She Breaks Just Like A Little Girl

I don’t know what happened to me this week… but it wasn’t good. It may be appropriate to call it a mental breakdown. It was brought on by a perfect storm of stress, stress-induced depression and anxiety, major lack of sleep, a general feeling of being overwhelmed with work/kids/marriage/housekeeping, working for and with my in-laws, and the cherry on top: 2-3 months of a really, really shitty diet.

The seeds were planted right around Labor Day. It began with a very intense argument with Mike over the holiday weekend – one that lead to a lengthy discussion where he revealed to me that he feels like I’m never happy, always on the edge of depression, and seem uninterested in our marriage and our children. This was somewhat surprising to me, as I had felt like I had enjoyed spending time with not only him, but also the kids, so much more since the beginning of the summer! What it really boiled down to was my constant complaints about work, and my dissatisfaction with my job. I didn’t think this stress and anger over work was bleeding over into my personal life – I was wrong. It was hemorrhaging. 

I decided to really think about how I could change this feeling, what it would take to make me happy, both personally and professionally. I barely had time to begin digging for the revelation when work sent me over the edge. It was no one thing, it was everything. Everything all at once. I was literally sick with worry and anxiety over messing up a task that I had been trusted with – I was able to breathe when I realized I had managed to complete it without error. Until I was told I made a large error. I followed the instructions provided to me exactly… apparently the instructions were wrong, or I misunderstood them. It doesn’t really matter, but that was sort of the final thing for me. I had worked so hard to make sure this went smoothly – I had had nausea and diarrhea (sorry for the TMI!!!) for days. Then to find out I’d done it wrong? It was all I could take. I had to leave the office a few minutes early, I had to go to my mom’s, I had to down three beers in an hour, chain smoke, and cry. I had to quit my job. I had to! I couldn’t take it anymore!

…but, of course, I didn’t. Because I couldn’t just do that. My income is necessary at this point in our lives, and it’s family. Not just family… but my husband’s family. I’m sure many of you understand the delicate “in-law” balance. This is an especially tricky situation. Especially with the new role and responsibilities I have recently been taking on within the business. My irrational decision to just up and quit would be more than bad. It would be the possibility of screwing up pretty darn important personal relationships… the most important of those being: my marriage. So I didn’t quit. I just drank a lot and stayed up too late and pretended everything was okay. Band-aid that bitch!

Bad idea.

You can’t put a band-aid on a gunshot wound and call it a day. It doesn’t work that way.

During all of this mess, my maternal grandfather (I call him pa-pa (papaw)) has been in and out of the hospital a couple times. He had a heart attack a couple years ago and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He recovered pretty well from his bypass surgery and has maintained his health… until recently. Over this last 6-9 months he’s lost a lot of weight. He is very fatigued. It’s just… it’s not good. And then he got bronchitis at the end of August and it’s caused a lot of secondary problems. Right now things are not good. I don’t know how to better explain it than that. My grandparents (on both sides) are more than just grandparents to me… they are my parents. They are just an extension. To lose any of them… I just honestly don’t know how I would react to that. I don’t know how functional I would be as a human being. And I don’t know how long it would take for me to regain that functionality.

Monday evening I talked to my granny… she sounded weird. My grandparents grew up in rural Louisiana, they have thick southern accents. Granny’s voice was so tight, she was speaking with almost no accent at all. She’s giving me updates on Pa-pa. She says he’s very sick… he’s not back in the hospital, but he’s very sick. I ask how SHE is doing… she gets quiet, then laughs and says, “Well, you know!! I just keep goin’ and doin’ and takin’ care of things!” (now I know where I get that laugh-off-the-bad from), and tells me she needs to get off the phone so she can get supper started.

I got off the phone and lost it, you guys. I’m tearing up just typing this out right now.

I went over to my parents later that evening and we started talking about Chelsea – the missing sister. Only she’s not reallymissing, we know where she is, she just doesn’t speak to us. I was telling Mom and Dad how I had a dream about her a couple weeks ago. A dream where she came home. And what was weird to me is that, in the dream, I completely broke down when I saw her… everyone else was happy to see her, but no one else was crying and clinging to her like I was. The other thing that stood out to me was that she was wearing this bandana on her head… it’s a detail of the dream that I remember very clearly for some reason. So in talking about this dream, I decide maybe it’s time I write Chelsea an email to have my baby sister send since Lillie is the only family member Chelsea still communicates with. Talking about all of that was heavy. I’m realizing in that moment, as I’m getting ready to leave to head home and go to bed, that there’s no way I can work tomorrow… there’s no way I can face the day. I’m not entirely sure I’m even going to be able to get out of bed. And then, a strange side-note: my dad always walks me to the door and watches me get in my car (“so the marauders won’t get you!”) – he gives me a hug as I’m leaving and says quietly, “I had a dream about Chelsea a couple months ago... she was wearing a bandanna.”  Isn’t that spooky?! That’s kind of spooky, right?!

I digress… it was two weeks of just really heavy stuff and really high stress. I decided to take a mental health day Tuesday. I slept in, I grabbed some lunch with my dad, and I went on a mad purge and cleaning frenzy in my house. It felt really good to get some household chores done that I hadn’t done in a long time, to take care of the things I had been either avoiding or just neglecting to the point of it being almost disgusting. It felt really good to just be home, to feel like I could actually take care of my house without feeling like I was constantly failing both as a homemaker and as a “working woman”.

I went into work Wednesday morning, still feeling pretty depressed and overwhelmed with everything else going on as well as with my job, but a little less heavy having cleaned my living space… Mike and I had spoken briefly a couple weeks ago about my staying at home full-time, in our talk about what might make me happy since he felt I was so unhappy all the time. We aren’t currently in a place financially where this would be an option, but it was something to think about in the future. Being the person that I am, I decided to see where a starting point could be for this option – what kind of a salary would he need to be making where I could maybe consider staying home with the kids? I found what I thought would be a reasonable starting point… I brought it up at lunch that day, just a hypothetical. Well, long story short: it turned into a fight. A really big fight where he said things (and then I, later in the day, said things) that were incredibly hurtful and cruel and just downright rude. I felt as if he, in his words and behavior, was telling me that this just simply would never be an option for our family. This, in turn, made me feel like he was saying my happiness really wasn’t as important as he’d made it out to be in earlier conversations – or at all, really. That having extra money would always be the most important thing. 

I have a tendency to think that money doesn’t do much for you if you’re not happy earning that money or can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor. …but whatever. So we get into this argument and I think the emotional center in my brain just broke. I couldn’t go back into work. I couldn’t sit in the office and pretend like I wasn’t breaking into a million pieces inside. I couldn't be silently crying at my desk for the rest of the afternoon. So I went home. I had to call my father-in-law hiccup-crying (you know, where you’re crying so hard that you can’t really breathe? Yeah.) and explain that I just couldn’t come back… that I was just having a really hard time and just couldn’t do it that day. We left it at that. I went home and laid in the floor, crying really uncontrollably… like to the point where I almost threw up all over myself… and then almost hyperventilated at one point. I obviously should not have been alone in that moment. So, naturally, I went to my mother’s. 

Once I calmed down, I picked up my kids from daycare early and headed back to Mom's house for some dinner… Mike randomly showed up around 6pm and ate with us, even though I never told him what I was doing or where I was going… but he knows me. He knows where my safe place is: home. My real home, where I grew up, where my family is.

We didn’t even talk, really, until shortly before bed. We ended up rehashing the argument and almost just continuing to argue instead of actually resolving anything… but then I guess we decided to pull our heads out of our assess and talk to each other like actual adults. And while nothing has been resolved on the front of what I want to do about my professional unhappiness that is causing my personal unhappiness, and Mike can’t magically get a 15% raise tomorrow to allow me to just be at home full time immediately… I’m feeling a little better. I think he may be more stressed out than ever (oops L)… but I have at least been able to put in a full day at work yesterday and today (well, so far anyway) without feeling like I want to kill myself or worrying that I may have to be institutionalized before the end of the day. Realistically, I understand this may have more to do with complete and utter emotional exhaustion and the fact that the weekend is here than anything actually being “better”. These episodes this week, they scared me. I’m afraid there may be more going on here than just normal, everyday stresses… or maybe it’s just that my stressors AREN’T so “normal” and “everyday”. Maybe this is a normal reaction to everything that’s been going on for the last couple months and I shouldn’t be expected to just be able to pull it together…

It’s all very scary. There are a lot of decisions that still need to be made. There’s no plan in place. I’m just sort of floating in depression/anxiety limbo, while I think I’m currently experiencing some false euphoria after spending the majority of Wednesday crying my guts out; I’m not entirely sure this is one of those situations where I just needed a "good cry”. I think there are some much deeper things at hand here, and I’m not even sure what those are or if they can be fixed/changed/made better.

I’m a mess. I can’t even remember that last time I felt so messy. I’m a mess that doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. The only problem with that is: I’m supposed to be a grown-up.