It started out with feeling like I just don’t have one more thing to give.  I’ve hit the ceiling of my sacrifice room and there is nowhere else to go.  Where does “I can’t give” go to when it wants to go?  It gets its wings and moves on to “I don’t give…”   as in   “…a damn.”  Those of you who know me well know that “damn” was not my first choice of delicious words to use, but this journal cross-posts to my primary Facebook account and I have aunts and cousins and clients and such on there who are sensitive to such things. 

I don’t know how many of you have been a mom of advanced age.  If you were or are, I don’t know how many of you have been a mom of advanced age who has been raising children since she was a mom of a very unprepared, unadvanced age.  I started at 16 and before that, I did a good bit of taking care of my mother’s family.  I turn 49 this year and I gotta tell ya, there is a reason why people who give and give and give until they die of very old age are celebrated.  It’s because not all of us can do it. 

I honestly didn’t see this coming.  When I had my 6th child at the age of having just turned 38, I still had a good bit of mom distance left in me, I thought, and was excited to have the little guy come along.  We’d been lulled into a false sense of security by Dylan being The Best Baby In The World and thought we could handle having another one.  Then came Nathan who came from the womb screaming his baby rage and then turned into a toddler, waddling around the house full of commands and anger and energy and ideas.  Since I’d been around the parenting block a few times by the time he came around, he spent a whole lot of time finding out where the rubber met the road.  I think the only things he managed to do that was truly unique and original was to stand on the inside of the door of the dishwasher and piss into it and throw Stacker 2, a butter knife, a pencil, some cayenne powder and a ruby eraser into the turtle tank during the 3 minutes or so I was in the bathroom one time.  Other than that, he only thought he was being impressive.  He was a lot to keep up with and pretty much wore me out.  As he got older, he became slightly more manageable, but he still likes to think he can be sly from time to time.  He’s my sweetie, but he was a challenge and took a lot out of me and sometimes, still does.

As I crossed over into 40, my menopause symptoms began and I’ve been shaking hands with them for the past 9 years.  I’d sure love to get to the “pausing” part, but apparently, my uterus thinks it’s only 15 or so and enjoys a healthy monthly cycle.  The other symptoms are managed by dietary choices, but the urgings and emotional shifts that come with going through The Change have been the most evolutionary process I have ever known, puberty and pregnancies included.  I guess it has some similarities with pregnancy, because you end up with a new life when it’s finished.

I got to 45 and started feeling like all I wanted in life was to slow down, be comfortable and do the things I want to do.  When that wasn’t happening, I pushed past my own resistance to nurturing that had developed over the past few years and went even further into mothering. 

My relationship dynamic with my husband has, from the very beginning, been based on nurturing and basically mothering.  He provides for us and gives as well and I have always said that he carries me around on a little satin pillow and feeds me chocolates all day long.  He is great at helping around the house, doesn’t hesitate to pick up a broom or wash a dish, and is a major help.  Most of the time, he doesn’t complain about helping.  I’ve spent a good bit of time feeling guilty about not being able to do it all and now, I just don’t care any more.  The house looks good most of the time.  I do some of it.  He does some of it.  I work online at my 3 jobs and he goes to college and manages the outside areas and the gardens.   

After a few weeks of lead up as the tension built inside me and a series of events worked to push the idea to the forefront, yesterday, I totally dropped my basket.  I had a fit.  I cried the “ugly cry.”  It wasn’t the pretty cry where the tears trickle silently down your proud cheek onto your strong jawline.  Oh no.  It was the sobbing, snotty, shaking ugly cry.  I’d had ENOUGH.  Too much giving!  Too much sacrifice!  Too much adapting and making do and faking smiles and rolling over and dodging the jabs and bullets and slings and arrows of life only to be hit anyway.

My family thought I’d completely lost my mind and everyone went into duck and cover.  Had I turned into Medusa and sprouted snakes out of my big Southern beautiful hair, I would have gotten a much tamer reaction from them.  I was gesturing wildly, make up going ever which away and ranting like a crazy person.  Heaven only knows how much therapy the witnesses will need to ever get right again.

The culmination was me jumping into my new car (well, new to me) and driving willy nilly down the mountain and pulling into a ditchy, weedy field cum parking lot across the street from the Somerset (next town over or rather, down) parking lot and contining my cry fest.  I was grateful to not be in my usual blue Jeep Liberty with the bumper guard off so everyone recognize me, whispering behind their hands about how they saw Katrina in the field across from the Somerset post office crying her eyes out. 

[Sidebar:  Eric picked me up from the airport on Monday in a 1989 Buick "I so do luvvvvv a Buick" LeSabre that he'd bartered with a guy to get and deemed it mine and I was just ever so happy and I do still luvvvv my Buick.  Did I mention that I have a Buick.  I so have a Buick.  *sigh*  I love a Buick.]

When I got tired of sitting and crying in the weed field, I went to the grocery store and picked up a few things.  Make up was a thing of the past by then, pretty much assuring that no one would recognize me there either.  Then I headed back home.  I went and talked to my girlfriend, Jackie Lou, for 3 hours or so and cried some more.  Then I came home and went through the whole “treat her like she has leprosy” thing for the rest of the day.  Eric and I had a decent talk, but nothing really (ever) changes.  Once a family dynamic is established and walks around for a few years, it is tremendously hard to change it.  All you can do is change yourself or learn to live with it or both. 

For the next many hours and well into this morning, my eyeballs hurt like they’d been boiled.  They did get quite a work out.  I slept like a baby, which is fully enjoyable after a month or so of waking up every few hours.  I took a nap today as well and that is all despite being hepped up on caffeine from Diet Mountain Dew.

Those of you who are good at connecting the dots will have no trouble seeing that this is a reasonable outcropping from my rebellous “go have adventures” months.  I am still dedicated to finding adventures, but now I am feeling home body-ish and it’s time to stop running away from what’s going on here in my house.  No one has really done anything specifically wrong.  Everyone here is singing the song I wrote and simply going along with how things have always been.  Typically, I’m the cheerleader, I’m the one who makes everything OK for everyone, I’m the one who tries hard to keep the smiles going and helps everyone feel secure and safe and like they have a soft place to fall.  Most of the time, I succeed, but sometimes, I shut down. 

For the past several months, the shut down has been more prominent than the succeeding and I haven’t exactly been spreading many smiles around.  I’ve been detached and unplugged and depressed.  I spend most of my days just going through the motions and then not very well.  I haven’t really been right since about September or so and that is most of a year.

I’m here on the edge of Harvest 2010 and I can feel that things are changing, both in me and around me.  In retrospect, I can see a lot of wasted energy and fumbling around that I’ve done and I hope to change that.  For the moment, I find that there is a lot I just don’t care about that used to be very important to me.

Eric doesn’t like that I haven’t lost weight as he’d hoped.  I don’t care.  I cared for a long time; now I just don’t.  There are dishes in the sink to be washed.  I should care; I don’t.  The floors need to be mopped as they do every day.  Don’t care.  I’ve been caring and worrying and problem-solving and crisis managing for so long that I ended up running over the finish line and didn’t even realize it.  It’s not that anything is fixed.  It’s just that I got way out of my ability to manage anything.

My 60 Day Challenge was me trying to control something, anything, and I did a fine job for that time.  Other stuff?  Not so much.

Have you ever seen the plate spinners who used to be on shows like Ed Sullivan?  If not, here y’go.  Embedding is disabled because the person who has posted the plate spinning video is apparently quite paranoid about what might happen to it if I share it with the world here rather than them sharing it with the whole world on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404&feature=related

If you get bored watching it (and you will), scoot ahead to right at 3 minutes into the video where all the plates and bowls are spinning away and that is about what my life has felt like for longer than I can remember.  I’m just trying like crazy to keep everything spinning and up in the air at the same time and have as few broken dishes as possible.

Now imagine that I just turned around and walked off and listened to the ensuing crashes.  That’s where I am right now.

*metaphor off*

Virgos try like all get out to control things and for me, it has come down to trying to manage the things I feel like I can manage and now I feel like I can’t manage anything, so I am just letting go of the rope.  Jesus take the wheel.

In absence of fixing things, I just do the things that I want to do (I cannot believe this dog just farted right here in front of me like it was his JOB or something) and don’t really care what anyone else thinks.  I am pretty much doing whatever I want to do at any given moment.  It’s not a lack of love.  I still love all the same people I loved before.  It’s more of letting them manage their own crap.  I tell myself I’m empowering them to take care of themselves, but it’s more like I’m shoving them out of the non-corporal nest with my foot on their backside and telling them to flap their wings really hard before they hit the ground.  *Good Luck!!!  Yayyyy You!!*

 That’s my philosophy from this day forward.  No more micromanaging.  No more macromanaging either.  No more managing at all.  I’m going to work with the money I have and no more.  Beyond that, whatever happens, happens.  If I want to hide in my room and watch TV, that’s what I am going to do.  If I don’t want to cook a dinner for the family, they will have sandwiches or cold cereal.  If Eric doesn’t like that there is more of me to love than he wants there to be, he can go find less of someone else to love and be happy for once.  If kids forget their homework when school starts, it will sit on the table until they take it the next day.  If they open the door and the dogs fly out like bullets from a chamber, I’m not going looking for them.  They’ll come back or they won’t.  The world will continue to turn with or without me.  For now, I choose without.

I’m not on strike.  I’ll still do what needs to be done, but there will be no more heroic measures to make everything OK for everyone else.  Things will be what they are going to be.  Mama’s got to dial it down and scale back.  The people I live with are going to have to work harder to make their own lives what they want them to be instead of depending on me to fix things for them.  If I don’t want to do something, it is going to be a rare occasion that I do it just because someone else wants to. 

This is my Declaration of Independence and I’m sticking to it.  One step closer to being Crazy Cat Lady Who Only Comes Out on Halloween and I am good with that.

Tomorrow comes the photo recap of the trip.  For now, I’m adapting to the new way of being in the world.