The anxiety builds throughout a day sometimes.
Your car needs new brakes, which requires time and money.
I’m making commitments at Flora’s school, which require time and a reliable babysitter (or two).
I’m constantly monitoring bank accounts, bill due dates, deadlines (at work, for school), appointments, homework, housework, pick ups and drop offs.
Our house needs a lot of work, which requires (say it with me!) time and money.
I stand sometimes in the kitchen and wonder how it’s all going to happen. On a drive home, I feel overwhelmed by the fact that I need a babysitter five times over the next two weeks — so I can keep school obligations, so the girls can go to gymnastics, so we can have a date night. I wonder how our son, who is having some separation anxiety, who is so very tired in the evenings, will react to mommy always on the run.
You have days or nights at work that we’ve invented an acronym for: DITH, Deer In The Headlights. When you (or I or we) have so much to do, so much to deal with, we can’t do anything. We freeze, we can’t move.
And then, you walk through the door, and that knot of anxiety that has nested in my chest for the last hour or day or week, loosens up a little bit. I find it easier to breathe, even though we haven’t solved any of these problems quite yet.
Just because you are there, again, at the end of my day. With a hug and a kiss. Yeah, sometimes you want me to make you a sandwich after I’ve just finished cleaning the kitchen, and yeah, sometimes you get the dirty dish to the sink but not the dishwasher.
I do things that bother you, too. I don’t put the clean laundry away quickly enough, I leave my shoes in the middle of the floor.
But I can breathe, I can let go of the anxiety a little bit, I can keep the panic at bay because you are with me, my teammate, my “clumsy boy” who will make me laugh, my love. Because just having you on my side, at my side, makes it okay.
I don’t say it enough: Thank you. And, I say it all the time, and I really, really mean it: I love you.
Who’s got your back?
Red Pen Mama 