channeling the crazy

For a few brief few hours this weekend, while in a complete obsessive, neurotic, fucked-up headspace anxiety funk, I channeled the miserable mental/emotional abuse bombardment that my mother used to drop around the house like grenades. It made me batshit crazy back then and it's even worse when I discover it coming from my own mouth.

We’re still cleaning up from the bedroom improvement project, five weeks later. We have one of those pack-rat things in the front yard loaded with boxes filled with stuff, much of it that we have no room for, nor need, now that space has been redesigned.

If the storage box stays in the yard another two weeks, we get whacked with another monthly fee. This project has cost a small fortune already and stupid costs need to be avoided.

We leave for nine days in two days. There are at least four days of unpacking left, to sift through boxes, to diminish the pile of things that need to go back into the house. To lighten up the clutter.

God, I’m sick of piles of crap. I need to stop crap accumulating myself, books, trinkets - no more stuff, please!

All of those things, and a few others, have jacked up my anxiety to new and interesting levels.

When my anxiety is cranked on high, little shit makes me twitchy.

Shit like asking one of the kids to put something away and it just gets tossed into the shed with no regard for where it goes or how it gets put away. My head explodes and I call said kid out to point out how just a few moments of kids precious time could have been taken to make sure something was put away properly rather than just irresponsibly tossed. And I went on for several minutes like that as I banged things around, and bitched that it’s just as easy to do it myself than rely on other people to do a half assed job.

Shit like asking another kid to unpack their boxes and then go into said kids room hours later only to find four boxes in various states of emptiness and little floor space to maneuver. So I went on a rant about how ridiculous this was and how one box should be emptied before the next is opened so it is done in an organized way and why is this hard to understand and do I need to do this myself so it gets done in a reasonable time frame.

And then I proceeded to find fault with just about everything everybody did, or did not do. All the tools lying around that were used and left about, waiting to be put away by someone else, usually me.

My husband had a severe allergy headache and was cranky and snappy and we fed off of each other’s bitchiness and I imagined that being single again might be more liberating. I don’t mean it, but for several long minutes I fantasized about the possibilities of it. And then set about showing him how I felt in a beautiful example of passive aggressive avoidance and cold shouldered belligerence.

I kept going, fueled by the inner anxiety ridden indignation of being tired of picking up after everyone, tired of everyone asking me to find things, tired of pointing out how things should be put back in their places, tired of being my husband’s irritability target, tired of the demands from my kids.

I slammed around the house, bitching under my breath about all of those things, as I picked up this, put away that, cleaned up more and simmered in the soup of my resentment.

And as the fire of my frenzy burned itself out, as it is wont to do, my ugly behavior became glaringly obvious. I recalled the stoic set of my son's face as he endured me berating him for being careless and irresponsible. The shimmer of tears in my daughter's eyes as I railed at her for not thinking things through and being disorganized. I used my tone and words to cut wounds into my kids carelessly and heedlessly in an effort to what? make myself feel better? Justify my shitty mood? Make everyone as miserable as I felt?

Score points for me.

I had just become my mother, emotionally and mentally battering at my kids, deflecting my irritation onto them and in the end making myself feel like the crap I want to throw out, empty and useless.

Once the shock had worn off and the Xanax had kicked in, I apologized to my kids for being such a bitch and we talked about frustration and irritation and how one handles it in productive ways other than the behavior their Mom had engaging in earlier that day. Which makes me feel loads better because that conversation would never have happened with my own mother.

I know how that behavior leaves lingering bleeding wounds. I've spent considerable dollars discussing it with a therapist and I swore that I would not be that way.

It is days later and I still feel like I failed in the mother department, not to mentioned ashamed at loosing my shit and for dumping the mean on them so hard. Since then we’ve spent plenty of quality time together, but I would give up a considerable amount to go back and redo Saturday afternoon. Some damage takes more time to repair than others.