Today I’m exhausted from feeling at war within myself. My husband woke up sick and spent most of the day in bed, which has left me juggling three children alone. My cognitive brain obviously knows none of this is my husband’s fault. He doesn’t feel well. A compassionate human being would just feel empathetic, brew him a mug of garlic broth, and send him to bed. Don’t worry honey. I got this.

This is what I want my brain to do. But does it? No. My gut reaction is to feel angry and abandoned. I’m not angry at him per se. I’m angry at the situation, but in the muddled mess of things it doesn’t always feel so delineated.

I feed children, change diapers, put in a load of laundry, come back around to doing the dishes and by the time the counters are clean it’s time to start over again. The temps are cold, so my older children only go outside for twenty minutes at a time, and there is nothing wrong with their beautiful creative energy except it’s bouncing off the walls of my home and overstimulating my body and there’s no one else to help me mitigate my needs. I spend nap time at the grocery store because the fridge is relatively empty and my only form of self-care for the day seems to be driving home without kids and letting the car run in the garage because I’m dreading turning it off and re-entering the chaos of motherhood.

In the midst of all this complaining, I recognize what is going on. It’s a mishmash of things. My childhood wounds of abandonment are saying hell no, we don’t like this. My ego is telling me stories about myself. It’s my husband who doesn’t feel well, but my ego makes it all about me. I don’t like this. I am the victim. I don’t want to feed my children again. I… I… I. The stories it tells me about myself brew discontent.

I know what I need to do. Want to do. It’s welcome and let go. A form of surrender. My husband’s illness just is. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can ride it out in misery, or I can choose to reach for something else. I’m re-engaging with a wisdom course this month and the irony is here is an opportunity to put into practice what I’m working on. What is the point of all my study and practice, if when the real world hits I can’t access any of that grounded contemplation I espouse so emphatically on the days I have quiet time to gather myself in my office and be still?

Where is the abundance? Isn’t it supposed to be all around me? Why can’t I recognize it today?

I wish it was an easy choice, a switch I could flip. I wish that the very recognition of what is going on and the choice before me would bring my will to heel. I try to self-coach myself in my head. No one is doing this to you on purpose. You aren’t actually abandoned. Your children are just being developmentally normal; they aren’t trying to make you miserable or exhausted. I work to separate out that abandoned child part of myself and put the adult part of myself in charge. She can do this. This is an adult problem and she can handle it.

On a spiritual and psychological level, I see the good choice. I see what I want, and it still feels like I can’t choose it. Over a decade of therapy and I can now recognize the shitshow in my head and all the places it stems from, but I can’t fully make it shut up. Driving home with the groceries I think of how I should be grateful. I wasn’t stuck in an ice storm without electricity like so many in the country. I had a warm home and food to put in hungry bellies and beautiful children filling my home with chaos when others are grieving losses or waiting for government bans on visas to lift so they can bring their adopted children home. I should feel grateful. Why can’t I feel grateful? My ego keeps fixating on all the things it doesn’t like.

So all day I fight within myself. Each minute and hour that goes by feels like so much work. I want to reach for the divine, but the resistance makes it feel like I’m pushing against seventy pounds of dead weight. Meet me, please, I murmur, but there are no miraculous interventions. No clear sense of Presence. No tingling energy when I bring awareness to my feet. Just my prayers and what feels like an endless slog.

I don’t yell at my children. I suppose there is that. Because I want to at multiple times during the day. The fifth time they start screaming or crying at each other (or was that the seventh?) I want to storm in and start screaming as well. But I don’t. I separate everyone for some quiet time, don’t give in to protest tears, and sit down to write this with my baby on my footrest beside me as a continued form of attempting to reach for what I need. Maybe if I write the shitshow down it will help me let it go?

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not going to go away. At least not today. Maybe that’s the pessimist in me talking, but probably just the realist. And there’s still at least four hours left in the day in which to lose my temper or slam a door or give up this fight. If I do cave, at least I’ll have made it this far? (Can you hear the question mark at the end of that sentence?) I’ll have attempted to choose something different for more of the day than not.

Before I’m done writing, I realize my baby has pooped through his clothes for not the first time today. I sigh as I stop what I am doing to take him to the changing table. It means yet another load of laundry for the queue. But while I change him he seems to notice his foot for the first time. I’m engrossed watching him watching his foot. He bats at it with his hands, touching it but unable to grasp it fully with his fingers, like I am unable to grasp the seemingly obvious things that lie in front of me. I am confident one day he will get it and probably stretch all the way to put his toe inside his mouth—but today is not that day. Today he is just noticing.

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Shalom.