Balls in the Air

My mind has been overloaded these days. I feel like I’ve been pulled in seventeen different directions to only be turned around to something else. There is no sense of completion or success. And instead of feeling like just another hamster on a wheel (in which I mean like everyone else)I feel overloaded; maxed out and even worse unfocused.  I feel emotionally brittle and mentally fragile.

When I got home last night I fell apart when I found that the speeding ticket I got a few weeks back that I haven’t paid yet because I thought I would pay my mortgage now has my license suspended. I’ve been driving dirty for 3 days! Instead of laughing about it I lost my shit. I cried a little bit in the bathroom, yelled at everyone around me and went off on Juanito about how I’ve got “all these balls in the air.” Even after I calmed down a bit I still wasn’t listening to what Juanito was telling me about the newly painted bathroom. I was looking at him but totally not engaged and paying attention.  This si shit that I yell at him about all.the.time.  I was somewhere else. I was 2300 miles away and three days later and five hours before all at once in my head. A few hours later I had to ask Juanito to retell a story because while he told me I wasn’t listening. Just like I wasn’t listening to the commercials that he asked about.

I tend to harp on the idea of being present as a parent, mentally. You can’t just show up and be a parent. You must in participate with your child, even if it’s just playing with cars. I didn’t do that last night. I was trying to get dinner done and figure out how to get the stupid ticket paid and when we were gonna pay our other bills and how to work the flow of money and about work and the upcoming traveling and the anxiety around the family shit. Needless to say it was not a stellar mommy moment last night. Nor was it a stellar partner moment.

So to Juanito and The Boy….I am sorry I snapped at you. I forgot that when I surrender everything else and invest the energy I expend everywhere else in to this family I get it back three-folds.