It’s been a lonely feeling week.
Actually, decade, really.
I find myself wanting to bang my head about the complexity of things:
The rips in the country, the pain of so many people, the fires and blizzards and hurricanes, all the while I’m still supposed to plan what kind of dinner to make?
Every day has felt like survival mode from the moment my eyes open, until I lay back down in my bed for what feels like four to five broken crumbs of sleep.
There have been so many times in the last several years when I’ve felt like shouting,
“Does anyone else care about all of this?! Hello? Am I alone here?! Am I the only one holding everything?”
Then again,
that has felt like my whole life experience as a mother,
back all the way to the time spent with toddlers in parks as they pick dandelions, and
(like a pack mule) I try to make it back to the car after piling up everything;
Snacks, and blankets, extra shirts, and their sippies, puffs, three toys, some special rock that’s supposedly a new family member now, and the bottle of leaking sunscreen.
My arms could be bursting with things, overflowing, and I would inevitably be handed one more thing, so I guess that I have been trained for this moment of holding in and holding on;
But, just like in the early days of motherhood,
to me,
these days can feel just as isolating.
This last week a friend I view as one of the strongest women and mothers I know messaged me asking how we are supposed to handle all this.
(I pictured her circle-gesturing)
“How do we face it all and keep our hearts filled with love?”
She was asking me that on a really hard day to answer.
I wrote back to her my response about staying open with one hand,
while I used the other one to desperately cling to the shreds of my sanity.
I don’t know all the answers.
I just take a step, then take the next one, really.
I just know I always want love and goodness and mercy to be the things that follow behind me.
I want the wake behind me to to look alive, and blooming, bursting with bees and flowers;
For destruction to be no part of me.
I want so badly for my children to remember me as the mom who gathered all kinds of things;
Their trash, their heartaches, their inward dreams, and even other people.
I want them to see me as someone who takes things and tries to prop them, revive them, treasure them, and help store them with love where they are supposed to be.
Just like with that special rock they found that they used to insist had a personality,
and that they needed me to guard with my life, I want them to see that a deep part of me will always be treating the loves and desires of other people as if they are as important as my own, worthy of being protected and cradled,
even if that specific thing isn’t special to me.
I know so many mothers carry so much, and collapse on the couch feeling depleted, powerless, and invisible.
I know that this is not only me;
But the inside soundtrack of my life right now so often sounds like being back to being alone at the park with a small child, when the only sound I hear is from my hand pushing, pushing, pushing an old creaking swing.
This week I posted something about this on Facebook, about the sense of loneliness, and had attached a picture of a single black sheep in the center of a white sheep sea.
I have felt like that sheep from the beginning of time, in a thousand ways;
Everyone else happily munching on grass, while I don’t blend.
My head is up, and watchful.
I take in so many things.
But then, after pouring my heart out, in the comments a message popped up from my best friend that helped me to reframe things:
“There. I fixed it,” she wrote.
Underneath it, a copy of my image, doctored, and now showing two of the black sheep.
A couple of months ago a friend messaged my husband telling him he had had a dream about me.
He said I was teaching large classes on parenting to many people, and the messages were being very well-received.
He said that after one of my classes he watched from the vantage point of seeing me then go home to just my family, and I walked through a doorway that looked like a bookcase, like a secret hideaway, that led to a kitchen that was in the middle of a massive remodeling.
He said that the kitchen, the place of preparation, had been stripped to the studs, indicating a major change, and this week I feel that dream so powerfully.
I see it. I understand it now.
I see what it means for me.
Let me be preparing to feed people.
Whether in word, or actual homemade soup, or in deed.
Let me come out of this stripping season, after having held it all, my arms overflowing, to have made my table bigger, my arms even more open and capable of helping to carry the burden of all of the other lonely black sheep.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
