If you know me, you know I am a cereal addict. At any given time, I have at least eight different cereal flavors in my cabinets. I don’t actually eat all the cereals, but I love collecting them. And especially when they are super cheap. Like this today from The Dollar Tree.
So much fun! All’s I gotta say is a bad day can be made happy by a cereal bargain. I am that simple-minded.
There are days that are not particularly unpleasant, fairly productive, and generally normal. I go about these days with no heavy thoughts or disgruntled countenances. Helping at the school, a trip to the dentist, reading at the bookstore, karate practice, a smooth drive home…
But then, there it is.
I hit a wall.
I just cannot physically and mentally continue on anymore. Before I have put the car in P, I feel my inner self withering and crumpling up. I don’t want to eat or move or think or talk. I certainly don’t want to listen to my children chatter on and on. And God, the thought of getting dinner ready! And later, when my husband asks me helpful questions about how I am feeling or whether I need anything, I just want to hit the mute button on him. I have become a lump of exhausted bitter flesh, and I don’t know why.
Still it doesn’t keep me from feeding the kids. Brushing their teeth. Helping with their Valentine’s Day cards. I’m just a bitch through it all, is all.
It’s good that Husband takes on the showers and bedtimes, or the kids would just go to bed dirty and probably yelled at for no good reason.
All I know is I was fine, happy even, all day long, and then at 6ish, I wasn’t. And I want to snap out of it, my brain tells me to snap out of it, but I am just done.
I can’t move. Not another thought. Another word. Eyes closed.
Full stop.
It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for years and years. After Dad passed (18 years ago!), I stopped writing and I stopped caring about writing.
Strangely, I never felt the desire to pour my grief into words. I simply grieved and continued to live life. It almost felt like an injustice to attempt to pin down with words the tumultuous and chaotic aftermath, the subsequent healing, and then the patient and often joyous living. Even now, my writing mind blocks me. I can see the images, I can see the words on the tip of my brain. But somehow, that time, as rich and full and beautiful and painful as it would be to be shared into words, won’t be shared by me. Maybe one day alluded to, but never documented.
I did subsequently make a three-quarter-assed effort somewhere in between then and now, trying to write stories I thought I wanted to tell but then decided I didn’t care about telling them after all. So I stopped again.
I got married. I had kids. Two very brief sentences that carry an enormous weight. For some, perhaps it means life faded away or just plodded on. For myself, and hopefully many many others, it means there are not enough words to capture the abundance of life and love that consumed me and took the place of ink and paper in my heart. It was just like with Dad. Except this time, I didn’t need to pour my joy into words. I just enjoyed living and loving my family, ever healing, drawing closer to God and being comfortable with a boring, grown-up me.
Still, I never stopped feeling my old love of words tugging at me. I would pick up a blank journal here and there and think about writing. I would run my hands along the spines of books at the library or bookstore and think about reading. I just couldn’t seem, though, to make my mind calm enough to do any of it. I made do by reading with the kids and trying to spark in them my own long-buried flame for literature. It was enough. For nearly two decades, it was enough.
And… now it isn’t. I have been lazy and wasteful with what skill I was given. I have been dismissive of my blessings and my passions. I do not apologize for it. But I have to start putting things in order again. I have to absorb words. I have to create words. No one needs to read them. I just need to spew them out, and not because of any momentous event in life or any desire to make my mark. I’ve simply held them in too long. The words have jumbled and tumbled and faded and melted and there is no clarity. I wasn’t suffocating, but I wasn’t breathing either.
So bear with me as I learn again.
Breath after breath.
Breathing Words 