The Blues

  After my brother passed away, the whole family except for yours truly got the flu.  Take a moment to digest that.  The whole family got the flu. They all started to look like this on Monday afternoon:

   In the scheme of things that might not seem like a big deal, except when you consider the fact that I'm the midst of cooking, cleaning, serving, and caring there is little time left over for grieving.  Add to that the fact that all I wanted all week was for someone to hug me while I cried a river, and I couldn't get a hug from anyone unless I, too, wanted to succumb to this horrible plague.  It's making me a pretty sad elf.  

                 Rose is a sad elf too.

   It's lasted for a week, so far.  So instead of lying in Coffeeguy's arms for comfort, he's on the couch with all his germs and I'm here...in this sea of alone-ness that is my bed.  I can't even call Mom, because she has it worse than any of us, and she's grieving the loss of a son for the second time.  My feeling of alone-ness is only trumped by my feeling of helplessness--there is absolutely nothing I can do to help my mother that my remaining brother isn't already doing..I wanted to end this with the moral to the story, but somehow I'm missing it.  

Summer of Discontent

     About two weeks ago I had a long talk with Coffeeguy about, horror of horrors, my feelings.  Generally when I build up to one of these talks I have so many different things bundled inside that they get sort of garbled, and it becomes the neurotic rantings of a tearful termagant (I like alliteration, so sue me...Sally...)  This time it was a slightly more coherent summation of my current fog, this feeling that I can't find "me", that I belong to no group other than the nuclear family.  While it made me feel so much better just to get it "out there", today I realized just how feeling better doesn't make you all better.

      Granted, Rose didn't sleep well, which meant I didn't, and I have a raging vitamin D deficiency that I keep meaning to do something about.  I tried twice today to cuddle with Coffeeguy on his day off, both of which ended in massive frustration on both our parts when Rose woke early and crying from her nap the first time and Punkgirl called from school for a new set of clothes the second time. So these things could easily make me discontent today....and quite frankly they did make me cranky...but it feels like more than that.  Talking about things didn't change my sense of not belonging.  It didn't help me figure out what lies ahead for me.  Some days (like today) make me feel like I don't even have time to think about what lies ahead.  It's something I have a hard time revisiting with Coffeeguy (I hate sounding like a whiner to him--I can be a whiner here without it "dulling the glow.")

      So here I sit, the summer heat making my physical self as discontent as my emotional one, hoping that I will find my "niche", or that miraculously I will find something that validates me as an individual.  

     I am a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter, and a good sister... even if I suck at some of the details.  But where is the definition of me that doesn't revolve around someone else?  I like meeting some of their needs, and certainly they meet some of mine...but I don't want that to be my epitaph.  

     Suck at home moms, how do you define yourself, after meeting the needs of your loved ones?  Or will "sucky mom" be your epitaph?

Me that is you

      I read somewhere that stay at home moms have the highest rate of depression over any other female.  Having experienced severe depression in the past, I can say this is not that drastic, but I can understand the statistic.  

     The thing is, you start to define yourself by nothing other than what you are to other people:  mother, wife, milk jug.  It begins with just realizing that you are constantly covered in spilled breast milk, none of your pretty things fit (between childbirth and breastfeeding), and your biggest thrill is when you manage to get out and take a walk with the baby.  It builds up as you realize you no longer have a more personal hobby than snapping pics of your precocious 5 month old.  Suddenly when someone asks you about yourself you can only describe yourself in relation to others.  You've become that home made baby food you've been making lately:  a mish mash of things that are no longer you, making you bland and somewhat un-appealing to anything other than an infant.

     Now I'm not saying that your relationship to others shouldn't define a part of you; only that it shouldn't define you in whole.  When you're a stay at home mom, and especially if, like me, you suck at it, it's all too easy to give up your own needs in favor of, well, in favor of anything else that comes up.  You can easily begin to feel a guilt that you don't bring home the bacon, or at least a compulsion to do everything else, since someone else does that.  We suffer from the delusion that if we don't do it it's unfair for anyone else to do it.  It becomes simple to decide you can't afford to do something because that money isn't in your paycheck.

     Before the good stay at home moms are up in arms, I am not saying that any of those things are true; only that it is easy to feel that way.  And I do, far too often.  I know how silly it is to think that Coffeeguy is keeping score, or that the mom police will revoke my license.  But there it is.  And worse, the very worst, is that I wonder if I asked him if even he could define me in terms that belong to myself, that define only me.  I can't bear to ask, so I guess I'll never know.

     Suck at homes, if you're out there, what do you do to remain you?  Or are you floundering around like me, wondering where me went?