A Girl Broken – A Mother Held Together With Thread

I wish they could see who I really am. A girl that was broken and now a mother held together with thread.

I was told that certain people don’t tell me things, don’t tell me the truth, because they feel like I am perfect. They feel like I couldn’t understand. The dishonesty though is what I don’t understand. How can they know me so little? My life is an open book and so many of the pages are splashed with tears and the mistakes are in bold 48 point font. The mistakes are highlighted in ugly yellow and underlined by a shaking hand in thick black ink. How can they not know?

My husband and I give as much as we can to others and don’t expect anything back. We have been like this for as long as I can remember. It doesn’t make us perfect. It means we often do not have a healthy savings. It means sometimes we do without. It means that sometimes we are not ready for the emergencies in our own lives even. So be it.

We have an amazing marriage that some don’t understand. Some days I do not even understand how lucky we are. We are not perfect though. We have happy healthy kids that we adore and are fairly well behaved. We are not perfect parents though.

What makes them think we are? I don’t understand.

Why can’t they be open and honest. Why must they feel too ashamed to tell us things, important things? Do they believe we will think less of them? Do they not see that we are harder on ourselves than anyone else could ever be and that we only tend to judge others when it could effect our children?

Don’t they see that I am still deep down the broken girl? That some days I am the mother held together with just thread?

I am not perfect. The reminders are every where. After my last baby I got overwhelmed. I didn’t know then I had Fibromyalgia, that my heart isn’t normal, that my health is really not ok, I couldn’t understand why I could hurt so badly and kept getting sick and I didn’t know why I couldn’t handle everything when my husband went away for military work for months. I kept waiting for it to get better and did when I could when I could. It wasn’t enough and I needed help. My worst nightmares, the idea that I wasn’t enough for my children….  nightmares now for years wake me in tears shaking and I get sick. I was so scared.

It all worked out. Yet here I am years later trapped by fear. No matter how well things are going I constantly fear I will get overwhelmed, that there will be no compassion, no help, no understanding, or worse the help that comes with judgement and scorn. I smile, I try to function like a real girl, not let the children see and I worry they do. My real friends know, they see, they worry, and the remind me to not let it define me. They must get bored of having to constantly remind  me of who I was, who they see me to be beyond the fear and trauma. Beyond the days when I failed.

I am not perfect, I promise. I don’t try to hide it, I can’t. I am not a blogger who will pretend everything is perfect, that the laundry is always done, that the kids don’t have sticky little faces, that homeschooling makes them little geniuses. We are a normal family that in some ways are just really lucky.

So while my husband might be deploying know that I am terrified. While once I could handle 15 month deployments I am not sure I could even handle him gone a few weeks. Please don’t just call and tell me the good things, please be honest with me because I need it. Please know that when I don’t answer the phone it is not personal, chances are my anxiety is so bad right then that my phone is off because it just ringing will make me shake with fear, so leave a message and I will call you back when I have a moment. Please excuse the fact that the door bells are disabled because them simply ringing sends me into a panicked state so you have to knock, possibly loud and for a while to be heard over the happy loud kids!

I am not perfect. Writing this is emotionally draining. Today is one of those thread kind of days. So please forgive me for being honest, for not being perfect, and for all the thread I am using to keep things together some days.

I think there are a few books I should read and yes, I need to make some time for therapy. Blah. Told you I am not perfect.