Before I Was a Mother

After trying to explain to my daughter that I was not mad at her over and over again I blurted out, “Believe it or not, before I was a mother I was a person.  That means that I have my own issues. I have good days and bad days.  It also means that I can be in a bad mood and it can have nothing to do with you.”

My daughter is an adult but I venture to say from the look on her face that this was a novel concept.  It’s probably my own fault that she thinks that if I’m mad it must be at her or her siblings.  I’ve rarely shared my own struggles.  I’m beyond a private person. I haven’t shared openly with my children, not even with my closest friends.  On rare occasions I have shared them with my husband.   I worry that I haven’t trusted others enough to let them that far into the castle walls.  More likely than not it has been my inability to trust myself that has kept me guarding my own traumas, fears, and failures so fiercely.

Consequently, I have spent years boxing up that which was painful, packing, and shoving it as far away from me as humanly possible.  It hasn’t been a terribly hard thing to do.  I am raising 7 children.  My husband and 6 of those children have ADHD and a list of co-occurring conditions a mile long.  I race from emergency to emergency – dealing with schools and IEPs, working with children to overcome dyslexia, handling an OCD, ODD or anxiety/depression moment (just to mention a few).  I home school two of my children still, I used to home school all of them.  I am active in my church and probably more important my children are active in church which makes me a taxi driver darting between schools, church, and home.  The amount we pay in medical expenses allows us to itemize on our taxes even though we don’t own a home.  Add the doctor’s office to the taxi route.

I have plenty to keep me occupied, plenty to keep me away from dealing with the issues I collected while I was a person, before I was a mother. 

But problems, traumas, fears, failures; they don’t wait forever.  They don’t stay neatly boxed up and packed away.  They find their way to the surface and eventually demand attention.  My day of reckoning came recently.  Now I’m trying to deal with all of it and still do all the things I do as a mother and wife in high demand.  It has made me a little cranky – in part because I really don’t want to go down this road, I really don’t want a road to go down.  I really don’t want to face the pain and other hard emotions; that is, after all, why I’ve been avoiding them for so long.

This blog is to help me accomplish that.  It’s to give me a safe place where I have control and I can have a voice in issues that I haven’t had control or a voice in all my life.  It is me reclaiming my ability to be more than just a mother, to be a person, a friend, a wife, a daughter, a sister, and a mother.