Unpredictable, a little Crazy, and too Loud

Hi All,

It's Wednesday night and here I am...today I got a call from my daughter's first grade teacher. He said he was concerned because she was having a tough few days and most recently had hid under a table to attempt to avoid recess. He said he felt that she was having trouble adjusting to the noise level in the classroom and that when other kids (mainly boys) got a little more wild that she seemed to have a tough time. I paused on the phone stuck somewhere between laughter and tears. I thought about both my husband and my own lack of tolerance for loud, I thought about my desire for a home that is calm, peaceful and under control and how much I craved the consistency of this simple thing in the last year. I thought about how hard both me and my husband had worked to get our house to be this sort of safe haven and how now it seemed that was coming back to haunt her.

I drove home. I thought about my girl. Who she is. Who I am. How we are similar and how we are different. I wondered about how my Dad's death has influenced her. She was not very close to my Dad because of his own limitations with his depression and temperament and so his death probably more impacted her thru me then her directly but it did have an impact. I thought about things I can control and things I cant. I came home to a happy girl who seemed totally ok, good. I helped her put on her Super Girl costume and watched her run out to the car to go to Daisy's. I thought about 6 and nearly 40. I thought about my Dad and how much he drove me crazy worrying about me. How in the end I drove him crazy worrying about him. I thought about all of that worry.

Will he be ok? Will I be ok? Will she be ok? What if he, I, she is not ok? Then what? Part of me feeling ok is me feeling smart. Part of me feeling smart is me feeling informed and in the know. Part of me feeling informed and in the know is me feeling in tune with those around me. So there is this...when my daughter was with me she was good, happy, ok. And yet she went to school, had experiences that I did not see, feel or know about and then was unhappy and became scared or sad. I want to make that scared and sad go away until I realize (again) that the scared and the sad are both important. The scared and the sad is sort of where the growth is. Do I hate seeing my kids go thru the scary and the sad? Umm, YES, but do I understand that these bad feelings will serve her someday. Yes, I do. I understand that learning to cope with feeling scared and sad is the essence of growing up. Scary and sad things happen all around us. How we learn to deal with those feelings defines who we are. Do we stuff those feelings? Do we act out? Yell? Throw things? Hide? Cry? Just what do we do when we feel unsure or sad or afraid? I don't really know.

I spent some time thinking about ways I could suggest for her to help her deal with her loud classroom. We talked about the girl who she sits next to that turned her back on her yesterday during recess. We talked about what that is like and how, yes, that has happened to me too. We talked about what I like in my friends and what I don't like in my friends and how I have learned to like people who make me feel good when I with them but how that took me a long time to figure out. I left her room with a lump in my throat for all that I know and all that she doesn't and then for all that she knows and all that I don't. I thought about how alcohol protected me for a long time from feelings I didn't want to deal with. I thought about how she came out from under the table and stopped crying and put on a Super Girl costume and flew to Daisy's with her Dad. And now I just sit here and think that when they say in AA that 90% of life is just showing up that they are right and how you can apply that to parenting too. And it hurts to sit with her little girl sadness and it hurt to sit with my Dad's older man sadness and it hurts to know my own. And I feel it all. And I show up. xxK

Autumn

Hi All,

Today is Tuesday and really uncharacteristically I'm home during the day. I stayed home today because I was feeling so sick last night and into this morning that I didn't sleep well and woke up still with a stomach ache. It sort of reminded me of how I used to feel when I was drinking--the waking up and just feeling pain immediately. At the end of my drinking I was drinking with an ulcer and that is just downright unpleasant. Feeling this way today is strange and I cant help but wonder if it is connected with my writing what I think may be the last checks for my Dad's estate. It was so hard to get past the procrastination and pain and do it. I wonder if I made myself sick somehow in the process...Either way, I seem to be mostly finished with the working part of settling his Estate. A process I found to be the most painful and difficult part of this all. Not because it was hard but because I had to show up and do it and all I really wanted to do was hide until someone realized I was still a kid and had my Dad take care of it--like he always used to. The reality that I am the parent and that it is my job to take care of this has never ceased to wake me up and cause me pain. I miss being the kid, and specifically I miss being my Dad's daughter.

My Dad was sort of a chauvinist which may or may not have been the result of his age, generation, temperament but the result of this fact was that he was always trying to take care of me and my sister. I was 30 years old and he was filling my tires or giving me gas money. It used to make me so angry--I thought he didn't realize how capable I was. He tried telling me once that it was just that he was my Dad and it wasn't about my capabilities. I didn't get it at all--I never really got that part until he was gone. That he just wanted to do it for me because he wanted to, not because I couldn't do it, but because he still could. Perhaps, unlike me, he knew that there would be a day that he was not around anymore and he wanted to do what he could while he could. In retrospect that stuff that angered me the most about him--the doing for, the calling so often, the checking in about small stuff that drove me crazy--it is that stupid stuff that I end up missing.  In some small way I also understand a little better now what drove that. How he had lost his own mother in a traumatic and sudden way just like I did and how it makes you scared, and vulnerable, and cautious. All of that energy trying to make sure that we were ok. Energy spent trying to control the people and events around him so that he didn't have to experience the pain of unexpected loss again.

And now my own pain. I too have pushed and pulled at the world around me. Have fought repeatedly the urge to hide both myself and the people that I love the most from a world I fear may indeed hurt them, and hurt me again. When I was about to give birth to my daughter I remember reading that the pain of labor comes from the tensing up after the contractions or in anticipation for them--this made sense to me and it helped for me to invite the pain in and not try to fight it. I can only assume this same logic would apply to this except it feels terrifying to invite this pain in. Like it could destroy me and leave me, like my own father, crippled by the sadness. So here I am--half warrior, half cripple, and one whole real person. A daughter, sister, wife, and mother. Feeling the pain when I can stand it, staying busy when I cant, and trying to find the middle place where I can live.

On November 22nd it will be one year since my Dad jumped off of the Lambertville, NJ toll bridge. One year since I got the call. One year since my world fell apart right down inside itself and I was forced to confront one of my own greatest fears--that he would someday take his own life. Like a train wreck I saw coming and could not stop my Dad had jumped away, taken flight, returned home. I wonder where he is out there and if he'll come back to me in some other mystical way...and I hope he will. In fact, I hope he finds his way back to me soon. I'll be waiting for him, right here, where he left me.