I need to remember this.
It’s happened before: weeks after school has started back, once the kids are settled and no longer crying at drop-off or overtired at pick-up, when things seem to have all calmed down and the sailing is smooth…this is when my brain clicks out of Survival Mode and switches to High-Anxiety Mode. Also known as Exhaustion Mode. Also known as Struggling for No Apparent Reason Mode.
But there is a reason, isn’t there? There always is. There is brain chemistry, and hormones, and hypersensitivity, and this year, there is sensory overload after a year of relative quiet. There is a vital but triggering interview that shows that #starsandduchesses are #justlikeus! There is the latent that rises to the surface once the kids are sorted. There is anxiety and depression, and they always. Come. Back.
Or maybe just never leave. Constant companions, and I prefer to work alone, thank you. But the depression that is expressed as anxiety, and the anxiety that erupts as anger, they are not medicated or meditated or prayed away–that’s not how this works. They are there–they are managed, but they are there.
Also there? The Husband, the children, the dog, who never leave me!…and also never leave me. There are the dog’s snores waking me in the night, the sound of little feet padding up to my bed, the narration that persists from sunup to sundown. There is the boys’ relentless fighting and loyalty. Their relentless need despite my best-laid plans to procure small containers so they can make their own breakfast and not contend with my barely-concealed rage over having to make a tenth snack. The hours that fly by only to prove there are not enough of them.
When it hits–this prickliness, this inordinate frustration, this anxiety and depression–I know it now. I know it as separate to my soul, separate to circumstances, separate to reason. I know, now (#thankstherapy) about neurological regulation and integration. I know tricks and strategies. I know me.
But sometimes I need to see myself through different eyes. The way I go through photos on my phone and see the ones the boys have taken: the videos of adults’ conversations, the still-lifes of cars, the close-ups of faces. The way, when I sneak into Little Brother’s room to give him a goodnight kiss after putting The Kid to bed, he surprises me by being awake and grinning at me in the dark, a secret for just the two of us. The way he calls me “the loveliest mommy,” and how TK says I’m the best mom he could ever have, and I nearly choke on laughter and tears because God help us but somehow it’s still true–somehow, because of patterns of forgiveness and grace.
I’ve been diving into nostalgia lately because why not, and when Felicity said it she was talking about New York which I also feel, but then it sort of works across life: “I swear, when you least expect it this city is so beautiful. You could never describe it to someone who wasn’t here.”
I’m trying to describe my city, how it’s hard and exhausting and beautiful. How it’s joy and grief and all the things. How it will always be complicated, how it will always be “a thing passing strange to me, that the healing hand should also wield the sword.” How all of life comes wrapped up together, connected. How the hardest things to say out loud somehow come pouring out of a keyboard. How this anxiety, this “flaw,” brings with it an ability to so deeply feel as to see what wasn’t seen without it: the song on the way to school that makes me cry, the verse that tells me how I am seen.
“Would you love me more than God does if you could?” LB asks me as he’s drifting off to sleep, and of course I tell him yes, even as I know that the grace that holds us both is bigger than either of us can imagine. That these are the eyes through which we are seen.
I need to remember this.