esteem or lack thereof at the time, came through. The paternal script I had heard all of my life from my own caretakers came through clearer, and suddenly, I felt I wasn’t fit to raise a kid. I felt I wasn’t grown up enough to raise a kid. Everything became a threat, walking too fast while carrying him, seeing knives left in the sink, the oven, the bathtub, being too warm in the blankets, being too cold, outside the blankets, sleeping alone in the crib, my own anxiety. What if I lost it? What if I died while alone with him? Holy shit I could go on and on.
My saving grace was getting help. And in this help I was told the dread from anxiety is a nightmarish hell, and for me it was my gift. I’ll explain. My main fear was I was going to lose touch with reality. I was terrified of losing control, to the extreme. In the most broken down form of this, I needed to maintain control. I wanted to know in certainty that he was always going to be ok and that I was too. It was torture. So, how was dread a gift for me? It told me that because I felt fear of losing control and hurting him, the dread proved that deep down it was something I did not want. I went through this for about a year and learned how to recognize the fear and not let it dictate my reaction.
Now with my daughters it was completely different. My 1st daughter it wasn’t until she came out of babydom that my anxiety took off. I had a parental wound that I didn’t realize was super deep and a sexual assault from when I was a teenager. As well as a miscarriage that was between the births of my two daughters.
There was a lot to unpack and at the peak of all of this my 2nd daughter, while grocery shopping with my partner and my eldest daughter, had a seizure and continued to have seizures for the two days after. One each day. We were in the hospital for a week, and then we heard something was going down in Wuhan...FUCK! Seriously?!
I was processing a lot. In the spring when we were told the kids would not be returning to school or even visiting anyone for that matter, I was either ready to run or die. And I couldn’t do either. The things I did to help me process anxiety were no longer available, like being out and about, driving people to and from school, my busy chauffeur life came to a halt, as did running from the tsunami that was building inside me. That day I went to our local legal recreational marijuana dispensary and fell into a pattern of hitting that dispensary weekly. I smoked to hold it all off. Until I had smoked so much that it wasn’t working anymore. And the wave took me. Here I am deep into this heavy processing, in recovery, letting go of the need to control, forgiving myself, forgiving others, reliving traumas I hadn’t faced, acknowledging without reaction. Feeling emotions and where they are tucked inside the body and tracking them until they dissipate.
I dug through the layers of my existence, and I still do, to find a purpose for my existence. I tried and am still trying to feel like I was meant to be. There had to be a reason for all this crazy shit right? And somewhere in there I found my inner child. Now the healing process truly begins.
Now I’m in it. Healing. It can’t be rushed. It takes time. How long, who knows? What is my purpose? I have no idea. Sometimes it’s art, sometimes it’s only my kids, sometimes I feel like I was never meant to be here.
The upside in this chaos is I have fuel for creating ink art, my kids are experiencing a different childhood than my own, and I’m alive.
Time for a nap.
Peace,
Athilea Etla Lucem
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