WTF Wednesday? Back to writing down the bones.

My home needs an entire overload. I can’t continue to clean up after four other people and maintain my sanity; I woke up this morning with a million things running through my head and came downstairs to chaos. Dishes were strewn all over the family room like trash along a run down highway. The kitchen looked like chicken enchiladas had a frat party and I wasn’t invited. So, I handed the scene over to my oldest child, told her it was a lesson in sharing the load, walked downstairs and started to type.

I have decided that I will take a little time each day to write a personal journal. Hopefully through writing down the basics, I will find a way to open my mind and dig through whatever crap has been burying me from the inside out and by getting to know myself, I will get to know my characters better and teach them how to do the same thing.

There are a lot of things that are bubbling underneath the surface in my psyche and I just don’t know which hole to start digging first so I guess I’ll start from the most recent. Right this second, a chill is running up my spine and my eyes are starting to tear up. The fear of letting the emotions I’m feeling at this moment, whatever they may be, is starting to stifle me but I am going to try to write through the fear and see where it leads me.

My husband and I recently went through a tumultuous time. Not one that would lead to a breakup. I think it would take something of biblical proportions to do that. But circumstances in the lives of our children, specifically, the teens made us question ourselves as parents. We came to the conclusion that we are good parents but it took us having to ask for help to prove that. First we had to get over the obstacle that being a good parent sometimes means asking someone professional and on the outside to give you some useful tools. In the grand scheme of things, we did the right thing, I think, but it was hard. We came out of the storm a little stronger too.

Our oldest had a difficult time dealing with the prospect of growing up. It’s amazing how your teenager fights you at every turn wanting to be a grown up and when faced with the challenge of actually becoming one, they panic. It’s happened to us all even if we didn’t realize it then but when you are on the other side of it, having already done it, you fail to see the signs of fear and think of it as rebellion. I (having had a mother, well let’s just call her the mother of all mothers and leave it at that) am just glad that my maternal instinct, those feelings in our gut that we are born with and not taught, told me that it was not about me but about helping my children and that my husband was strong enough for the both of us to realize that we needed help.

Help for us came in the form of a therapeutic ranch in Utah and it came for our son and through some self-reflection while he’s been gone, it came for us as well. I wish we had known about it before our daughter reached eighteen but we did learn some tools to help her there as well. While worrying so much about the actions and lack thereof of our oldest, our son got a little lost in the shuffle which led to defiance, lack of motivation and into a descent that as hard as we tried, we couldn’t pull him up from. I remember taking him to the airport and wanting to see him off. I wanted to walk to the gate and watch him fly off even though part of me wanted to hold him and coddle him and tell him that everything would be alright only to get up to the gate and realize that the ticket agent forgot to give me a pass so I could get past security. I wanted to cry but couldn’t because I wanted to teach my son that he had the ability to go out into the world without having to have mom hold his hand. I also wanted him to know that I would be here to catch him if he fell. Funny thing is that when I got in the car that evening, I hadn’t realized that yet and I was livid at my husband because he made me do that even then I knew that wasn’t it and it took me going to visit him to realize that everything I was feeling at that airport gate was right. My instinct took over when my head screamed against it. I am so grateful for the man I married for loving our family enough to do what was needed to heal us and for my instincts for taking over when my heart was faltering.

As I sit here typing, I realize what is causing the fear and the tears to bubble up. First, it is the fear of how putting my inner most thoughts out there for the world to see might come back to bite me on the ass and yet I’m still going to do it. Then, there is the fear of digging through the emotions that led my life to where it is now and how all of that will affect my life and my writing and finally realizing that in order to get to where I want to go, I have to find where I came from and take the introvert that I strive to be and become the extrovert that I need to be in order to be a better me, wife, mother and writer.

So, let the journey continue.