Over the last 20 months I've been swallowing issue after issue. Problem after problem. Drama upon drama. Just handling it as it comes because I had to to survive it. To be the strong one for my kids and help my little family through it all. People would ask me all the time how in the world I was able to take it all, and I would just laugh & say "We're fine! It's just stuff. We'll get through it all & be stronger in the end." And I truly felt that at the time. Hell I still do, and I was right for the most part. We are fine. It was just stuff... Four of us are stronger because of it...
So why the hell am I falling apart now??
On one side of it, I am so blissfully happy. That part of our life is over. We are living in this beautiful place & I really do love it here. It feels more like "home" than anything else ever has. I have my perfect little family and because of that have more to be thankful for than many people in the whole wide world. But now that I don't have to "deal" with it all day after day I find myself completely freaking out at the littlest things and I fully know in the back of my brain that #1 it's all of that stress just now coming out & #2 that I really am being ridiculous.
We have been through entirely too much in our thirteen years together. More than most couples go through in their entire lives. The tragic & traumatic loss of my husband's father, the transition & ultimate loss of our family business, the loss of four pregnancies, a year & a half of fertility treatments to have our daughter, and then the whole losing our house to natural disaster- insurance being a PITA- robbed four times- moving across the country to escape fiasco. After all of that (and that's just a brief sweep over the stressful craptacularness that we've had to deal with) we have always come out of it with our heads held high & kept on going. So what the hell is my problem now? I think it's because now I have the breathing room to stop & think about it. I'm finally allowing myself to grasp what's behind us. It's like I realize now how much we have completely lost control over in our life & I am desperate to grab ahold of control over something & I can't.
It first was coming out in little spurts here & there. Freaking out over a mess in the kids' room. Getting thoroughly upset when the papers would pile up on the kitchen counter. New shower curtain in the bathroom caused this weird claustrophobia that I never knew I had & I freaked... Little panic attacks here & there that I could get over & move on.
But now? Now we have our stuff back from Kansas after all this time... & I have completely lost my mind. It's gone. Bye bye. See ya. Admit me to the looney bin & throw away the key.
It took three trucks *and* two u-haul trailers behind them to bring all of our stuff. (*vomit*) So much of it was either severely water damaged from the house (and they still gave it back to us so we could relive the awfulness of it. Awesome.) or it got irreparably damaged in the 1500 mile trek.
The rest was in 750 boxes of fun for us to go through. 750!!!! (Again, dry-heaving). It was unloaded in a matter of a few hours & we managed to fill three storage units and *still* had to bring 20 boxes or so back to our tiny rental house. (Commence panic attack!!) I felt like I couldn't breathe! Stuff was everywhere & I couldn't even so much as cook dinner because I couldn't get to my stove or my sink! AAAHHHH! Calgon take me away! So Mathew to the rescue starts to open the boxes and start to go through them. I feel a little better now because from the very first box we opened we could tell that we didn't have near as much junk as it would seem. In one huge box there was two cereal bowls and a saucer. That's it. (Plus a half of a trash bag full of paper). Oy. So even if we didn't get rid of a single thing (which we totally will) we still could downsize a ton just by consolidating the boxes. But we have to actually do that & doing that equals a huge mess in our already tiny house. Matt has gone through 100 boxes so far (I say Matt because I haven't been able to even go near them yet without my heart beating out of my chest) and has eliminated at least 40 of just those. But that means a) we have all of that trash to swim through with all of the paper to recycle and all of the broken down boxes and b) we have to store all of the boxes to keep until we can get through enough of a storage unit to start to reorganize it. So my reaction? I simply want to crawl into a corner until it all goes away all by itself. I don't want to deal with it anymore! Can't I just wake up one morning and it's all already done for me?!? No of course not. I know I need to suck it up and just deal with it. Just power through it all like I've always been able to do and get over it. It's just hard!!!
But I do know that we're in the home stretch. We just need to get through all of our crap & get rid of a lot of it and wait until we can move into our beautiful home & just live a normal life again. Once we can do that we'll be beyond perfect, I just know it. Now, if my heart could just tell my brain that so I stop freaking out I'll be all set...
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