It's been a bit of a stressful start to the new year. Nothing too newsworthy, so don't start feeling bad for me. However, in the midst of the holiday preparations and tending to Juan and the children, and feeling quite bad for myself, I let a lot of tasks I needed to accomplish go ignored. Once I realized how chaotic my life was getting, I thought I would just pick up the pieces later; after school started again, once all the parties were wrapped up, and once we got into the new swing of things with Juan's injury life would get back to normal. So I stopped caring a little bit. It must have been a coping mechanism, I dunno. Once I stopped caring about taking out the trash from the bedrooms and bathrooms, it seemed pretty easy to stop caring about vacuuming upstairs and doing the dishes. One thing after another got dropped from my To Do List, all in the name of "coping". I didn't brush Qiana's hair until after noon most days. My house was full of Christmas decorations, a borrowed recliner for Juan to sit in downstairs, and schloads of new "stuff" from Christmas so it started to feel like our house belonged on Hoarders. I made myself do the laundry, but didn't follow through with folding it. There it sat. Day after day after day. "I'll do it later. Maybe tonight," I would say. Before I knew it, it had been a week and I needed to do laundry again. The same dishes must have been in the sink for three days. We ate out because of the "stress" of making dinner.
I mean, can you SEE how RIDICULOUS I had become?!
The culminating event to all of this madness was when we made piñatas for the 3 Reyes party we had. There was flour and water goop all over the kitchen counters, the table, and the floors. It was a massive disaster area. The house was officially a war zone.
Suddenly, I started to lose my patience a lot quicker. Even the slightest annoyance became the most unbearable torture to my nerves. For example, the neighbors below us cook very fragrant Brazilian meals multiple times a day. It wafts through our house and into every room through the vents that we share. The smell of fried food covers every inch of our living space. I couldn't handle that in the least bit anymore. I opened all the doors and windows and let the bitter cold in for a good ten minutes so the smell wouldn't linger as long. I didn't care what the heating bill for our landlord was going to be. Other things that normally wouldn't bother me that much were preying on my patience; where are my workout pants? Ezra, stop yelling "Mommy!" over and over and over again, Qiana, if you pee your pants one more time, I swear.... I was NOT a pleasant person to be around. This was especially the case when I went to pick up Juan for work twice in one day and he never came out because he ran 20 minutes over time with a patient. It was not part of agenda and I was not feeling very flexible with my schedule so I left him both times and took care of other errands until he called me, waiting on his pegleg, asking me to pick him up. Two days ago, our refrigerator broke and most of our food went bad. This was really NOT good timing. It didn't just rain, it poured that day... figuratively speaking, although the snowfall was pretty heavy that day as well. It really had become too much for me to handle. Stacia was on an angry rampage through the country, burning villages and plundering the weak. My kids sat in front of the TV for about 2.5 hours straight that day while I tried to save what I could from our fridge and harbor it in plastic totes buried in the snow, all the while repeating, "I can't take it anymore" under my breath.
Just to think of how horrible things got makes me shutter. My poor, poor family. How did that transition happen so quickly? I know it wasn't just a single catalyst; it wasn't just because of Juan's injury, or the messy house, or all of the gift shopping, party prep, or untidy children, or a makeshift fridge in the snow on the back porch. It was definitely a combination of those things and probably hormones (yes, I get to play that card) that formed a black and very dark corner in my mind.
Well, like any emotion, there was an opposing emotion getting ready to spring into action. It's the "fight or flight" response we each have. I personally believe that we sometimes get both feelings at the same time, it just depends on which feeling overpowers the other that determines how you react to a situation. My dark corner was telling me to flee, to leave the stress and give it all up so I won't have to deal with any of it anymore. It was the feeling that was slowly building that whole time. The accompanying feeling that was battling it out in my subconscious was telling me that I could conquer what I was dealing with. One of those emotions had to come out the victor. Luckily, "Fight" overcame "Flight" and I didn't give up. Slowly, I started realizing that I needed to rely more on the enabling power of the atonement to help me clean up the path of destruction I had created. It took a lot of tears and prayers to get me to remember that I couldn't do it on my own, not at that point at least. Through an extremely patient husband and a friend who was there when I needed her, God showed His love for me. I felt like I could tackle my messy house and that I could be forgiven by my family, and that life would get better. An overwhelming new feeling came over me. I don't know how else to describe it, but it just felt like I had a much stronger will, sense of ability, and determination to put everything in my life back into its proper compartment.
And come to think about it, that's EXACTLY what enable means: "to give power or ability to".
The concept of this huge resource was not really getting through to me before. But I think I'm starting to grasp a smidgeon of understanding now that I have actually felt it and seen it work. I was able to start with one, small thing. I vacuumed. Then I washed dishes. Then I folded laundry. It really was a couple days of just pure cleaning, with the occasional break to play in the snow with the kids (which I think was just what the doctor ordered.) It took some time, and some old-fashioned work, but I no longer felt a looming cloud over my head telling me that it was impossible to catch up with my duties or that my children were already too far emotionally scarred to ever come back to normalcy. I felt hopeful and I felt happy. I felt loved and cared for. I felt grateful. I felt a little silly for letting myself get to that point, but in hindsight, I wouldn't have changed that experience a bit. I needed to see and learn for myself what Christ can do when you feel like you are no longer in control or even you. The enabling power of the Atonement is totally a real and accessible thing.
