“I’m very good at falling over.” Peppa Pig

The morning before Mother’s Day, I considered leaving my family.

I was in the middle of a good run–the rare kind, the kind when I find myself actually smiling and bopping my head to music only I can hear and thinking I might just run a damn while today–when I got a call from childcare. Of course they have my number–I’m the mom. Primary caregiver. The concern turned out to be nothing, but I had to go and check, and Little Brother, after seeing me, cried when I left. Which made me feel like an ass. The guilt piled on, because I’m always ready with a shovel. I stepped outside and considered my next move.

I decided to keep running.

The first half of my run was fueled by music; this half, by anger. A ticker of vicious thoughts scrolled through my mind, and even the Hamilton soundtrack couldn’t drown it out: I’m never going back. I’m just going to keep running. It’s not fair. It’s too much. WHEN DO I EVER GET A BREAK? Guilt popped through again: A good mom wouldn’t be thinking this. A good mom would gladly sacrifice for her children without counting the cost. A good mom would immediately turn this into a blog post by seeing the beauty in it.

Well screw that. Guess I’m not a good mom.

I finally stopped running. I prayed: help. I flipped to “Wait for It” because Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr is pissed and passionate and flawed and all the things I felt. I knew I would go home–I know I’ll always go home (*so if I ever go missing, please go ahead and assume abduction and not abandonment and call the police, thanks*). But I really didn’t want to. I’m so tired. And sometimes I feel so close to the edge–sometimes I even wake up that way, with fourteen more hours staring me in the face.

The Husband, whom I had told I was running home from the gym, asked if I wanted him to pick up lunch. I told him I wanted to be left alone. Is there a Hallmark card for that? Dear Husband that I prayed for and waited a lifetime to meet, please take our children that we longed for, experienced loss for, whom I love so much it hurts, and go far away, and do not touch me until I say you can. Happy Mother’s Day from me.

Motherhood can feel like a club I’ve somehow gained entry to–maybe the bouncer was on a bathroom break?–full of inexpressible joys and unfathomable love. And sometimes? Sometimes it feels like a blanket soaked in puke that I can’t crawl out from underneath. That I can’t get a break from.

But I also can’t get a break from me.

When I was a kid, I heard my mom tell her friend–when she thought I wasn’t listening–that I felt things deeply. And I’ve carried around that apt description all my life, wavered between seeing it as a gift and a curse. Because I don’t want to just skim the surface, like Galinda sings, and dance through life. But being so penetrable–by circumstances, by emotion, by my kids–can leave some carnage. It can leave scars. It can leave some wanting to run away. Motherhood has made me confront both the person I have been and the person I am now, and there are distinctions even while they bleed into each other, across years and events and locations and relationships. My anxiety has skyrocketed since holding two lives in my care, the shades of it from my earlier life paling in comparison. I’ve gone from being completely self-focused to rarely peeing alone: yesterday I was in the bathroom with one kid looking up my butt while the other cried and pulled at my hand as if it were a life raft. But I still have the same interests, the same desires to read and run and own my time. (To think: I hated residency for many reasons, one of which was being on call all the time. ON CALL ALL THE TIME.) I am the same person, but not. My identity hasn’t detonated, but it has shifted with earthquake-like force. Apparently my already-fragile emotional makeup is supposed to take this shift in stride and document the highlights on Instagram.

Well fuck that. Guess I’m not a good sane person.

My friend at the gym, the one with a son who is The Kid plus thirteen years (and is THRIVING), talked to me there the other day for an hour and a half. We covered everything. Sometimes I look back over these conversations and think she shows up when I feel at my most lost–and not just regarding TK. She is a hope-giver, an encourager, but she doesn’t do that with platitudes. She doesn’t deal in “chin up, sweetheart”s. This particular conversation, she talked about the days when she thought she was going to go crazy. Then she looked me in the eye and said, “When you have those days? You forgive yourself.”

Her words echoed through my head on my run. “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” said philosopher David Whyte, and though he was talking about forgiving others, I’m taking it to heart regarding self-forgiveness, because I’m going to need some help with that. My frustrations are rarely worked out during the privacy of a solo run; they are more often fueled and ignited by the throes of motherhood and family and around people who are my people, people I don’t want to hurt and will. People from whom I will also need forgiveness. Assuming this larger identity has been, continues to be, painful work–all the what ifs and fears and guilt only too readily available to scream over the more quiet insistences of grace. Marriage and motherhood hold an immovable mirror in front of me, and the reflection can get so ugly. The willingness to face that reflection requires deep faith and a big God–two things I’d rather be travel-sized, easily manageable and capable of being tucked away until I need them.

I need them now. I need them always. I need them to be bigger than my flaws and my fear and my anger. And because of my flaws and my fear and my anger, I’m finding that they are. I would never have known any other way.

I came back home after my run. Later that day, flowers arrived with a card attached: “to the best mom ever.” I looked at The Husband and snorted. “Hardly.” When we were putting the kids to bed, TK grinned at me. “Happy mommy,” he said. He’s not yet capable of sarcasm, and it didn’t sound like a request, either. Just an observation: happy mommy. These people I love, they keep calling me things that don’t feel real or right. They feel like a joke. I want to laugh bitterly and run away. The weight of motherhood and all its expectations, so ridiculously exemplified by Mother’s Day, is often crushing. I can’t breathe. And sometimes it is the weight of Little Brother’s head on my shoulder in the minutes before I place him in his crib at bedtime, heavenly breath at my ear, me not wanting to ever let go. I’m not fixed; I’m me. This morning I thought about leaving again, and I bet I will next week too. I don’t have answers, just grace. Which, I have to believe, is more than answers. Is everything. Is what takes the words that feel like a joke and makes them true.