This is heartbreaking to put into words. It’s hard to admit defeat when your mantra the last 520 days has been “if I can just get past XYZ…”. The past few weeks it’s been “if I can just get to the first day of school...”. Well, Wednesday is the first day of school. Its 3:30am Tuesday and I have cried pretty much since 7pm on Monday after being screamed at on the phone in the middle of a school Open House.
I need to hit pause.
The last year has been horrible. The last 17 months have been abysmal. When the Covid 19 pandemic started I looked at it as a speed bump where we’d all Marie Kondo and chill at home. Unfortunately for my family, March 2020 also hit us with tragedy when my mom found my brother in septic shock on the floor of his home. The sepsis started in his neck and paralyzed him from the neck down. Every two to three weeks we would get a call about a new emergent issue we could only handle by phone and eventually FaceTime because we were not allowed to visit. These constant issues kept him from ever leaving a hospital until his body gave up this May.
In February we got the news my husband’s deployment was bumped up 2.5 months to accommodate required quarantines and he would be leaving in two weeks. We had two weeks to do everything we thought we had months to finish before the rock of our home would spend his last year in the Navy on the other side of the globe. Let me tell you how much easier deployments were before we had kids! Doing it with kids and with Corona chaos, I give it 1 star!
Lightning Keeps Striking…literally.
I kid you not! On top of deployment! On top of being on the phone day and night with medical professionals translating it to terms my parents could understand! We still have not stopped being hit with a series of unfortunate events! Some of the “highlights” (if you can call that) include… an uncle passing the week before Christmas. 3 kids doing remote school in some form all last year. I’ve become the meal maker and part time caretaker for my parents after a car accident and losing a child. Being thrust into helping raise my displaced niece. We literally got struck by lighting which destroyed the cable and internet lines coming into our house this summer…we are NOT off the grid people y’all! Two of my daughters had the exact same unexpected surgery 8 months apart. One of my kids currently has Lyme disease after not showing the typical rash. And the partridge killed our pear tree! (Okay…that’s kind of a joke, but seriously my beloved pear tree is 3 branches away from death!) All of this while keeping life normal for my kids (without our beloved summer babysitters for the first time in 3 years) while dad is gone. Like, HELLO?! Give me back my metabolism from my early 20’s if I can’t get off this ride!
Monday while I sat in the car and cried after my kids went in the house I didn’t think just a few more days and I can get back on track. I finally couldn’t hush the voice screaming something has got to give, and give NOW. Mentally I am so worn down from my personal life I am just drowning. It’s not fair to my beloved clients to be so distracted. And, it’s not fair to my family…or laundry piles… to be bursting into tears at their school while I’m their only source of stability.
What does this mean for you?
I have a handful of things currently in the system or booked that will be completed very soon. As soon as those are done, I will be taking a leave of absence until the school year ends and my husband has settled back in at home. While on one hand it’s taken the wind out of me succumbing to defeat. The reality is we all need to wave a white flag sometimes. I need to hit pause and be here for my family.
