Even When It Doesn't Feel Like It

When there's been a significantly traumatic event, one needs to learn to cope, to re-form one's expectations and reactions, to work through it, hopefully blundering through to the other side of normal, which is never an easy process. In our case, there are so many others to drag along through it, traipsing through an emotional minefield, carefully choosing one's words and considerations, in my case, I'm blessed to call upon a psychologist who makes Saturday afternoon house calls if necessary.

It certainly was necessary yesterday as I'd eluded to...I can't even dredge up a word within my churning mind...our previous crappy day and night.

One of my comments questioned if my severe anguish yesterday might have been attributed to any unknown health problems. Nope, it was purely a combination of events and disasters. There's a word...but it doesn't touch upon any decent description at all.

I have to cope. I have to function. I have no choice. It's gotta get done each day. In spite of grief, turmoil, calamities or negative events, there still needs to be a functioning authority/parental figure who cooks, cleans, does laundry, and tends to children. I'm an automaton at times.

Expending energy is my preferred means of coping. A bedroom needed repainting and I only got two walls primed as there's an odd, older raised finish on the walls, a stucco type feel to it, and it absorbed paint like a white blouse might suck up an ink cartridge that no one uses anymore. I once had the most beautiful cartridge pen in my nerdy junior high school days, living way up north then in Annandale, Virginia. I had very decent penmanship as well, a lost art nowadays, but slipping back in my mind to days of no conflicts and a simpler life seems infinitely desirable in my over wrought mind.

Chuck, Yolie's husband, feeling helpless and stressed out as well, decided to replace the broken window panes with plexiglass panes until the kids are grown. Now there's a plan.

Will we make it to church today? I dunno. Nerves are shot throughout the house, kids have imaginary and reactionary psychosomatic aches and pains, there might have been an overload of trauma this past week, three days of school alone absolutely exhausted all my children, who'd all made a joint effort to act normal while out in public, saving their shenanigans for my benefit.

I personally need to get to church, but I must weigh it against the possibility that traumatized children will use it as a forum to express their massive displeasure over life, forcing me by their actions to constantly correct their behaviors, and to stress out over being in public where other children are behaving, in obvious contrast to my own kids.

Both Yolie and I chewed upon one of my many well-thought out comments yesterday regarding unconditional hatred. Lindy writes, "With our newest son we have, for the first time, seen and experienced the opposite of unconditional love.

He has unconditional hatred. He hates based on absolutely nothing. He wants revenge on anyone who has tried to help him in his life. At 12 he has a list of people he wants dead. I'm on it.

It never occurred to me someone could hate unconditionally. Anger I understand. Hating those who have hurt you I can understand. But hating anyone and everyone to the point of murder, I have a hard time getting my head around.
What have we done to our children in this society to have them filled with that much malice?"

I italicized her last sentence. So many of us are living this life. We're trying to use normal parenting methods of love and logic, knowing it won't work here within our families, but struggling to find all the other possible methods of therapeutically parenting children that have been devastated and non-nurtured, abused and neglected, often in such a horrific manner that no recovery may even be possible. I even hate to express that thought but the evidence is beginning to overwhelm me.

Several different deputies had expressed this week, "I just don't understand, with all you've done, why they don't appreciate it," a sentiment often mentioned by my parents, often my own primary thought. Yet I do get it. I do comprehend the depths of the damage done to them in their past. I also despair deeply.

I read and re-read all comments, answering them in my mind as I worked, generally my answer involves a "I just don't know the answer," wail as I struggle. Jesse, my son in Texas, was texting me, but I just didn't feel like talking and he knows I'm uncoordinated and clumsy on a good day. On a bad day, me texting and painting simultaneously is not even in the realm of possible physical activities.

If I were a true author, if I had the luxury of escaping into an aerie abode to thoughtfully write out my musings, rather than a now equally traumatized mom with severely limited time to verbally discuss my own feelings within my own knotty head my ownself, maybe I could cope better.

Claudia sent, "I understand if you don't feel like talking," message combined with an inside joke regarding my own personal Preacher's Kid Rebellion as a teenager, which made me snort with laughter. I needed that.

I want to quote all the comments, but I have a barfer I need to hold until he feels better, but I'll be thinking about an anonymous thought "Maybe kids who've experienced the worst in adults need to see how an adult handles the things they know and have experienced without violence or drugs. I can't imagine how it is for you, but God does have a reason even if we never know what it is. In some way perhaps this is part of the healing of those who can be healed in your family."

I go back often to my comments, thinking, considering, mulling and reconsidering all y'all's input, knowing you know, knowing you've been there, and most of all, deeply appreciating your prayers over us as I go about my day mumbling, "Thy will be done," like a mantra, knowing I'm in the will of God, even when it doesn't feel like it.