Can I be honest here? Like, brutally, terrifyingly honest? Is this a safe space?
It’s not a secret that lately, I’ve been feeling pretty shitty. And for me, that looks a lot like anxiety and anger and resentment and coldness. I push people away, I live with my anxiety at a 10, and I just always feel….stressed.
Let’s be honest. Those don’t sound like great characteristics for a mom, do they.
Most days, I find myself stressed out to the point where I’m yelling at my kids when honestly, they probably don’t deserve it. I want them to clean up faster, or get dressed faster, or, and god forbid they do this one, listen the first time! (Gasp!)
My kids are not bad kids. By any standards. Sure, they piss me off and they get on my nerves…but when you’re a stay at home mom to 5 and 3 year old boys, that pretty much just comes with the territory.
But I’ll be honest, lately, I feel so guilty. Like, all the time. I feel like I’m fucking them up, like I’m doing a terrible job, and I am living with so much guilt and regret and increased anxiety because of it.
Because I’m not feeling my best, I’m not doing my best. My patience is…well, I don’t know where the fuck it went. My warmth went along with it. Every hug and “I love you” has felt…forced. Unnatural.
And I fucking hate myself for it.
Lately, I find myself feeling so guilty after a long day and I’ve finally gotten them in bed, after I probably rushed through bedtime. I feel like I didn’t love them enough, or like I didn’t take my time and they’re going to go to bed feeling…I don’t know, anything bad. But I feel so guilty about it that I just want to go back into their rooms and tell them that I love them. Hold them a little bit longer.
And lately, I have been. I’ll go back in, especially to my older son, and make sure that he knows I love him. That he can feel it.
Nobody is making me feel bad. My kids don’t complain, and my husband, just a few hours ago, looked at me and told me “you really are a great mom”. Which, again, is why I’m convinced he should leave me, and why he’s so much better off without me. I don’t deserve him.
The amount of guilt and anxiety and self hatred that I’m living with is…intense. I am genuinely afraid that I am ruining my life, that I’m fucking up my kids, and that my marriage will inevitably fall apart because of it.
I don’t want to be like this. And I don’t want to feel like this. I feel like this is one of the worst versions of myself that there could possibly be. (Besides the one that’s drinking all the time. That one’s bad too. Let’s never go back there.)
We all know I’m the queen of pushing people away. Been there, done that. It sucks every time, and it never serves me.
But my own kids? My family? I can tell that’s what it is, that’s what it boils down to. I’m acting the same way, like I’m pushing them away. Like I don’t want their love, don’t want them around me because I know I’ll ruin them or hurt them.
My kids love me so much. My husband too. And I don’t deserve it. Not any of it. It makes me feel so weak and so guilty.
I don’t know why I feel this badly right now, why things are the way they are. I know that I’ve tried to talk about it in therapy, and it gets misconstrued or things go in a different direction…and now, well, things are more fucked up than ever.
She’s, more or less given up on me it seems, and I’m scared I’ll never heal in the ways I’m SO desperate to. I haven’t been articulating myself clearly in therapy when it comes to this, so maybe that’s on me.
But I also know I’ve been frantically trying to. Because I know it’s a problem, and it’s making me actively suicidal.
Feeling like a bad mom, feeling like I could be fucking up my kids…the idea that I could be the thing that harms them in life…I would rather die than be the cause of pain or hardship for them.
I want to feel better because I want to do better. My family deserves the best of me, certainly nothing less than that. I just feel so stuck and so guilty.
And so alone.