Category: Rage Against The Pile

Day One of new Staying On Track Schedule is complete, and I’m tuckered out. I was productive, I was not swayed by distractions, and it was kind of nice to move through the day with purpose: make grocery list, work out, fill crock pot with dinner, go to grocery store, scream immaturely at my daughter, eat dinner, clean the kitchen, and fall onto the couch at 9.

And yes, you read that middle part right: I had a small breakdown in the middle of my day in which I screamed at Ruthie for her to stop screaming so she doesn’t wake up her brother. I think that was mature, don’t you?

I recovered well from that breakdown, thanks to a husband and a friend who both talked me down. Lack of calories played into that fit, as I ate a light breakfast right before working out, and hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Low blood sugar = very bad mother. I also realized the last time I threw a fit this bad at Ruthie was about this time laaaast month.

Hmm… methinks I should start tracking my cycles a little better. When I was in college my best friend once told me that in certain cultures women who were pms-ing would live out in a separate hut behind the family hut. I think she may have been hinting to me about something.

Bryan has slowly been making the switch in our household from PC’s to Macs, and my laptop PC was one of the last to be switched over. He finally ordered me a new one last week, and spent time this weekend setting it up for me. I’m excited about it, and love all the cool programs that come on a mac. But, as in all new transitions, I’m also a little discouraged. There are certain things I was able to do on a PC that were as easy and effortless as breathing, and I will be able to do them on this Mac once I learn, but I have not yet learned.

So now, as I am staring at my screen, trying to figure out how to access the memory card on my cell phone so I can download a video, I am feeling a little stupid that I can not just click the buttons I’m familiar with and make it happen. I know this is only temporary, and that it will all be once again as it was (maybe slightly better!), but for now I am on the edge of obsessing.

This is what I do, and this is what kicks in the rage, and this is what defines my insanity: staring at this screen, becoming more and more frustrated that I don’t know what to do, my heart quickens, and yet… I cannot back away.

It’s as if my life depends on downloading this video.

Isn’t that just the silliest thing you’ve ever heard?

I think so, too. And so I’ve decided to stop obsessing, drink a shot of vodka to calm the looming rage (because I am, after all, a blithering drunkard), and move on to something more important, like vacuuming.

This morning I ate my breakfast while locked in the bathroom because Ruthie would not stop bugging me about giving her a bite of my eggs. I kept asking her in a calm way to please back away (she was literally in my face, hovering over my plate, with her fork touching my food), that mommy needed to eat, that she had just finished her second breakfast, blah blah blah. She was not listening to me, but instead kept insisting, “BUT YOU HAVE TO SHARE, MAMA!”

This is an aspect of parenting in which I have not yet formed a thesis – do I share to set an example of sharing? or do I eat my own meal because it is in the best interest of my blood sugar level, which in turn makes me a mommy who won’t tear your eyeballs out? For this reason I was hesitant to put her in a time out, though in retrospect I probably should have because she was not listening to me when I asked her to stop. So in that moment, as I felt my adrenaline building toward rage, I excused myself, told her that mommy needed a time out, and locked myself in the bathroom to finish eating. At which point she screamed, began to cry for her daddy, and went downstairs to bang on his office door.

Great, I thought. I’ve denied her basic sustenance, hurt her feelings, AND dragged Bryan into the drama. Way to go, jen.

My day has not gone much better since, at least in respect to the tense feeling in my chest and the Twisted Spine of Stress.

This is a battle that is fought with Ruthie on a daily basis – mostly at breakfast. She rises at the crack of dawn, at which point she has one or two bowls of cereal. Then when Thomas wakes up and has breakfast, she has something else to eat, and I try to make it something more substantial than cereal. While the kids are sitting at the table eating, I make breakfast for myself and for Bryan, which usually involves eggs, because one can never have too many eggs in my opinion. By the time I sit down to eat said eggs, Ruthie is in my face asking for a bite, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I HAD JUST GIVEN HER EGGS OF HER OWN TO EAT. There is something about MY FOOD that she insists upon wanting, and I’m coming to the conclusion that it may not have anything to do with food, but with control, because by the time she gets to my breakfast, she’s already eaten more than she will eat for the rest of the day.

Part of it is that I think she is interested in the shared experience of things. For instance, she won’t play with any of her toys by herself, but if Thomas or any of her friends is around, and THEY want to play with toys, then she is happy to play along. And this goes for anything else like play-doh and coloring. There is nothing that I have discovered in the last four years that she will do alone – even the amazing Polly Pockets have lost their dazzle and are no fun unless I’m sitting on the floor with her.

Why is this a problem?

Because my brain literally hurts from being turned on all the time. Just now, as we snuggled in bed before her nap, I had to place a lavender eye pack over my eyes because it was too painful for me to try and keep my eye lids closed independently. Ruthie is at an age where everything is a question, a conversation, and no subject is dropped until Veronica Mars learns the truth.

‘Why is that man standing there?’

‘I think he’s waiting for the bus.’

‘Where is he going?’

‘I don’t know, honey.’

‘Tell me!’

‘I really don’t know, honey. Maybe he’s going to work.’

‘NO! TELL ME!’

I can’t even make up an answer because she knows when I’m bullshitting her.

But I digress. This is not a post complaining about my lovely daughter, because she really IS lovely, and I know all these things I’ve just complained about I will probably adore about her tomorrow. The post is more about me, and what to do with myself when I am feeling so sucked of energy and brain cells that I threaten my children with dismemberment if they will not go play in the damn Ikea ball pit so I can get one hour of peace to myself.

The last time I felt this stressed and trapped and like I never had a moment was a week in which I was not able to spend my Tuesday afternoon writing because the sitter didn’t come. And yesterday? The sitter was sick so I was not able to spend my afternoon writing again.

Herein lies the common thread – the expectation of three hours alone every Tuesday not being met.

[blink.][blink.]

That, my friends, was an epiphany. I just discovered this by bitching on the internet.

Please disregard this post as I figure out a new way to deal with failed expectations.

Lately I have been struggling with guilt and condemnation. We are working through Grace in our recovery group, so of course it draws up all the nasty reasons in my heart of why I shouldn’t be worthy of God’s grace. Today is a particularly bad day as I have struggled all week in my relationship with Ruthie. In referring to the list I have on my kitchen cabinet, I am ashamed to admit that I have been self-important, rude, self-seeking, easily angered, and a holder of grudges.

I am an unpredictable parent – I will be loving, patient, and attentive, then out of the blue I respond to something Ruthie says or does with anger and irritation that is way more exaggerated than the offense calls for. I take it personally. I am irritated that Ruthie does not always do the right thing. I am exasperated at being inconvenienced by her disobedience.

But not all the time.

Many times I respond correctly: I am patient, I am kind, I shepherd, I correct. But other times I am not, and it kills me that Ruthie cannot count on me to be consistent in my response to her. I have failed in all the ways that Love Is, and feeling this way after being in this damn recovery program for over a year, it seems like crawling into a dark hole with a bottle of gin is the only real consolation.

[blink. blink. blink.]

Now that I have written these words, and stare at them in front of me, and ponder them for several minutes, I begin to feel a wash of peace. These are irrational thoughts, I know, but sometimes it takes me getting them out of my head to see them for what they really are. I am no longer sobbing ridiculously, and I can see a glimpse of the flip side of this coin.

I am no stranger to the dysfunction of a parent/child relationship, for I’ve had my own troubles and insecurities with my biological father. I struggled throughout my childhood and teen years, wondering what my place was in his life and doubting that he really cared about me. And today, after many difficult conversations over many years, we are reconciled, and I am at peace in my relationship with him. And more importantly, I am able to see how my journey through those issues (and my continuous maintenance of them) matured me and shaped me. They are part of my DNA.

I find that when I have days and weeks like this, I see every false move I make in direct proportion to the number of hours Ruthie will spend in therapy or in an unhealthy relationship or hating me or contemplating her own demise. I blame myself for all her future dysfunction before it even happens, and therefore I walk under a cloud of guilt and condemnation because the story is over before it’s even begun.

I have not allowed for Grace.

Ruthie will have her own journey to walk, and her mother’s dysfunction is part of that DNA. I have to trust that God’s grace will extend to her, as well, and shore up her strength to spend many long hours over many years in conversation with me so that we can maintain reconciliation.

That is not meant to give me license, but to give me peace. God began writing her story in my womb. He knew her before the stars were made. Trusting him is how grace sneaks in.

Monday was a bad day, and I knew it from the moment my ears opened to the sounds of my daughter crying when Bryan attempted to get her back to bed again at the crack of dawn. She would not have it. As a compromise, he let her sit in the recliner in his office, watching Dora on his video i-pod, like he has done so many times.

On one hand, this is a nifty arrangement for me, as I am able to either sleep in until a normal hour or get up and have my coffee in peace. The problem lies in the aftermath when the video must be turned off and the rest of our day is to be tackled: the screaming, the wailing, the flopping, the kicking of the wall. Bryan’s attempt at integrating his daughter into his work-at-home life backfires every frickin’ time.

It definitely set the tone for our Monday, because right from the get-go Bryan and I were both the bad guys, forming a united front against Ruthie’s head turning into a t.v. screen. The difference is, he can lock the door to his office and I still had this kicking and screaming little munchkin to deal with – a fair trade-off for not having to work outside the home, I suppose.

So as Ruthie’s bad attitude continued, and my stress level in dealing with it continued to rise toward Red Alert, I decided to drop everything and get to the gym for a good, sweat-inducing, stress-relieving work out.

And here is where the story gets interesting, because Monday dropped record amounts of rain in our area, causing mass flooding everywhere, including the parking lot of my gym. So when I stepped out of my car, already irritated, and stepped into ankle deep water, I nearly grabbed Ruthie’s pink umbrella and started smashing some windows. My feet were soaked – shoes, socks, and all ten toes, and there was no way I could work out with wet feet.

I got back in the car, slammed the door, and headed for home to change my shoes so I could go to the grocery store instead – bitter and angry that my chosen method of working off some steam was stifled. But as I drove to the store in my Keens, I remembered a quote from the book I am reading: All anger is related to the question, ‘Is life (God) just’? …. Anger attempts to rectify God’s passivity by empowering us to act instead of waiting vulnerably for God to do something. It is not only a protection against harm and an energizer for battle; it is a taunt against God for apparently refusing to act on our behalf.

I felt Step 5 kicking in again (Am I willing to change? Or do I just want to talk about it?), and the tunnel vision I was experiencing began to broaden. I remembered that God is not out to Get me. I realized my Keens were made for hiking, ergo I could try running on the Monotonous Machine of Monotony with them and hope I didn’t break out in blisters.

I took a deep breath and pulled an A-Team-like u-turn back to the gym (and took care where I parked the car this time), and ended up pressing through a forty-minute workout in which my adrenaline was so high I actually sprinted full speed for the first mile and a half. My chest caught on fire and sweat soaked through every inch of my clothing, but my feet were happy and dry and I actually wondered if my Keens weren’t a better shoe for me to work out in.

I once viewed my anger like a train leaving the station – it chugged on down the line, stuck on one track until the whistle blew – and I was a helpless passenger. But now it seems more like a race horse to me – bursting out of the gate with great force at the sound of one shot, hooves pounding in the dirt toward the finish. I am not a mere passenger on this horse, though. I am a petite jockey on the back of this powerful animal, holding within my hands the ability to simply pull on the reigns and stop or redirect the horse.

God has empowered me to Change.

Ruthie is digressing. Or relapsing. Or rebelling. Or whatever you call it when a perfectly normal potty trained three-year-old starts pee-ing herself several times a day. Oh yeah. I’m angry. And I’m not just irritated-angry or inconvenienced-angry. I’M ANGRY. In fact I’m REALLY REALLY angry. I was already angry that this was happening, but then the proverbial cherry on top was when she just now pee’d while SITTING ON MY LAP. It soaked through my pants to my underwear, and through the chair fabric into the cushion.

—

I wrote the previous paragraph earlier today when I was, well, angry.

I was tempted to continue on with my rage of words – the bitterness, the stabbing, the indignation – it was all fueling my adrenaline. My heart was pounding, my eyes were narrowed, my lips were pursed –

And then I stopped writing.

I just knew where it was heading – a lamenting post about what a bitch a three foot tall Dora-lover is for pee-ing in her pants. I was taking it personally. And though I believe her potty rebellion is a declaration of control and not merely a series of accidents, my response to her in recent days has, I’m sure, fueled her flame as well.

Step 5 kicked in.

Step 5, as they say, separates the boys from the men. Am I going to talk about overcoming anger? Or am I going to make a change?

(As I wrote this last sentence, it sounded eerily similar to yesterday’s post.)

As Ruthie soaked in the bathtub, I found myself cornered in the kitchen – sobbing, grieving, ashamed. I am the fat kid from Mean Creek, shaming others and making them feel small, delusioned that this will win their respect or somehow satisfy my need.

Every day that goes by, every hour, every second, every time she laughs or dances or begs me to sit with her I am aware that my time with her is fleeting. I have a narrow window to get my shit together and it better happen soon because Ruthie is smart – scary smart – and one day she may stop giving me hugs and kisses when I ask her to forgive me.

Sometimes this reality drives me to action and motivates me to change. But there are times when I believe a Lie, the one that asks, “Did God really say – ?” And I project twelve years down the road to a teenage Ruthie who hates me, who rebels, who feels unloved by me, and this makes me certain that I will never change and there is no hope.

I keep my Love List from I Corinthians taped to one of the cabinet doors in my kitchen. I refer to it often, and continue to pray that God will change my heart to reflect more of what love IS than what love is NOT.

I checked that list as I stood in the kitchen crying, and I spoke the words out loud, “Patient. Kind. Unfailing.” I was falling short on all accounts today, and I asked God to forgive me.

It was a small victory, though it seems twisted, in a way, to declare victory from within the ruins of nuclear annihilation. But the Word stepped in and set me free to move on and let go. My pulse retreated and my tightened chest released – the physical tension dissipated without being satisfied.

I was interrupted.