I’ve blown up one too many times this week. Stress having to be a working mom on my own with Noel away during the week. I took it out on Blake. Not in an obvious way, just in letting my voice rise, crying too much, being generally a drag and not less than a bit scary.
I worry that I am making him my partner. I apologize to him and try to explain, as though a 3-year old could remotely know what the heck I’m talking about. At one point tonight, I was in the kitchen yelling at the sink, banging the collander against the sides, while Blake was at the top of the stairs, yelling and crying. Both of us yelling, both of us longing, both of us disappointed in each other, in life, in everything that moment wasn’t that we each wanted it to be. Both in absolute pain at precisely the same moment. Both of us causing it in the other person. But, I’m the grownup, and I should not have let myself fall apart so badly.
I need more than help at this point. I need to change the parts of my life that are so broken, so un-fixable. I need to take off this brooks brothers suit of a life and breathe as myself again. My son is seeing me as an unsuccessful cypher. I crawl out of myself wailing, hating, raging, and he sees. And on some level he knows. And he accumulates memory, and builds a relationship with me and with himself. And I damage that, chip away at him, make his life a little less than it could be every time my feelings take up so much space that they crowd him out.
I will never raise my hand to my son. But please, someone, teach me how to never raise my voice, never act scary, never have to look at a kid with the look in the eye I had for my father, that look of cowering, that fear that he’d do to me what I saw him do to the other kids. That silent loathing I had for him because I knew, and he knew I knew, that he hated himself. I don’t want to hate myself anymore. I want to love myself if, for no other reason, than to teach Blake a better way to live.
I don’t mind him learning from my mistakes. That’s called progress. But I deeply mind his learning how to adapt to my emotional landscape out of fear and longing. I deeply mind his living my pain just so I can see what it looks like on some unconscious, self-absorbed level.
God, please give me the strength to feel the love for my son just a hair of a second before I let myself cause him to be afraid. Please help me with this.
