Losing My Shit (I’m not the only one right?)

Some days we have no energy. As mothers there is just nothing left, we are stretched thin and there is nothing but the thinnest piece of skin between us and the world and if you touch it, if you blow on it, if you make it vibrate with your noise we just might get torn, be swept over the edge, have that be the end of us.

We most certainly will lose our shit. It will be gone, lost and what might erupt out of us is Goddess-Kali-like-volcanic-energy. We might swear, shout, scream and throw a tantrum that would put our two year old in the corner in a ball. We might just completely and utterly lose our shit.

No one wants to see that. We don’t want to admit that even ever happens (but it does, you know it does when we are pushed too far). So instead we ingest large quantities of caffeine, chocolate, sugar, alcohol.

We find a way to binge watch TV or to pick a fight with our spouse, because we are going to blow and if we don’t take immediate action, the mess we are about to make will not be pretty. Not a fucking pretty sight.

This is not something our kids deserve to see, or be on the receiving end. But I guarantee that most of us parents can’t make it through getting our kids to adulthood without at least one major scream fest. Some of us just try and keep it down to once a month or quarterly, but I guarantee it happens.

Does it have to be this way? Can we look back and find ways to keep ourselves from being so stretched thin that the slightest breeze tips us over the edge? Is there anyway to prevent this colossal blow up from occurring? Can we keep it from happening?

Well, your road is different than mine. But here are some of the ingredients that I have found that add to the recipe of blowing up for me:

• Not getting enough sleep
• Not getting enough help
• The house looking like a total shit hole and no one but me gives a damn
• Too many social events and not enough time at home
• Driving for days
• Not enough time to read a piece of fiction
• Not any time to work on creating something with my hands
• Life stress, like say moving
• Not eating good food
• Not enough sleep, oh did I mention that one already?

These for me are some of the key ingredients that make a volcanic explosion. Notice that baking soda and vinegar are not required. However not using them to clean things can be an ingredient.

Can I control some of these? Sure I can do my best to go to bed at a decent hour (though whether or not I get woken up is not necessarily something I can control).

I can allow my kids to only sign up for one extra curricular activity at a time. It won’t kill them to choose just one, I have four kids, it might kill me if they do more than one.

I can say no to social events, or more importantly keep one weekend day a week where we stay home, period, I don’t care how amazing your social event is, it’s not as amazing as my blow up later the next week because I didn’t get any time off.

I can hire a housekeeper. Haven’t done it yet, but you better believe it is on my bucket list, because my kids are not reliable cleaners….

I can make sure that I always have access to a good piece of fiction and that I can at least sneak away to read for 5 minutes a day.

I can have craft projects strew across the house so I am never far from one I can make.

I can speak to my hubby about my needs, and when they are not being met and find creative ways to get time off, like a long bath, a nap or just a sleep in day, or maybe he could just make the next couple of meals for me.

These things and more can happen and when they do the explosions get further apart. I am more often able to see they are coming and find a way to head them off, or explode away from my kids so they don’t have to be a part of it.

Will they ever truly go away? I don’t think so because I am human. And part of being human is losing your shit from time to time. Some of the most valuable lessons in life come from the shit losing.

Sometimes the only way to make space for something new is to lose something first, and yes sometimes that truly is our shit.

And sometimes those explosions turn out to be massive crying events rather than scream fests. Just Sayin’