So, sometimes the universe throws you a day from hell. Sometimes, it throws you a cold, a child with a cold, a husband with a cold, and intense feelings of frustration, failure, and defeat. Deep down, you’re not upset about the day. You’re just worn down to the very last bit of yourself, and it feels like everything in your life is still trying to shave off another sliver.
I know everyone has bad days, and I know that frustrating times come and go. But today, I felt an “uncle” creeping up to the surface. I felt a moment of surrender, and I found myself sobbing over the kitchen sink as I rinsed ketchup and ranch out of the compartments of my daughter’s lunch plate.
She hasn’t shown any interest in eating anything besides fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, and yogurt for most of the last week. I know she’ll diversify her food choices again in a bit, but it’s just one thing on the list of things that are making me feel almost powerless this week.
I decided to take a stand over the weekend. I fight, plead, bribe, and beg her just to pick up the toys on the floor, because the constant battle of trying to keep up with that means I am not taking care of putting away much else. My declaration? I would not pick up even one thing for her for a week, nor would I let her have any sugary sweets until she did it herself.
It isn’t working. She just wails and howls when she asks for a sweet and I remind her of my ultimatum.
As she woke up at around seven this morning, she asked for a cookie, and she hit me in the face when it said it was too early. Everything went downhill from there.
When you’re sick, every little struggle feels amplified. This day and this week have been really loud. Having recently learned that I am prediabetic, I have found myself fighting to make even small changes to get back on the right track. I know that I have to make big changes, but quite honestly, I have allowed everyone and everything around me to become such an emergency that I know the only way I can make a start is to just start wherever I can.
I have allowed trying to maintain my own self-control with my daughter’s unpredictable behavior to steal my inner calm—the part that focuses on keeping my own emotional head above water. I have allowed other stressors in life to steal the voice inside that knows I should say “This all means I could get really sick. For a little bit, I have to put more of myself first.”
And this damn cold! And my damn body! And my damn feelings!
I started cutting and cutting, being more cognizant and aware of everything I was doing. Even after one week, I saw positive momentum. And then, without any change in how much effort I was making, that momentum swung right back the other direction. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t mean anything. I tried to tell myself my body’s defenses were kicking in, and giving a protest against me trying to change my habits. But that same voice everyone has inside of them that felt so pleased with the positive direction from the week before, was crestfallen and didn’t give a shit that it was just my body saying “Hey, wait a minute. What are you doing”?
And then, another shoe dropped. I felt just a little stuffy, but was running on my treadmill, and feeling better than usual. So, I kept running, because the slip in momentum my body had thrown at me needed to understand it wasn’t going to win out over my reasoning and logic about the situation.
By the next morning, two out three of us in the house had developed a nasty end of summer cold, and by end of that day, we all had it.
At this point, it might be reasonable to ask why a stupid little cold has to matter, and throw me into such an emotional and physical tailspin. But you see, it’s not the cold, it’s all the little things that seem to swirl around me in a low level hurricane all the time. This cold, my body laughing at me while I ate ice cream and wished there was a real Dr. Pepper in the house instead of diet, and my emotional meltdown over the kitchen sink are just the visible manifestations of the hurricane no one else usually gets to see.
As always, I could see the scene from the movie “Circle of Friends,” when Benny gets passed over by Jack at the dance, and stuffs chocolate in her mouth as she fights back tears.
“Ah, go on Benny. Ruin yourself”, she says.
And that’s how it feels. It feels like defeat. It feels like failure. It feels like everything else around me is grabbing and tearing at me, so what difference does it make? What difference can it possibly make that I can’t keep on track?
A friend reminded me that in the airport safety instructions, they always tell you when the oxygen mask falls, you need to put it on your face first, and then help those around you. You can’t pour from an empty cup. You can’t give what you don’t have.
This all sounds sensible. It sounds like common sense. But none of it works when it feels like life is grabbing the oxygen mask away from you before you can even reach for it.
And so, that’s how the little things get you. They chip away at your defenses and your strength a little at a time, and one bad moment turns into a bad day, a bad week, a bad time. You once again tell yourself that when things settle down with everyone else's struggles, you will be able to focus on taking care of yourself. And until you can do that, you have to plug the holes of your sinking ship with anything you can find, and hope that those plugs don’t somehow manage to make those holes too big to repair.
Add to all of those stupid feelings the knowledge that somewhere in the world, someone would give anything to have your “problems”, and you spiral back down to that place you always come back to—trying to push what you’re feeling down, because you don’t want to bother anyone else with things you should be strong enough to deal with on your own as a grown-ass woman.
And so, the cycle continues. From the outside of things, we often wonder what leads seemingly happy people with seemingly perfect lives to make seemingly unthinkable choices. The reality? Nothing is black and white when it comes to how we feel, or how we deal with those feelings.
No, I’m not on the verge of making any dramatically awful choices about my tomorrows, but I understand how small things grow and become bigger to us than they would be to anyone else. I understand why people don’t reach out when they are struggling. No one likes to admit that the little things are too big for them.
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