Posts Tagged "happiness"
Puddle Jumper
I think my problem is that I want to be happy. I don’t want to make do with so-so. I don’t want to make do, fullstop. I get one life and in it I want to burn and feel and know what it means to feel really alive. I want to chase down joy, and pin it, eager paws and tail wagging. Because I know it’s out there, see? Because I feel it and I see it. I feel happiness every day, the little slivers of it that make up daily life that lots of people seem to miss. A lot of things make me very very happy indeed. They can be tiny, little firefly dots, and I’ll still hone in on them with everything I’ve got.
But I believe in the big happy too. Not a happily ever after, but something I get to swim in, rather than just jumping from one puddle to another. And I can’t help but look for it. I can’t. And the thing is, I’ve learnt, that you can’t always tell from the start, you can’t always tell whether that puddle sinks a lot deeper than you think it does. And so I’ve become a jumper, two feet first. Because if I don’t? And I if miss it? Life is about risk, isn’t it? It’s how you grow? How you test the limits of who you are and what life means?
Read MorePermission to be happy, please?
This is a post about happiness, or finding it, or being allowed it – I’m not sure which yet.
It’s been ages since I’ve posted. Oops, sorry about that. Last week was mostly about pulling myself out of the Fibro flare-up, which I did, just about, with thanks to enough painkillers to floor a small herd of gazelle, slow walks in the rain while Kai jumped in every puddle, and an especially lovely weekend away to rest and take photos and do other things that reminded who I was again.
I don’t know whether it’s just me, but I sometimes think that when something bad happens, something big like a marriage ending, it’s easy to feel afterwards that you shouldn’t be happy again. Maybe it’s a ‘stop all the clocks’ reaction: the world is never going to be the same again, for all involved and I’m partly responsible for that, or feel it anyway, so maybe my ‘punishment’ is to live in misery.
I’ve been feeling a lot of guilt about the idea of being happy, like it would be a betrayal in some way. Maybe, if I’m really honest, I felt like I will be judged for being happy. I’ve felt like I shouldn’t be, that I don’t deserve to be, and that others think so too – those mysterious ‘others’ that I always assume are thinking badly of me, it’s ridiculous really. It’s felt safer, more justified, to think of myself as sad and suffering, and I have been, to be fair, but anything that felt even remotely like happiness I have had a tendency to steer away from, or hold at arms length a bit.
Read MoreRight Now
You have all been so lovely the last few days. The comments on my post about the Health Visitor’s worries about Kai have been endlessly comforting and supporting and I am so grateful for you taking the time to respond so thoughtfully. Thank you.
I had a bit of bad day with it all yesterday. Actually, I had A LOT of a bad day. There were moments there were I could genuinely have opened the front door and run as fast as my legs could carry me.
I didn’t, obviously. Instead I wrestled the ferocious ball of frustration and bad-temper that is my son till bedtime, put him to bed without a bath and went downstairs and cried. And cried. And cried some more.
I doubted everything yesterday. EVERYTHING about myself, about Kai, about my abilities and suitability as a mother, about my perception of my life and how perhaps that differs from reality.
And do you know what scared me most? That maybe there is absolutely nothing wrong with him at all. That he is just spirited, and wilful and frustrated with the world – no different from most other toddlers.
And weirdly, this made me feel like shit.
I convinced myself that every toddler is like Kai, that all mums have to manage behaviour like his, and as such, the fact that I’m struggling to cope with it so much means I am just weak, neurotic and failing miserably. You probably have three children like Kai. Ten. And you still manage to do normal things like brush your hair, and eat, and go out.
Everyone tells me he is delightful, and fun, and charming and he IS! Maybe what I endure behind closed doors I have blown vastly out of proportion.
Maybe I am just not cut out for all this at all.
No, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want there to be anything ‘wrong’ with Kai. It’s just that the thought that it is supposed to be like this, supposed to be so impossibly hard and feel so unmanageable ALL THE TIME just made me go cold.
Luckily, I have good friends. Good, kind, honest, supportive friends who listen (and I could list hundreds of you, thank you so much).
I have a husband who has been through it all with me and keeps me grounded.
And after being told an awful lot of sense, I realised this.
Do you know what? Kai is hard work. He is really, really hard work.
I’m not saying its some kind of competition about ‘who has it the hardest’, or that other parents don’t find it hard either,but the reality of life with Kai is incredibly challenging and I don’t think anyone could question that.
He’s always been hard work – early months of constant crying and refusal to be any where but attached to me, followed by endless battles getting him to cope with transitions and change and him resisting everything. The speech delay and the near-constant tantrums and the freak outs at the slightest thing are just a continuation of something that’s been going on from the beginning.
He can be lovely of course. He is obviously bright, and can be so much fun and entertaining. He charms everyone around him and can be fabulous company. He plays beautifully, when in the mood to, and if you get it right with him you get it SO right and it is wonderful.
But this is offset by the most rigid personality I have ever come across. It is offset by moods completely dependent on things being just how he wants them to be and endless frustration and tears and anger when they are not. And I can honestly say? The hard times far outweigh the good times right now.
I am not enjoying motherhood right now. It’s not much fun to be honest.
A vast proportion of my day is spent ‘coping’ with Kai, managing his moods and single-minded determination and enduring the frequent screaming, crying, hitting, pulling, outpouring of his emotions. Every single day involves a good deal of time listening to long bouts of crying. It’s incredibly draining, exhausting. And I defy anyone to not find it hard.
And the speech thing IS worrying. The constant, weird, babbled gobbledegook? The fact that has somehow ‘forgotten’ how to say the odd word he could say a few months back? That he makes NO attempt to imitate words yet will copy the sounds he hears himself making on recordings? Of course it’s worrying. I’m not saying it won’t right itself, I’m sure it will, but obviously it’s going to be a concern to me. What kind of mother would I be if it wasn’t?
Whether he fits some kind of ‘label’ or not, whether he is like other kids or not, whether I find it harder than you or anyone else? It doesn’t really matter. Deep down I know it will be fine. I know that he will be fine, that he will grow out of most stuff, and we will survive. I know that really I am very lucky, he is healthy, so am I. I know it could all be so much worse.
But it doesn’t change how hard it is right now. It doesn’t change how much I am struggling.
What matters is I love him. I love him so much it actually hurts me to think about it. I see so much positive in him, despite all the bad stuff, and I am so enormously proud of him, of his fierce strength and passion.
I know I am doing the best I can, I know I am doing a good job, even, because I care about all this stuff and I think about it and I want to make Kai happy.
I just want to be a better mother for him.
I want to figure out what is he needs that I seem to be missing.
Mostly, I just want to see him happy.
And I want to see me happy too.
Read MoreGrowing Up – a shiny happy people post
Last week the very lovely pink coiffured Rosie Scribble tagged me in a meme thingy that she started to inject a bit of happiness across the bloggosphere.
There’s been quite a lot of negative stuff happening in this lovely bloggy community of mine lately, and, as I tend to with this sort of thing, I take it all very personally and get far more upset about it all than I should do. So it was nice to do this tonight, to lay aside all the crappy stuff and focus on things that are lovely and good and positive.
The rules of Rosie’s Shiny Happy People meme are thus:
Name a song that makes you happy - a song you would listen to if you needed a sudden injection of happiness.
Post an image that makes you smile, it can be anything – a silly photo, an image taken from the internet, anything at all that puts a smile on your face (and isn’t too rude!)
So. First a little intro. As most of you know it’s been a bit of a tough journey for me at times. Motherhood hasn’t been easy, in fact, in some respects, its something I struggle with more and more. But I do love it. I love the person that it’s making me, the way that it’s challenging me, forcing me to evolve and change and adapt. It’s teaching me new things about myself every day and although I still battle with a lot of inner demons and feel I have a long way to go, I really believe it’s taking me somewhere good and exciting and fulfilling.
I feel like I’m finally growing up. Feel like I’m finally BECOMING someone. And I love that.
This song really captures that feeling for me. The feeling of growing into myself. And it never, ever fails to lift my spirits.
(Apologies for the weird large box – clueless how to make this smaller!)
Next some photos. I never thought I’d be the sort of mother that endlessly bores people with pictures of my children, but sorry, I really really am. Here’s a few funny and sweet ones from Kai’s very early months that never fail to make me smile and show me just how far we’ve come. Hope you enjoy…
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| Make a Smilebox slideshow |
So, tag time. I tag:
P.S. I’ve had a few memes lately and to be honest I’m starting to forget who tagged me in what so my apologies if I’ve not responded right away but thank you and I’ll be working round to as many as I can! I don’t want to give you meme overload. Just that word is weird. meeee meeee. Ok I’ll stop now…
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