I had the thought in the middle of the chaos of the morning, as I finished shoving tiny feet into shoes and tried to make my way into the bathroom alone while voices screamed around me:

I am so unhappy.

It’s not unusual, this thought. This voice. But today, I stopped listening to it, following it down its bleak road. Instead, I questioned it.

Am I? I thought. Am I really?

Just the question was rebellious, and felt empowering. Suddenly I was suffused with possibility: the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the voice was full of shit.

I chose that road–the road of possibility–and told myself what I know: that a momentary feeling does not a life make, is not the sum of my existence. That the sight of my children can be the best part of my day, can fill me with awe and wonder. That it can also drive me mad, true, but that this madness is inextricably woven in with a fierce protection and maternal instinct and hormonal changes and biological connection beyond even my understanding. What I’m saying is, it’s complicated. And that’s okay.

What I’m saying, also, is that I’m learning to recognise the voices that would take a feeling and try to make it a definition. I’m learning which voices to listen to. It’s just that the mean ones are so loud. And total assholes.

Last week I had just broken some blinds, so I was already angry when a sharp pain came out of nowhere to land upon my big toe. I looked down and a chair was resting on my foot, while beside it stood Little Brother. Somewhere in all of this I yelled out a non-Disney-approved word, and LB scampered away. I crumpled to the floor to cradle my bleeding toe, with its now-purple nail, defying anyone to come near me with my body language. The pain was excruciating. I don’t know how we’re expected to be mothers and good citizens in moments like these, when all has fallen apart and our very bodies are just heaps upon the ground, but I waved my white flag pretty early. I’msodoneI’msodoneI’msodone, I remember thinking, the physical assaults of a day full of small children past taking its toll. Another thought entered my mind–it could have been so much worse–which I swatted away in self-pity even as I marvelled at the fact it showed up at all, a funny and misplaced-feeling gratitude gently working at the edges of my anger, another voice added to the chorus already singing “This always happens to you” and “Why is life so hard?” I allowed it to stay, on probationary status, while I continued to weep.

Later that week I was driving LB to sleep, covering the area around our house and the beach, when a kerb (Australian spelling) jumped out at my car and attacked us both. LB stayed asleep but I clenched my teeth, knowing our company-bequeathed RAV4 would not make it out of this encounter without scars. I pulled over and sure enough, the front tyre (Australian spelling) had popped. Flat. I considered just parking it there, a block from home, then imagined lugging LB and all our gear over that block and decided to take my chances. We made it home, back to our broken garage door, and I parked, texting The Husband the truth even though I wanted to feign surprise later–THIS IS SHOCKING! How ever did it happen?–while guilt ate away at my soul. Appealing, but no.

His first response was to ask if I was okay. Bastard. This kindness opened up an avenue for thoughts like “Good thing we don’t need to drive anywhere later” and “thank God it happened so close to home,” instead of my usual “why does this shit always happen to me?” (Full disclosure: this has never happened to me.)

I am an introvert with a need for solitude and quiet. Instead, I look up and am followed into the bathroom by two small people constantly in need, asking questions like “Why is it Tuesday?” and screaming about how one did something to gravely offend the other, like “He put me in time out in the shower,” as if that’s a real thing. I hear the negative, the hardest, thing the loudest: the hissing that I’m unhappy, the need that I know I’m not enough for and will never address perfectly. The worst and most confusing part is that there is an element of truth to it: there are moments when I am unhappy, when I do want to be alone. But this is not the whole story.

Because there’s the rest of it: there was the moment, between toe and tyre, when I went back to the beach that is now our beach but last year was the site of tears between school visits and home search, when all felt lost and hopeless, and now I drive by every day and say “hi water” with the two small people in the back seat. Last week I went on my own to say thank you. Thank you to the grace that changed that beach and me, that refuses to let hopeless and unhappy be the whole story. There was the moment last week when I was rushing to pick up LB because I had left TK at home with friends who had come over for a playdate, and when I got back my friend told me that he had given them a tour of the house, through every room, hadn’t stopped talking for a second so that she couldn’t get a word in. Sounds familiar, I thought, then remembered a time when it didn’t, namely the first four years of his life. How, when I had picked up LB from school, his teachers had shown me a picture of him singing to his class, performing his alphabet song while they all sat watching. How, on the way home, in the midst of my anxiety about getting to TK, a rainbow had appeared on the road ahead of LB and me then just as quickly disappeared, a gift that lasted a moment but more. How the chaotic morning routine has left me clambering for a way to not be so me during it, and so I’ve resorted to this: giving each boy a turn on my lap in which we look into each others’ eyes and I tell them how loved they are. Because people, they…we are changed when we believe we are loved. When we listen to that voice.

Unhappy? Sometimes. I mean, have you seen what’s going on in the world? But a better word may be beset. Or the one a friend and I toss back and forth with regularity, because of how all-encompassing it is: fraught. Some days I choose to add “so f-ing” in front of it, this word that means filled: with responsibilities, with voices, with burdens, with blessings, with everything.