I don't want to be her! But then again...

So incredibly frustrated with myself lately.  I don't know exactly how it happened, but I used to be this fairly on top of it, pretty much organized person.  Really, I was!  I used to start addressing Christmas cards while passing out candy on Halloween.  On January 1st or maybe the 2nd, depending on how hungover I was, I would start to clean out the filing cabinet and remove all the old stuff.  It then went into a "purge box" where it would sit in a dated labeled folder for seven years at which point it would be put into a bank box and shredded on rainy day.

Really, that was me!  Don't get me wrong, I've always been a pile person.  There was usually a pile of stuff on my desk or some horizontal area that needed tending to.  However, it usually was given enough TLC that it didn't slide off the table onto the floor.

When did that person leave and who is this inside of my body?  I want the old me back.  Can't I return this one to Walmart or something?

I think it happened gradually.  Things were definitely under control before we got married.  I couldn't have done the whole wedding thing if I wasn't.  I was psycho organized about the wedding.  Of course a few things fell by the wayside, yes, and I made a couple mistakes that hopefully no one noticed so I'm not calling myself out here.  But, for goodness sake, when everyone arrived at the hotel, they were given a packet with the details of the weekend, local places to eat and a crossword puzzle full of clues related to Charlie and me and our relationship.  A CROSSWORD PUZZLE!!! What bride do you know that's got the time to think of 20 or so clues and make their answers all fit together on a grid?  I was a freak!

So maybe I don't want her back.

The newly married me was not bad.  I remember being completely overwhelmed when we moved for the first time.  It was hard to unpack all this stuff, half of which was not mine and figure put where it was supposed to go.  I  was never the Martha Stuart type and the places I had lived before being married were closets with not much space to decorate.  I remember being really pissed off when another wife suggested that I just "needed someone to tell me what to do."  In some ways she was right.  I did need a bit of direction in the decorating business, but I wasn't sitting on my butt all day.   I didn't understand wives who would knock on my door and just "hang out" with nothing to do all day, because I always had stuff to do.  I was working and volunteering and I had a life.

Maybe I want back the me that had two kids.  Sweet girls who were 14 months apart, but yet I still managed to play Bunco or go scrapbook on a regular basis.  I volunteered at the Thrift Shop and coached cheerleading,  I was a real person.  I was never very good with housekeeping and Charlie started to get annoyed with my inability to keep up with dishes,etc. but I still had a name, a personality!  I painted the kitchen with two kids under two in the house!  I was even pregnant at the time, which begs the question "Is that what happened to Lyra?"

But I was overwhelmed.  I remember freaking out before Charlie came home from a deployment b/c I knew he'd be furious that the house was a wreck.  Two of my most awesomest battle buddies, changed their plans for the evening (one was supposed to go on a date with her husband) to come over and help me get the house in order.  I will never forget that...ever!!!

Someone once told me that every time you have a baby, you lose half of your brain cells.  If you buy into that theory, anyone with more than two kids is in the red.  We moved and the clean strokes I used to swim,  became a doggie paddle.  I had three under 3 1/2 and Lyra spent 22 1/2 hours of every day screaming at the top of her lungs.

Discussion with the doctor:

"Why is she crying?"

"She has colic."

"What's colic?"

"Inconsolable crying."

I really don't like to think much about those days, so I'll keep moving forward.  There are so many feelings and emotions coming at me, I may need a break to rework this a bit.  It's not where I wanted to go with all this.  Because memories start getting very tough.

So let's fast forward 12 years.  I have had three more children.  All boys.  (One I lost at 22 weeks)  The second daughter has been diagnosed with anxiety and depression.  Obviously, that comes from me and I can only pray that by realizing it early and by me having truly "been there" I can help her cope with what will most likely be a life long struggle.  My 7 year old son has Autism. He is very high functioning which comes with it's own set of issues.  The doggie paddle has turned into more a "survival bob" where I come up for air once in awhile only to be sucked under again.

I have a husband who had been deployed or unaccompanied 6 times in the course of our 16 year marriage.  That does not account for all the TDY trips, Army schools, and other times we were separated due to timing.  (ie; I'll move with the kids, you stay and get the house packed and well meet at the next duty station in a month or two) Have no fear,  I realize our separations are a drop in the bucket compared to so many other military families.  We were lucky in our duty stations and timing, yet, I feel C has definitely done his part. 

And now, here I am.  Typing on my iPad at 12:07am because I am so aggravated with myself I feel like I need to confess it in a public blog.  I was not supposed to end up as this woman!  I don't want to be her!  I do not want to be the woman who runs around like a crazy person on Friday afternoon because it's May 2nd and she realized at 8pm on May 1st that the car registration expired on April 30!
I loathe the woman who cannot put her hands on her husbands orders even though she knows where she put them last.  The woman who, while having a severe panic attack is at the mercy of  several federal employees and about 300 yards of red tape before she can re-register her car because her husband is out of the country and she was not with it enough to take care of it on line when it came in the  mail.  She deserves no respect!

I want to smack the woman who has an appointment with her daughter in the morning to finally, after 9 years of schooling and begging for answers, finally get some dyslexia testing done and is looking at a stack about two feet tall of report cards, test results, medical info for all 5 kids that is completely disorganized and not in any semblance of order!  Is it really that hard to stay on top of this stuff?  It shouldn't be, yet....

As I got kids going to bed this evening, I decided that I would in fact, stay up and try to get through the mound of paperwork on the dining room table.  Remember the guy from Close Encounters and his mountain of whatever it was?  That is my dining room table right now.  So I was feeling really good about trying to tackle some of it while gathering some papers for the appt tomorrow.

It's uncanny, actually.  The moment, the exact moment, I threw away the paper towel from washing my hands after putting away what was left from dinner, I heard the dreaded word.

"Mom!"

The rest was garbled to the point I wasn't sure who was calling me.  It was Lyra that announced Josie had a bloody nose,  I'm not quite sure if she understood the garble or if she was able to see the offending nostrils from the bottom of the back staircase.

No big deal, right?  We have our share of bloody noses around here.  Lean forward, pinch, wait, move on.  Not tonight.  This was a bloody nose to rival a major botched surgery.  Imagine a child, who is already having a somewhat difficult day for completely unrelated reasons, and who is trying to prepare for yet another set of tests with a stranger tomorrow to deal with issues she only sees as a failure on her part.  And let's give her a healthy dose of anxiety. For dessert, we'll top it all off with a bloody nose that take a good half hour to get under control. Let's let her start coughing up the blood that's running down her throat and add a few big clots that make her think she's choking and a good size chunk coming out of her nose that is labor and delivery worthy.

I should have spent the last hour trying to go through and organize those papers, but after an ordeal like that, I was done. Fried. Finite! And maybe you wonder why I grabbed the iPad and started typing so uncontrollably instead of spending the last hour organizing those papers. The explanation will make perfect sense when you realize, that before I did any paper sorting I had to google a few things.

1. Best stuff to use for getting the adhesive from EKG stickers off a child's skin. (There was nothing specifically for a child with sensory issues who will not allow me to touch the spots unless he is asleep)  Alcohol did not work.  I will wait for his next deep sleep and try the Goo Gone.

2. How does one to about getting spray paint off of concrete so the Army does not fine one when one is ready to move? I had a list of things to try, but since I did not write them down I'll have to look it up again.

While looking up the previously listed items, I stewed about who I've become and how difficult it is to be this person.  This person I don't know.  This person who, despite the thoughts of her husband, does NOT enjoy living like this.  The person who, because she is so compulsive at times takes three times longer to organize something since she can not just "toss something in a folder."  The folder must be new and labeled correctly.  The papers must be in chronological order.  The bins must be labeled on the outside and all facing the same direction.  I could go on, but then I would be waiting for the knock on the door from the men in white coats!

Three Days Later:

I'm in a much better place at this moment then when I started to write this.  Perhaps I just needed a few days perspective.  A few events to happen that told me the woman I am is not so bad after all.

Event #1- Lyra came home from school Monday and told me in detail about an assembly on bullying that was not presented well.  That's a whole other post, but the important part was, guess what?  A ton of kids never even shared with their parents what had happened or the details of some very disturbing things that were said to an auditorium of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders.  That tells me that I am close to the kids and that they will tell me stuff that is important to know.

Event #2- I had a therapy appt today.  I mistakenly scheduled it at the same time as Josie and B Cha's orthodontist appt.  I was in a panic about what to do.  I ended up dropping them off, going to see my doctor and then picking them up.  This was no big deal, but not too long ago, I would've cancelled the therapy because a.) What kind of Mother would drop the kids off at the ortho and make them hang out there until she could come back? and b.) if anyone has to suffer, it should be me.  Someone who is so disorganized to schedule two conflicting appts should not be allowed to do her thing.  I will pay the $25 to cancel the therapy appt less then 24 hours out with my own bank acct so Charlie doesn't have to know what an idiot I am.

Event #3- The therapy went well.  I was in a rant about this woman who can't keep her house strait and doesn't cook for her kids and who I normally think is a hot useless mess.  But, I had to confess what was really going through my mind.  Lately, all this beating myself up has led me to a few conclusions and when I ran them by Dr. K, she was pretty much in agreement.  I love to be right!

So this is where I am today:

Guess what?  The house is trashed.  No seriously. Trashed!  The dishes are piled up, the laundry's walking around by itself, it looks like a Staples store exploded on every horizontal surface.  I kid you not and I could produce a few witnesses who, only with my permission, could corroborate my story.  Yet, if I do the dishes, the child who ignored them yesterday will feel free to ignore them again.  If the laundry is done perfectly everyday, the kids may continue to think there is a laundry fairy and that anytime they want something clean, the fairy will magically pluck it from under their bed, wash it, fold it, and place it neatly in their drawer.  We may have a ghost in this house, but we ain't got no laundry fairy!  And the papers, well, the papers, I'm working on them.  I have cleared out most of the file cabinet of very old decrepit receipts, warranties, and cable bills and am in the process of making new folders with new labels so everything will be more easily accessed.

Guess what again?  Rome wasn't built in a day.  I really have no idea how long it took, but I'm willing to bet it wasn't built in a week or two either.  In addition, I highly doubt that Rome itself had 5 kids to deal with while her husband was gone.  And if her husband was around, was he lifting heavy bricks while kissing boo boos?  I doubt it.  He may not have been so understanding of her taking what he considered a ridiculous amount of time to finish building herself.  So what!  If she's doing the best she can, she's doing the best she can.  Don't we tell our kids that all the time?  Someone should've told Rome that! 

So this person I've become.  Is she what I envisioned?  Eh, not so much.  Is she what I strive for? Ummm, that would be a big "Nope!"  Is she "good enough" for right now, for this minute, for these kids, for this husband?  Although I would've answered differently a few days ago and probably will change my mind once I walk away from the solace of writing,  I'd have to say "Yes, why yes she is!"

It's funny how a day or two changed the outcome of this post.  How the realization that if I threw myself into housework and being someone I'm not, that I'd be missing things.  Missing Lyra's need to talk to me the other day, missing Tali face timing with her friends who always ask that I come up and wish them a good night before I go to bed, missing Josie so overwhelmed by a science lab that she melted down and needed me to talk her through it, missing Sawyer so excited about some Minecraft thing that he followed me around until I agreed to watch a video of other people playing Minecraft which, although akin to watching an Italian Opera, makes him giggle so much it's contagious, missed the fact that while I was inside the orthodontist paying the bill, B Cha was standing on the wall of the planter in the side walk dancing to a song he only heard in his head.  I knew it was the song "Happy" because I know that's what he sings to himself all day long. Even missing the chance to send my husband a four line email and get a shorter one back from him, but one that made me laugh all day.

I'm not trying to say I'm a great Mom, because I'm not.  I am very far from it, but I'm an okay Mom.  A "good enough" Mom.  A Mom who loves her kids and her husband and really does try to please everyone as best as she can. A Mom who continues to try to improve, even when it doesn't seem like it.  A Mom who feels like she'd rather be lip syncing to the Sound of Music in order to make her kids laugh, than to leave them to go bed alone while she cleans up.

I rest in the knowledge that there will be time to clean.  Plenty of time when (if I survive) all the kids have grown and are wrestling with who they are striving to be.

Just A Mom!

(And I'm trying to be okay with that)