The Stressed Mum's Unheard Cry For Help

It's February and my daughters party is looming ahead of me. It is actually in three weeks time but my mind is so consumed by this party you would think it is tomorrow. It is all I can think about, I make lists, lots and lots of lists about this day.

This I rationalise to myself will definitely make the day run smoothly. I spend hours and hours deliberating on every aspect of this day, what each member of my family will wear, what we will eat, drink, what we will eat off and drink out of.

What games will we play, where will we play them, how long will they last for, who will coordinate them. Who will do the make up, will they remember to call the names in the right order. Will this day run to my schedule?

Question after question is going around in my head.

This is in fact my daughters 6th birthday party and it is going to last for two hours. When I have a 'sane' moment I tell myself it is only two hours and the little girls won’t care if they are basically just running around for this time. But the problem is at the moment I am not having many 'sane' moments.

I am waking up around 2am to jot more things down on my lists, now im worried what the parents of these girls will think of my house. I start another list of what jobs need doing around the house for this day. I then can't sleep at all this night as I wander how we are going to afford all of this. I try and share my worries with my husband John; he doesn’t understand me at all. He very rarely does these days. He keeps saying stop worrying, its only a kids party, what does it matter what the parents think, as long as the girls have a good time.

This incenses me that he can’t see this from my point of view. He doesn’t understand I cant stop myself worrying. I can’t focus on the every day things now. I spend hours trawling the internet for party games. I’m aware my mood swings are affecting people especially my two little girls.

The problem being I’m not sleeping, my headaches are getting worse and I feel there is nobody on my side, nobody to understand me.

Some mornings recently I have woken up with this real sense of foreboding. I don’t want to get out of bed, I don’t want to face the day but what is the alternative? My brain is so foggy, I can hardly clear it to focus on my morning routine. I struggle though I know I need to be worrying over something but its not coming through, I drive to school and drop one daughter off, then take my other daughter to nursery.

I keep driving, crying now, I cant cope with the children, I cant cope with going to work, I don’t want to do anything. I then come to. Literally in Morrisons car park near my daughters nursery. I am now scared I don’t know why I drove to Morrisons.

Then it all comes flooding back about the party. How did I temporarily forget this. I'm annoyed with myself now. I feel exhausted with all these thoughts in my head. I want to go back to bed but I force myself to drive onto work. At work I know I have to put all my energy into being 'Jane'; helpful, informative, nice, happy, and cheerful. I never let my guard down, I have to act because in my mind it is so important what people think of me.

I have asked myself many a time why can I not put this act on all the time? The answer is it simply exhausts me.

I had felt good for a very long time and if I have to put my finger on it I would say it was a catalyst of my husband being made redundant and still struggling to come to terms with working again and looking after the children.

John being made redundant was a shock and I had a severe case of feeling claustrophobic of my lovely little life crumbling in around me.

Many times in the days after hearing this news, if I thought about it for too long, I would have to remind myself to breathe. I tried again to put on an act for my husband but sometimes I was aware that the 'real' me overlaps and becomes transparent in my home life.

I try hard to hide these dark moods but sometimes the effort of doing this makes me worse. Im aware of shouting a lot, I'm aware of upsetting people I love, the problem is only much afterwards am I aware of this. Then I'm so contrite, I feel even worse. Why oh why can I not control myself?

What is making me feel like this and act like this? I know I cant ask for help from anyone because everyone assumes I have the perfect life, I know that. Nobody would understand or sympathise.

I go for weeks feeling like this until the night before the party arrives. I have asked my mum to come up and help me, I also have Anne my 20 year old step daughter and my step sons girlfriend Carol helping. Plus there is John and I.

I thought this might lessen the stress I feel about this, but it is making me worse. I have called a meeting and I am trying to point out my action plan, but they are all laughing at me. For some reason they are finding this funny. My panic is rising and I feel physically sick, I keep thinking of those little girls and how they will be feeling when they leave the party.

My mum keeps saying I need to go with the flow. This is making me worse. You cant go with the flow over a party. I wish I was doing this on my own, it would work then, but its too late now.

Of course I only sleep periodically through the night so on my daughters 6th birthday I am now so exhausted I can barely drag myself out of bed. I shout at Sophie over something insignificant and feel terrible as I know she didn’t deserve it. I am now so anxious at these little children and their parents arriving I keep disappearing. Finally the party is in full flow and I now have so much nervous energy and I am flitting from room to room but am aware I am not actually doing much. My mum and John have it totally under control, they actually do not need me, I have made the whole day much worse. Everyone had a lovely time and are thanking me, but I feel guilty I didnt actually do anything. This feeling of guilt stays with me a lot at the moment. But I don’t actually know how to change this.

The next couple of months go by painfully slowly. I have fallen into a pattern of not sleeping for maybe three nights then allowing the exhaustion to sweep over my body and have such deep sleeps I struggle to wake up, then the heavy head I have all day is closing in on me. The rows in our house are getting worse; John and I cant agree on anything, I scream and shout over the littlest of things, I flare up literally over nothing. A bit of paranoia sets in and I now feel that everyone in this house is against me.

I'm so alone there is nobody to talk to. They don’t understand that my routines are there for a reason and not to be broken.

I don’t cope very well if my daily routine is broken. I have a course to attend, a full days course. This means I have to adjust my child care arrangements. I decide the best thing to do is put my youngest daughter in nursery for the full day and arrange a friend to pick Sophie up from School. I attend the course but spend literally the whole day worrying about Rebecca spending an extra two hours in nursery. I hardly hear what the tutor is saying, I get more and more agitated and decide I have done the wrong thing. At break time I have 3 missed calls. One is from John to say he has left work early and he can now pick Sophie up from her friends and take her dancing, he is pleased as this means she will not miss it. Anne is the other missed call, she will leave work early and pick Rebecca up as she knew I was upset over this. Do I feel peace of mind, of course I don’t! I'm fuming. How dare they put me through all this worry for nothing. I have spent the best part of three hours planning in my head who I was going to pick up first and how long it would be until I can get the dinner on. I arrive home in a foul mood, John and Anne arrive together all smiles and the children happy at the change of routine. Somebody asks me how my day has been, I lose it, I shout, I try and find something to have a go at them about, I need to be in control but am aware I'm losing it.

I storm out past my little girls faces who I havn't seen all day and get in my car. I drive around for, well I don’t really know how long. I pull over and cry, cry till I can't any more. I notice the clock on my car says 5.45pm. I've been gone an hour. I calm myself down and then ask myself many many questions. I rebuke myself; for gods sake Jane when Rebecca was six months old you put her in nursery for four full days and you never thought anything of it. What was today really about.

Think hard, think why you have left the house with four bewildered people who love you. I don’t have any answers. For the first time in four months I realize I need help. I have a glimpse of a thought that the problems may lay with me and not with others. I spend so much time thinking of others and their feelings I tend to think I am a sensitive caring person so I must be right. 'All' my ideas, thoughts and plans are the right ones. I realize today I need to confront my problems.

I drive slowly home and grasp the fact I need to talk to someone. I put the children to bed feeling such a sense of remorse I am still crying. I feel the worst mum ever. Once the children are in bed I sit down and talk to John. I pour everything out, every little bad thought I have had. He looks at me aghast that he has not noticed. He doesn't understand how things have got this bad. He says I need help that he can't give me. We agree I need to see a doctor and see if help can be offered. His parting words are we need to resolve this, I can't be traveling away with work and worrying over you. I break down; I never have believed anyone would actually worry over me, that’s my job to worry. I’m so touched I realize he loves me very much and I am lucky.

I go to sleep unsure as to what advice I will be given. I do feel almost happy that tomorrow my unhappiness will be resolved. I see my GP and again I'm all over the place. I can't actually tell her what the matter is as I'm crying so much. She says I am obviously depressed. She asks me what has caused this. I say to her this is the million dollar question. I have a lovely house, a wonderful supportive husband, 2 lovely adorable little girls, 2 very loyal and lovely step children. I only work 18 hours a week, and my husband has landed a fantastic well paid flexible job so shares a lot of the childcare responsibilities with me. What could I possibly have to be depressed about? She stares at me. I know she doesn’t really know what to say.

We agree the sleep patterns need addressing. She then says she feels she has no alternative but to issue me with a prescription for anti-depressants. These will help my sleep, my mood swings and generally make me happier. This seems too good to be true. I ask what the side effects are and she says these are rare, but had reports these can make you feel numb so you don’t feel anything at all. Whilst she is talking I feel elated; she has a magic potion for me.

I rush across the road to the chemist. There is long queue and I look at the prescription intensely. I have no idea what happened at that particular moment, but I drove home thinking there must be another way. I don’t want to feel numb, I don’t want my life dictated by drugs, I just need to gain control of my thoughts.

There must be another way. It has suddenly struck me I have hit rock bottom.

This is almost like a wake up call. I realize there is a lot of people who are a lot worse off than me. Telling the doctor these things, has made me realize I have a lot to be positive about. I just need a way to accomplish this. My mind has cleared a lot today. I'm now desperate for some answers. I look up on the internet the prescription drugs she has given me and the side effects are everything I'm suffering already; anxiety, mood swings, breathlessness, headaches. I am so happy I have made the right decision. I feel a bit stronger now to help myself. There must be other ways to gain control of your life. I need to help myself but I need help. I want to feel happy, to feel a purpose to life not constant despair. I want to feel full of energy to do things and more importantly to enjoy things. I want to have more spare time instead to trying to fill my time with unimportant things. I want to feel relaxed at times. I haven't felt relaxed for four months now. I want to get rid of that feeling that something bad is going to happen round the corner. I don’t want to worry anymore about other peoples problems. I want to be able to say no to people and have some me time.

Basically I want to be the person that I am so good at acting at. I have hidden this so well from everyone. Even the closest people to me would be shocked if they read this. I want to be the confident Jane that has everything under control, an answer for everything, and more than anything; 'without a worry in the world'.

A Year On

A year on, it's February and I am planning my daughters party again. How do I feel? Well excited, calm, relaxed and grateful. Grateful because I am now a completely different person to that which I was a year ago.

Once I was ready to get help and be helped, I couldn’t believe how quickly my life turned around. The first step for me was to open up to the people closest to me and explain how I was feeling; saying how you feel out in the open makes it seem real. I was then ready to investigate what would work for me. I was very fortunate to have someone close to me who acted as a mentor for me; the advice given to me was invaluable. It opened up my mind and made me realise everything I was feeling was generated within me; nobody had made me feel like this.

As I explained, I have a loving family, a very supportive husband, so how had I become the way I was? I realise my whole perception of being wonder woman / super mum was a ridiculous expectation. And that is the whole point; 'expectations'. Who makes them? Ourselves of course. And who can change this? Only ourselves! So it was a matter of retraining my thought patterns and changing my expectations.

Was it really that simple? Well, yes it was. Any day I felt the irritation rising, my head fogging over or the feeling of despair, I would train myself to sit, have a cup of tea and think slowly through my thoughts. I tried to sieve through the good and bad ones and make sense of everything. Think about how I wanted to feel and how I could change things to make myself feel better.

It was about being flexible. My mind will still plan things into half hour windows continuously, but now instead of coming home and trying to fill those windows as they appear in my head, I think for goodness sake is the house going to fall down if I don’t run around and make all the beds, wash up, hang the washing out and hoover before I leave for work? Will the children think they have a really bad mum if they come home to this? Will my husband think I’m lazy if this is not all done? Of course they wont. I can go and sit down and read a magazine or make a phone call.

Of course things still get done but at a time that suits me instead of a time when my head is telling me to do it. It’s almost like having a mini argument with yourself. But I am chuffed as I always win now!

Sometimes things do pile up around the house, or I have forgotten to pay a bill, but I feel liberated when this happens. I think, yes you have conquered your demons. A year ago I would have tried to accomplish all this even if it meant missing my favourite programme or compromising my home life.

My list making is still there, it’s a comfort blanket for me, but even they are more relaxed and usually lists of delegation! I still agree some things still need to be planned, but I’m mindful plans can be changed and being flexible is a good attribute to have.

The bottom lines is I thought people would like me better and admire me more if I could do everything and help everyone. I now realise the only people that matter the most to me are my family and friends and they accept me for what I am - me!

Because I am more relaxed in my everyday demeanour I have found I have the confidence to make new friends now and my general consensus is if they like me they do. If they don’t it's their loss. I was lucky I got through this with the help of a good mentor, but the ideas are simple and slowly it all begins to make sense.

My only regret is I left it so long to get help. I have spent years in anguish and despair causing such discomfort to my family.

I know my husband is grateful to have the new me. We very rarely argue. My philosophy now is why cause a bad atmosphere in the house and days shouting and arguing. I am not going to leave him over something trivial so why put us both through it. I train my mind to look at how happy we are on a day to day basis, cuddled up on the couch watching our favourite programme and I think I can create that now if I slow down, control my breathing and think about how to change the situation.

I had felt so dissatisfied with my job, I kept feeling I can do something better than this or other days I would think my job gets in the way of things I am supposed to be doing. Now I am grateful for my part time job. I enjoy the chance it gives me to mix with interesting people and gets me out of the house. I also know I could go on and do something different; the only difference is I don’t want to.

Some mornings I will wake and think I don’t want to get up today, but what I always try to do is before I go to bed I think of something positive about tomorrow, then when I wake up in the morning I focus on that.

Any time I feel I will fall in a dark mood I make myself think positively, sometimes you can feel uncomfortable doing this, but you know once it has worked it will work again and again for you.

Each situation I am in now I think how lucky I am now. I constantly compare myself to what I was like before. My mum came up to help me with my daughters party again this year and she was visibly shocked at the difference at me. I had even forgotten to confirm the booking! She said you have gone from one extreme to the other.

This was the biggest compliment someone could give me!

 Add to Del.icio.us /  Digg This /  Stumble It