I Broke, But I’m Better Now

Did you know that airplane wings are designed with a certain amount of “give” in them?

They may look solid as a rock, firm and rigid, but really, they’re quite flexible.  If they weren’t, the forces of take-off, flight and landing would cause them to snap into pieces like a toy.

It’s the same concept as the old saying “If you don’t bend, you’ll break.”

As a Flight Attendant, I have no choice but to be flexible.  I may have a day planned where I work two little bitty flights and end up in Miami (at the hotel right on the beach with beer vending machines!) and instead wind up working four flights and am diverted to Columbus, Ohio to stay at an airport hotel (arriving after the hotel restaurant closes and no one will deliver to the location).

Thanks to an entire adult life working in aviation, “flexible” is my middle name.

While my nature is to be unyielding, I have learned very well the lesson of “rolling with the punches” or “going with the flow”.

It’s called survival.

But you know?  Even flexible things, bendy things, things that roll, yielding things…well, even those things can eventually break.

An airplane wing is designed to bend and flex with the normal forces of flight.  Hey – they can even withstand hurricane force winds that are above and beyond what they were designed to do!

But if you touch that wing to the ground when you’re landing?  Yup.  Broken wing.

I feel like my wing touched the ground last week.

My dad retired last Wednesday after 35 years working for the same airline I eventually began working for.  The kids and I flew down to Houston for his retirement party on Wednesday night and drove back with my parents (15 hours of traveling!) on Thursday.

Before I left, I gave Zac his probiotic earlier than we normally dose him, and when Darrel asked why, I said it was because I didn’t want to have to worry about carrying perishable probiotics with me on this whirlwind trip.  If we gave him the dose right before leaving for the airport and gave him his Thursday dose the minute we got home, I wouldn’t have to add that to my long list of balls to juggle and he’d still be on track with his probiotic trial.

Darrel agreed that sounded like a good plan, and off we went.

The drive home took longer than I thought it would, so we didn’t roll in to town until about 3:30 a.m.  Everyone was exhausted!  I got Jed into bed right away, but left Zac in the carseat while I went to get his probiotics ready.

I couldn’t find the teeny-tiny measuring spoon for the probiotics.  I spent ten minutes banging around my kitchen, trying to find it.  Just when I was going to wake Darrel up to ask him where it was, I thought to look at the dirty dishes in the sink – and there it was.  Sitting in a bowl of nasty, watery ickiness with who knows what food residue in it.

Well, great.

So I scrubbed them to within an inch of their life with hot, soapy water, put them in one of my breast pump equipment sterilizing bags, zapped them in the microwave for twice the time it says to in order to sterilize things, got them out and dried them, then sat and waited for them to dry completely (you’re not supposed to use anything even remotely wet in the probiotics, as it can kill the little buggies) before I could finally get the probiotics ready.

It was 4:00 a.m.

And I don’t know why – in the big scheme of things, this was not that big of a deal, just an oversight on Darrel’s part, not some big bad rotten thing he did – so I don’t know why, but in that moment, something inside me just…broke.

I’m so tired, folks.  SO tired.  Tired of thinking everything through twenty steps ahead.  Tired of planning everything.  Tired of working so hard.  Tired of being so scared.  Tired of the multitude of demands that are on me at all times.  Tired of cooking 6 meals a day.  Tired of being so exhausted I fall asleep if I just sit at a really long red light (at noon).  Tired of being financially broke.  Tired of knowing I could help dig us out of the hole financially – if I had the time to work on the things I could create that would generate money.  Tired of having no time to do anything other than what I’m already doing.

I looked around my house while I waited for the spoons to dry, and I saw chaos everywhere.

My kitchen was a disaster of epic proportions.  My dining room made my kitchen look clean.  I couldn’t walk in the living room for the toys strewn about the place.

And that was just the rooms I could see.  I knew what awaited me in the other rooms of the house.

In the just over 4 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never once won the battle against the chaos I’m up against.  Never once.  Not ONCE have I had a day when I could honestly say “Everything had a place, and everything was IN its’ place.”  Not even an hour.  Not even a minute.

And I have worked constantly at staving off the chaos in that time.  And I have nothing to show for it.

I’m tired, folks.  So very, very tired.

I’m good; in fact, I’m DAMN good at rolling with punches, dodging and weaving, juggling balls of fire while jumping on one foot, but everyone has a limit.  Everyone reaches a breaking point.  Eventually, everyone has done all they can and have nothing left to give.

Why that moment?  Why that particular “straw that broke the camel’s back”?

I don’t know.  The measuring spoons were really not that big a deal.

But they broke me.

I thought it might be permanent; I wandered around the house all day Friday and Saturday, smiling, enjoying my kids, changing diapers, being a Mama and loving on my babies…but there was something different inside of me and I didn’t quite know what.

I went errand running with my parents…getting their new phones set up, electric turned on, buying some essentials for their new house until they can get moved up here, and it was fine. Fun, even.

But something was broken inside of me; I could feel it.

I didn’t clean the kitchen for three days.  I only cooked one meal in that time, too.  I did no laundry, didn’t pick up a single toy, made no efforts at tidying anything.  In fact, I didn’t even clean up after myself – I threw my clothes on the floor wherever I was, tossed my makeup brushes on the counter instead of putting them away in the drawer, left my plates on the table after eating, and avoided anything that bespoke of responsibility without even realizing I was doing it.

I guess it was a “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” kind of thing.

Saturday night, I got the kids to bed and came in to the office to take care of a couple little things.  Just tiny little things that were part of Making Our Lives Work – two emails had to be sent.  That’s all.

And the stress level from doing just those two little things made it impossible for me to fall asleep until 4:30 a.m.

So Sunday I was talking with Darrel as he cooked my brunch and came to the understanding that HE has been feeling this way ever since we found out about our foundation problem at the beginning of the month!  And suddenly it all made sense…

That was about three weeks ago.  That was about when Darrel started slowly withdrawing from “doing stuff” around the house.  Not drastic, not horrible, but small, niggling things that he used to do, well, he wasn’t any more.

And three weeks of me doing what I normally do combined with doing those small, niggling things that he was letting go of because it was too much for him to bear was enough to thrust me into a deep, soul-crushing depression.

It was like a cast iron frying pan flew out of the ether and slapped me across the face.

“OK.” the frying pan said to me.  “Now you know what the problem is.  What’re you gonna do about it?”

And I looked over and saw Zac making funny faces on the window and I felt some primal rage/strength surge up from somewhere deep inside of me.  So I told Darrel,

“If we were both just people, I’d say we could wallow in our misery and milk it for all it’s worth.  But we’re not people.  We’re PARENTS.  And they (pointing at the kids) deserve better than to live in a house like this.  They deserve to be able to eat at a dining room table, and they deserve two parents who are not shells of human beings.  Whatever we have to do to rally, we have to do it.  We have to snap out of it.  Because they deserve better.”

And Darrel agreed, and then we hugged and kissed and gathered the kids around for a rousing rendition of “Kum Ba Yah”.

Well, no, not really.  

What really happened is that Darrel agreed with me, but we don’t really have any plans or ideas of how to dig ourselves out of this funk.  Time will certainly be a factor, as we see how Zac does on food trials and if my returning to work will be smooth or rough.  Or, you know, even possible.

But that primal Mama instinct told me some things when it roared to life within me; things that will certainly help shake off this brokenness and make me whole again.  

Put on your big girl panties and deal with it.  

Put one foot in front of the other and keep going.  

Don’t stop.  Don’t slow down.  

Eventually, you and your family will walk out the other side of this valley.  

And, by the way?  You need to spend more time praying.  

(I’m starting to wonder if God doesn’t sometimes speak to us as primal voices from within.  Ya think?)

So, yes, I broke.  But I think I’m all better.  For now, at least.  

And I have one gigantic mess of a kitchen waiting to be cleaned.

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Have you ever broken?  How did you fix yourself?