Sandwiched between my adult kids and aging parents, once I am totally at wit’s end overwhelmed, I feel the lonelies and if-onlies grip me by the neck and chest till I can’t breathe.
It’s never over. No breaks—days off. Emails, zoom meetings, apple watch, bills, Covid, bureaucracy, AD/HD, college courses failed and repeated, graduate school applications, assisted living, group homes, psych wards, on and on.
I would settle for whelmed.
Travel through ambivalence on the way to change. It is frightening to travel through ambivalence on the way to the unknown. A change is coming, but there’s no way to prepare. I re-feel loss, now projected from losing a loved one onto losing things, even meaningless things, that remind me of that person. But who am I? Am I the person I used to be?
I swim in regret with water over my head, drowning and wondering why? Why did things unfold this way, is it because despite trying my hardest I was not the mom, wife, daughter I really wanted to be? If I had kept putting myself last but tried even harder, listened to all the cliches and killed myself to improve your lives as my life felt like it was centered at the “fail” mark, never to improve again. I’ll sharpen my pen.
Still not better than I have hoped and tried for.
I would settle for whelmed.
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