Momma. Sad.

It was midnight. I had been in bed for two hours and still no sleep could be found.  The house was dark and still but I tossed and turned. My mind a frenzy with negative thoughts that circled around like thick, black ropes.  I climbed out of bed and went to the den downstairs to lay on the couch.

I texted E.  “Can you chat?”  A few minutes later she responded.  I had already spent a good half hour in the fetal position crying in the darkened den, feeling half crazed.  I needed my best friend.  Everything was too much.  The house, the kids, the noise, the mess, everything. Days earlier I had gone balls to the wall insane (like Ms. Piggy karate-chop insane) on a pile of boxes that had taken up a month long residence in our bedroom.  I was ready to fling them out the second story bedroom window if they didn’t evacuate the premises immediately.  I yelled and cursed at those boxes. I heaved them up a flight of stairs, flinging them and shoving them into the storage space above our bedroom.  I felt cleansed when it was done. The fact that the kids destroyed the kitchen by breaking into the pantry while I did this was not the point. 

Two days later I was feeling lost, futile and an increasingly weepy mess.  Again. It was getting worse. I had a 10k to run in the city at 7 a.m. on Sunday.  I needed to sleep but the dark, twisted thoughts wouldn’t stop.  I talked to E.  She calmed me down but only enough to get a little over two hours sleep.  Somewhere in the hazy, mess of half-sleep and half-wakefulness I realized something.

All the efforts of friends and family have been fantastic.  I, we, needed the help.  We needed the meals, the watching of the kids, the errands run and the date nights.  Yes, we did.  However, what I desperately needed now and had been needing for weeks wasn’t any of that.  People kept offering to take the kids but more and more I wanted to pull them in closer.  I needed my family.  I needed their screaming mess.  It was everyone else that I didn’t need. I didn’t need “down time”, or “me” time. I needed quiet within my four walls with my kids all squished on the couch.  I wanted peace in my home with H and The Fifth Element by my side watching Dexter hack someone up.  Having this taken away, having all those events and chances to be out was wonderful but all the running around, the mess created from never being home was making me feel a bit Dexter-ish myself.  I needed an almost vegetative state with my family in tow. 

Later, after explaining all this to H, I found myself looking around the many messes in my home and sobbing again. An intense lack of sleep will do that.  It also made me want to hurl the tree off the deck because it’s gold, spangly tinsel was creating even more mess in our home.  Every second that passed more tinsel was being tracked into different rooms and not staying on the tree.  Dishes piled up.  The laundry monster reached out and almost ate The Comedian for breakfast.  It cornered TD on the stairs.  It was The Comedian who found me crying.  She went and got H saying, “Momma. Sad.”  That made me cry harder.  My two year-old was coming to my aid, handing me her security blanket to make me feel better.  Yes, the house was making me crazy, the lack of sleep was making me nasty and twitchy with grief.  I kept thinking of that spiky-haired woman, Susan Powter, yelling “Stop the insanity!”  She was all about regaining control of your life.  That’s what I had lost.  I couldn’t sleep because of the loss of control.   I needed to stop the insanity.

So for now, I’m focusing on keeping calm.  Not doing the run around and unplugging a bit.  It’s hard to disengage.  There are so many exciting things going on around this time of year.  So many people I want to see and things I want to do.  But, I can’t.  I have to admit to myself I can’t do it all.  I don’t want to do it all.  Even when someone tells me it will be good for me to “get out of the house..”, etc.  I want to rest my body and my mind so that my soul gets in order and in sync as well.  I need that.  I need that desperately so that I’m no longer “Momma. Sad.”