Cheeky Sweetie

I wasn’t always the anxiety-ridden control freak that I am today.  When I was young, I was very laid back.  It was something that most likely drew Brian to me throughout the years of our pre-romantic friendship.  The irony that the way our relationship fell to pieces is what catalyzed my journey into anxiety and controlling behaviors is not lost on either of us.  I was easy going and carefree, even while raising my son alone and balancing college classes here and there with working full time and running a home and family.  I had a child-like faith that everything would turn out okay, and, no matter what kind of mess I got myself into, it typically did, for the most part.

But the years of never knowing what to expect..or, rather, knowing what to expect, but having the either faithful or stupid hope that things would be better than I expected..created a familiarity with anxiety and fear that I wish I had never known.  I was never hit, or threatened, or verbally abused, or kept under tight control, or cheated on, or anything truly awful like that.  But sometimes I feel like I survived a war, anyway.  Sometimes I wonder if I don’t have some mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder, because when I look back, all I see is a vast period of mere survival.  There was no thriving..there was no personal growth..there was little room for intimacy in my marriage, and I don’t mean sex, although that suffered as well, I mean *trust*.  There were no family traditions or routines or vacations or outings or sleepovers or…anything.  At least not much that I can remember.  All I remember is despair.  All I remember is insecurity and mistrust and feeling like my life and family were completely out of control.  All I remember is putting one foot in front of the other, loving my babies, and all the while knowing I was not providing everything they needed.

When I got separated while I was pregnant with Faith, I made great strides to put that insecurity and chaos of the first years of my marriage behind me.  I found FlyLady.net, and I followed that system like it was my religion.  I was pregnant, working full time, raising an 18 month old and an 8yo, running my home, and grieving the loss of my marriage and the dream I had for my family, all on my own.  And I did it better than I did when I had help.  My house was always clean, aside from the toys the kids would pick up each night before bed, and we always had a home cooked meal.  I managed my life and my family with routines that made me forget all about the tension that day-to-day living had before.  I never had to think about a thing…we all knew what to expect and what to do because we just made habits of the things we had to do.

Then I gave birth to Faith, her father and I got un-separated, and within a month, friends of ours needed someplace to go, so we had a family of four plus a dog move in.  That was one of the worst years of my life.  Our friends are good people, but with the household going from two kids and myself to four adults, six kids, including a newborn, and a dog, and them being more accustomed to clutter and a less organized home…..it was very hard to maintain the system I had honed.  I felt like I was the only one who gave a shit about the house staying clean and uncluttered, and really, I was probably right.  I was let go from my job six weeks after returning to work, for missing work because the baby was sick, so by Christmas, I practically lived in my bedroom.  And while you would think that my room would be the one clean oasis in the house of junk, the opposite was true.  I was in such a depression, that it was a wreck, too.  It was all I could do to make sure the kids were clothed and fed and loved.  I did laundry, but rarely folded it and put it away.  I gave up on cooking because the kitchen was always such a mess that I would have a baby panic attack just walking in it.  Even after our friends moved out, I was so far gone that I didn’t know how to pull myself out.  I became a social recluse; unwilling to go out because I was ashamed of myself, and unwilling to have anyone over because I was ashamed of my home.

An adorable, but humiliating, example of what I lived like in 'The Dark Ages'

But all of that is over now.

I know the limitations of my disease, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and I know what exacerbates it and what eases the panic that feels like a million buzzing bees are inside me, getting louder and louder as they swarm and swell in order to break out of my skin and consume me and everything I care about.  And being in a chaotic environment literally damages my spirit.  I need order..I need routine..I need security..I need to know what to expect, and I need those expectations met most of the time.  I don’t handle surprises well, or plans that keep changing, or travel, just because of the sheer amount of the unknown, and how little control I have over flights and airports and planes.

It seems to be the lack of control that sets me off the worst.

It’s not that I am controlling because I just feel like being a prima donna and expect the world to kiss my ass.  It’s that for a long time, if I wasn’t in complete control over every aspect of our family, something would always go horribly wrong.  I couldn’t trust Brian with much of anything for those years.  If I left him with the kids so I could work, he wasn’t as attentive as he needed to be, or he took them places they weren’t safe.  If I depended on him to provide financially, he would often quit jobs or switch jobs or spend all his money on pot or whatever teh fun thing seemed to be for the moment for him..end result being me scrambling in a panic to pay our already late bills by begging for help or later, baring my ass on the internet because I just didn’t have anything else to fall back on without spending 75% of my earnings on child care or leaving the kids in a situation I didn’t feel was safe.  It all boiled down to the fact that I couldn’t trust him for shit.  I couldn’t trust him to provide, to be honest, to keep the kids safe or clean or fed…I couldn’t trust him to make our family his top priority, so I ran around like a maniac trying to clean up the piles of shit his unreliability created for me.

And now, I have to trust him.

I have to have faith, (Anyone seeing why I chose that name for my youngest yet? It’s SO hard for me to trust anyone but myself.  Her name reminds me that sometimes I have to let go, and have faith.), that he will be able to make our family his priority..over the friends that I battled for him so many years..the faces have changed but the situation remains the same, over the partying that is admittedly more fun than raising a family, over everything that was more important than us for all those years.  It’s the hardest thing I’ve done in a long time….just letting myself be vulnerable….just handing trust over to someone who has not proven to be trustworthy….giving over complete control over whether this family survives or not.  I’m afraid.  I’m an anxious mess.  I am second guessing myself every single day over whether I am doing the right thing, but now I’m in school, and dropping out now would mean it would be next to impossible to ever go back again, thanks to financial aid suspension and academic suspension, both of which I am on and only attending school on account of an approved appeal.  So, when the fear and anxiety and OMG THE SHEER FUCKING TERROR that everything will go to shit faster than I can clean up the mess start taking over, I am having a glass of wine or a klonopin (which are amazing for anxiety attacks!), and reminding myself that the strongest thing I can do right now, is just have faith.

Just trust.

Even though sometimes I’ve been wrong to trust.  Right now, I have to trust, and just do my part, and believe he will do his.

I am surrendering to the forces of good in my life, and having faith they will protect my family from the forces of evil.