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I’m Tired By: Lori Loesch


 

 

I’m tired of trying to be normal.  Tired of trying to do the normal things that normal families do with their kids.  I’m not normal.  I was not raised normal.  I am starting to understand just where I came from.  A horribly, dysfunctional, family upbringing.  

 

My life is changing.  When my son turned 10 years old, I had a baby.  My life was full, taking care of a baby.  I see the same pattern repeating itself with my daughter turning 10 this past year.  I am in need of something to occupy my time.  I no longer need to care for a toddler.  I am lost.  My daughter spends most of her free time on her lap top.  She doesn’t just play, she learns and draws too.  I remember when my son was growing up, TV was the bad babysitter.  My son and I spent a lot of time with the TV on.  We watched cooking shows and kid shows and documentaries.  I find that with TV, my kids and I were together viewing.  With the lap top, I am not a part of her life and I can’t even try to be.  I just don’t get the games and with my vision, it’s more trouble than I feel it’s worth.  Faith will ask me to watch her play a favorite game, but it’s boring to me to sit, watching a small screen, where I can hardly see the mouse jumping around anyway.  

I always blame myself.  If I went outside…if I did a craft…if I invited her to join me in cooking or baking…she would get away from the lap top.  My husband says it’s not me it’s her age.  So, I listened to him.  I have found that when I ask Faith to do a craft or cook with me, when we have down time, she is off to her lap top.  I’m not talking thirty minutes of down time, just two minutes where she is not engaged in the craft, she will be off to her lap top.  It is clearly not my fault.  She picks the lap top over all else.  

I put myself down, thinking of the other mom’s out there that are doing a better job of raising their kids.  But, I only see what they post on their FaceBook pages.  The smiling faces.  I have deleted my FaceBook page.  I don’t miss it at all.  For me it did more harm than good.  

I beat myself up because I do not do things that I used to do.  I don’t seem to care if I make breakfast, lunch, or supper.  I don’t take the love and time to do things.  It’s like, hurry up, get it done, so that I can be done.  I don’t even know what I really want to do.  Nothing, really.  Nothing gets me excited.  I feel like a wet, rung out dish cloth, after scrubbing dirty dishes all day long.  

So, if I don’t want to live like I’ve been living, why do I?  Good question.  When Faith was small, and we would go grocery shopping, people would make comments like, she’s a happy little soul.  She and I were.  I think.  Again, it’s her age.  There are so many things happening in my life, that I have no, to little, control over.  My eyes, legs, shoulders, for example.  Are they the reason I’m falling behind and lack the get up and go that I need to create a better life for my family?  If so, I need to accept it.  My new favorite commercial is the one for Fibromyalga.  It looks a lot like my life.  I struggle with thinking that at 52 years of age, I shouldn’t be taking care of a child.  The oldness came on quickly.  The fall of the economy didn’t help and moving to the country, where I am secluded, is not good for me either. 

I have been blamed by everyone for everything.  It’s my fault we live in the country.  So, moving back to town, I worry that it will not be blissful and again I will be blamed for the decision to move.  So, I stay.  A friend asked me, “so why not move back?”  Great question.  She is probably tired of hearing me complain.  I do try to embrace the good things about living in the country, but it is a struggle.  I long to be able to order out and have it delivered to my door.  I said to my husband, last night, while I was wondering what to make for supper.  I said that I remember not liking to answer the door when the food was delivered!  How funny that sounds to me now.  Now that I have no delivery service.  It’s true, that, you don’t miss what you’ve got ’till it’s gone.  

 

This is Thanksgiving Day.  My husband, daughter, and I are staying home.  We will probably go out to eat.  I didn’t buy a turkey, no body likes it anyway.  I could have bought a ham, but I didn’t.  My son is at his boyfriend’s house, and this is different, not having him around.  I decided not to go over to my sister in law’s house for Thanksgiving.  My mother invited us, she said we’d go to a restaurant, then back to her house for desert.  Being around my family puts me into a spiral downhill.  PTSD.   I assume, for my mother she feels the same.  I like my mom, but I just can’t shake the feelings that come back when I spend time with her.  I figured that, maybe the reason my sister in law wanted to have us together was to snoop into our lives.  You know, there has been so much going on in my life, and she is probably biting at the bit to know all the details so that she can spread them around.  

As I said, I’m tired of trying to be normal and do the normal family things.  I want to do what comes naturally to my small family.  What ever that is.  If it means not going to a family dinner for Thanksgiving, and Faith will have to listen to all the normal kids talk about their Thanksgiving Day fun, then that’s what it is.  

I guess that when I got married and had children, I thought that all the abuse and dysfunction would disappear.  It didn’t.  It probably got worse.  I want a normal family life, but that was taken from me, and the sooner I am ok with that, the better I and my daughter will be.  I do not have a mother, no matter how much I long for her. My kids do not have a grandmother.  She is not here.  Her words are just that, words.  I always blame David and me for her not coming to see her grandkids.  She probably doesn’t feel comfortable in our home.  It’s not us.  It is who she is.  She was not a mother and she is not a grandmother.  I need to stop forcing it to happen.  She and I will never be what I want us to be.  I worry that I’ll be a mom like her, to my daughter.  Raising a son was not the same as raising a daughter.  There are things that come up that throw me into a tailspin, probably because I am forced into the past, thinking…”what was it like when I got my period?”  “How did my mother react?”  Probably not the same way a normal mom would act.  I have been thinking that she must have had thoughts of;  “Will Lori get pregnant to my husband, her step, adopted dad?”   I can only imagine what was whirling through her mind.  

I would like to go back and relive my past as it was, not as “they” lied and said it was.  When I saw something, “they” said I didn’t see it.  They confused my little mind from one year old.  They rewired my mind.  I couldn’t trust anything I saw, because what I saw, I  was told I didn’t see.  As an impressionable child I believed what “they” were saying.  

I hope I have finally come to a place where I stop blaming myself, that I like myself, and that I stop wanting what I can’t have, and that I stop thinking everybody has a loving, kind, family, that get together on Thanksgiving Day and enjoy themselves.  

I read where Terri Hatcher, the actor, said that she wakes up every morning, knowing that she is one in 3 or 5 that have been abused.  It’s a struggle.  Everyday.   Maybe I am normal.  1 in 5 children are sexually abused.  That is sickening.  

 

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