Mommy, You said to remind you if you start to yell at us...

Hi All, I am back on the blogging. Now I cant stop. So this entry is a sort of parantheses to my last blog about my story and my drinking. I am writing this because I just reread my blog description and realized I very rarely write about motherhood. This is laughable since I seem to have so many different thoughts on the topic. You can see tonite's topic based on my title.

So a few posts ago I mentioned that I started taking Zoloft because I was tired of yelling at my kids. This is an over simplification but is also essentially the truth. I started a month ago when in my rushing to get my kids (already late) to PreSchool I yelled at my daughter. She wasnt listening and I was not in the mood to debate the finer points of getting in the car now or playing a few minutes longer in the first snow dusting we had on the ground. I yelled her name and then some other stuff and then her name etc. After this I picked her up and put her in the car and was pissed. I was pissed nearly the entire ride to her school. I was thinking: What the fuck do I have to do to get my child to listen to me? I thought: other moms do not yell at their children like psychos because they are running late to PreSchool. I thought this is just another area of my life where I am underachieving AND this is the most important area...shit.

Then we get to PreSchool and my baby girl draws me a picture of our fight and tells me to take it home. We make up. I drive home. I get home and sit and look at the picture. On red construction paper my stick figure self can be seen with mean eyebrows and a nice big thought bubble above my head yelling her name in all caps. Point taken. I pick up the telephone and call my Doctor. I make an appointment to see her in 45 minutes. I go.
I tell her about how I dont feel like myself and I am so irritable and it is terrible and I dont like myself and I just want to crawl into bed and I cant. I tell her that my husband is worried bc I am seem so frustrated (true) and that I really wouldnt even care except I just yelled at my daughter (who is actually really good) again and while I do not mind hurting myself--I will not hurth my kids. My pride is not that big. My ego is not that big. If that pill will help me be nice to them and sleep and not freak out--fuck it, I'll take it.

She writes a prescription for a new SSRI (having tried Lexapro last winter and having given up on it because of yucky side effects despite feeling better). I realize that it is all ego and pride and other people's opinions about meds but that none of it is important if it can help me. I take the meds. It has been about 3 weeks now. I will say that I began to feel less impulsive with my yelling and started to feel calm enough to play with kids and enjoy it. I have recently found myself feeling like me--the me that I was before I was not me. This is not a perfect person...I still feel frustrated, tired, pissed etc but I do not feel so irritated I cant think or so frustrated I want to scream. I feel ok. I will say it again. I feel ok.

Having felt not ok on and off for a long time, feeling ok is pretty fucking great. I am open to other opinions on this but let me say that if an anxiety problem fueld my drinking then taking meds for that anxiety problem is fueling my recovery. Please know that I always only speak for myself and dont assume to know what is right for anyone else. I also know that a month from now I might be writing abotu how I stopped taking this because I changed my mind but for now this is where I am at.

Being a working Mommy of small children (age 3 and 4.5) is not always easy. I often find myself having to make the sacrifices that all parents have to make between what is right for me and what is right for them. In a perfect world these are the same. In the real world they are not always. For today, I am trying to do both and make the time I am with them be time that is good for us all. Not perfect, but good. Someday I will tell my kids about my struggles and how I want to be the best parent and person that I can be. That I want to be honest about what I am good at and what I need to work on. I feel this is important. That is why I told my daughter to remind me if I start to yell because Mommy is working on not yelling but sometimes she forgets. It is a bad habit that Mommy started and now needs to stop. No worries though kids, Mommy has some experience with breaking bad habits. xxx K