I’ve been off from writing personal posts for a long time. There has been so much going on with me. There is so much I’m trying to work through. I feel like all the broken bits inside of me that I have been patching up from time to time have ripped loose. I’ve come undone. It’s such a mess and clearly the glue I’ve been using is of an inferior quality. Now I’m sitting surrounded by these shards of glass. I’m too afraid to touch them, if I do I’ll cut myself and bleed again, but I need to pick them up. I can’t just leave the mess. I have no idea how to piece things back together. I’ve made a start, but the pieces of glass are scary. I don’t know how to pick them up. I know which ones should be thrown away, but I don’t know where to put them. I know that I’m strong enough to do it, I must be. After all the demons I’ve faced in my life, I know I’m strong. I see the demons reflected in the pieces of glass and they also still scare me, these memories. Piecing these things back together isn’t a job that can be done wearing kid gloves. You need to  get right in there and handle those things with your bare hands.

So in the middle of October as they do every year, my feelings started rising to the surface. I started suffering from anxiety and slipped into depression. There were days that I struggled to lift my head off my pillow and drag myself in to work. I would cry while applying my make up in the mornings and would continue on the way to work. By the time I arrived I would wonder why I even bothered putting on make up at all. This is the second year around Jamie’s birthday that I’ve started feeling this way, except this year it was a lot worse and it carried on way past her birthday. As I’m typing this I am still struggling with the anxiety and the tears that just come. It is better now than it was a month ago, the depression did not hang around long. I had a few really tough days, but that eased off once Jamie’s birthday was behind me. A friend recognized my struggle and urged me to get help. I did, but it was a temporary arrangement that I cannot afford to maintain. Honestly, I did find it very helpful and I wish I could continue, but it just isn’t financially viable even though it is invaluable. Right now I’m left trying to figure it all out on my own. I’ve been avoiding the pieces of glass for so long. I thought I had it all together and handled, but it has become clear to me that I do not and now I have to do the work. There is no going back. There is no more faking it till you make it. I need to deal. I just haven’t figured out yet exactly how.

I went through almost a month where I didn’t even open my blog to write anything down. In my 10 years of blogging, this is unheard of. I stopped doing nail art for a few weeks. A first since my nail obsession started. I couldn’t even find the motivation to do a nail post, which is usually fairly easy for me. Luckily I had a few drafted posts that I could push out in the interim so my blog only went silent for about a week when they had finally run out. Writing on my blog has always been cathartic for me. I blogged though some of the most difficult times of my life with much success (or so I thought, that inferior glue). The deterioration of my relationship with my mother, the loss of Jamie, my grandfather’s illness and subsequent death. I just couldn’t sit down and pour out what is inside this time.

I am struggling at home. It is peak season for Rudi at work and this sees him away from home even more frequently than he was before. While I have adjusted somewhat, day in and day out it starts becoming too much. I’ve realized things about myself and identified why I react a specific way in certain situations. I know now that I am a bit of a control freak and if things do not go precisely as I want them (or very close) I get upset. So yes, having kids is super fun for me. I like to plan things down to the finest detail. I cannot “go with the flow” unless my plan was specifically to do so. Yes. It is weird, I know. When I was getting help I was given homework. I could not find the time to do any of it. I really tried. I did, but I just couldn’t carve out time in my day to sit and work on piecing the glass back together. When I get home in the evening I need to cook, clean, attend to the kids, bath time, etc. We get home around 17:00 and 20:00 is bed time. That’s 3 hours to get everything done. Gabby still likes to have a reunion feed when we get home, so that takes about 20 minutes in itself. Elijah will go and play with his friends and Gabby has started wanting to follow suit. I cannot let her go play outside alone, so if she demands to go I have to accompany her. Cue not getting anything else done. Trying to herd them back into the house for supper time (if I’ve been able to cook)/bath time can sometimes take a half an hour and usually ends with me picking Gabby up and carrying her home with Elijah in tow. Gabby has also suddenly become averse to bathing. She just won’t! A lot of nights she stands with one foot only in the bath screaming at me until I manage to wipe her down. Hair washing nights are very difficult. I lose my cool. ALL THE TIME. In between getting them out of the bath and dressing them I can be found sitting in a heap crying from frustration 8/10 nights. Before the tears comes the yelling. They don’t listen. I speak. I speak again. I speak again. Finally I shout. Nothing works. Not the speaking, not the shouting. Admittedly the tears also come because I feel like a horrible mother for shouting at them. I genuinely feel terrible for doing it, but I completely lose it and it’s like I can’t not. I have tried to stop many times. It is usually short lived.

Until we received a written warning from our body corporate complaining about the noise very recently. Somebody reported it. I really needed that written confirmation of my complete and utter failure as a mother. Thank you for that, dear neighbour. If I remove my emotions from the situation, I can envision that the complaint was made with good intent, perhaps even out of concern. I get it. The problem is and has always been that I have too many feelings. This written warning was a wake up call for me. My rock bottom. It made me feel like it is not only me that thinks I’m a shit mother. It is now a shared sentiment, common knowledge. Since receiving the complaint I’ve tried to be very careful. I’ve tried my best not to shout. The night after I received the e-mail Gabby was crying in the bath, standing on one leg wanting to get out. I tried to calm her, to quiet her…worried about the warning I had just received. I didn’t shout. Instead I sat sobbing by the side of the bath feeling completely powerless to do anything. Eventually I managed to suck it up enough to get her washed and out of the bath. It wasn’t the last time that night that I cried.

Sometimes I just want to escape. I just want to run away. I miss having help around the house. I miss it a lot. I am not going to get it back though, so I’m stuck feeling overwhelmed. Rudi is talking about applying for a new job where he will be driving long distance. He mentioned being away from home for 16 days at a time. I said under no circumstances do I want that for our family, but all he sees is making enough money to finally buy our own house. All I see is my children missing their father and time that they cannot get back with him.

The latter half of 2015 is kicking my ass. Come to think of it, this entire year has kicked my ass in different ways. In the beginning of the year Rudi was changing jobs and as a family we were under a lot of financial pressure for a number of months. This only settled down once he was made permanent in July. During that time my previous car broke and I had to buy a new one and it was very stressful not knowing if I was going to be able to pay for it. Just as the financial issues sorted themselves out, I had to adjust to taking on everything at home and a month or two into that my coping mechanisms gave in.

All in all I think I will be glad to see the back of 2015 and hope that 2016 will bring some sparkle back. Good riddance to 2015!

Thank you for reading x