Once the baby was up, I went ahead with our usual rituals, and we sat together in the living room watching cartoons as I fed him oatmeal. I ran into trouble, though, because I hadn't realized the variety pack I bought came with "original" flavored oatmeal, and he kept spitting it out. I went into the kitchen to look for some cinnamon, and found myself getting extremely irritated when I couldn't find it. I was shuffling things around in the cabinet as I searched, getting increasingly agitated. It had been such a good morning, and I couldn't understand why I was feeling so cranky. I gave up on my search and just threw the bowl of oatmeal in the sink, not bothering to scrape it into the trash, and sat back down in a huff. Obviously I was irritated because without the cinnamon, I couldn't get the baby to eat his food. If he didn't eat it, it would go to waste, which is irritating in itself since food is not always plentiful in the house. I also felt guilty, because without resolving that problem, the baby would hardly have eaten anything for breakfast. I also felt guilty because I didn't scrape out the bowl and was adding to the mess in the kitchen that I knew was bothering my mother, if not everyone else in the household. It seemed like my guilt and concern for the baby would outweigh everything else and compel me to find a better solution than just throwing the oatmeal out, but I didn't feel like I could handle making something else, since the dirty dishes in the sink made any work in the kitchen feel like an insurmountable task. I did still have to make sure he ate something, so I opened a package of crackers and started feeding them to him. It wasn't a very hearty breakfast, but it was better than nothing. And as I fed him the crackers, the real root of my irritability revealed itself. I started dozing off in the chair. I forgot, I had only slept for a couple of hours, and since I was up so early I had already been up about six hours. I was just tired!
It was so obvious. And yet, it took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on with me. It's almost like I have a reversed fundamental attribution error. When examining our own behavior, most normal people attribute negative behavior to something besides themselves, such as something in the environment or various circumstances. But when we examine other's negative behavior, we attribute it to something intrinsic about the person: we call them evil, stupid, bad at their job, arrogant, selfish, etc. We don't consider that they may just be having a bad day, or be under a lot of stress, or maybe they recently experienced a major loss. I seem to function in the reverse; when someone else acts out in a negative way, my default is to ask myself "Why are they behaving this way?" and dismiss any of the intellectually two-dimensional solutions such as "They're just a bad person." This is why I feel I can readily see into other people's thoughts and feelings. This is why I often feel such intense empathy with others. But when looking at my own behavior, such as not waking up in the morning and immediately attending to my baby, my default is to attribute this behavior to something intrinsic about myself, such as "I am a bad mother." Those are the kind of thoughts in my head that I am constantly trying to stomp down, because just like if I were thinking such things about another person, I know that they are fundamentally flawed, intellectually shallow, and profoundly maladaptive. But for some reason, I find it much harder to keep these thoughts at bay and offer a better solution to why I behave the way I do. Even though the solution is so obvious, as it was in this case.
It's like when I was in college and started to feel like I was getting dumber. I didn't grasp ideas and concepts as readily as I did when I was in high school, I was losing my intellectual curiosity, I just wasn't making connections the same. I didn't contribute to conversations like I once did. My friends would talk about their ideas, and I rarely had anything to contribute. When I did, it felt so forced, and nothing seemed as clever as what they were saying. Even they were taking notice and thought it strange it seemed I was becoming stupid. Even I was starting to believe it. I was ashamed and disappointed in myself. At times I felt like it wasn't worth living if I couldn't think the way I once did, if my mind was just going to continue to deteriorate year after year.
But then I heard a story on NPR about a recent study that examined why it seems like poor people make bad decisions. They found that "the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points" (or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults, which I found really interesting... but that's another tangent entirely). All of a sudden, it made complete sense to me. I wasn't going crazy, my brain wasn't inherently broken. Since beginning college, and especially after graduating, my socioeconomic condition had changed drastically. Now I was responsible for so many things, like my housing and food and classes and work, things I hardly had to worry about when I was living in an upper-middle class household. Even when I moved out at seventeen, there were still adults making sure I was taken care of, so that I could focus on school. But in college, sometimes the financial burden was so bad, I would not have enough money for food. There were times I went without eating. Sometimes that lack of nourishment or general stress prompted depression that kept me homebound for days. I would miss classes. One time during the summer, I had been eating so little for so long (whether it was from depression, or empty cabinets, or a combination of both, I don't remember now), when I did leave the house with a friend to go see a play, I fainted. I fainted perhaps two more times as I tried to make my way to a vending machine and scrape together what little pocket change I had on me to get some crackers - something, anything - in my stomach. All the while, my poor friend was shocked and horrified and at a complete loss for what to do. (Again, upon recalling the incident, I feel more for his plight than I do for my own, an impulse which speaks to how much more deeply I empathize with others than feel for myself.)
Even my gaming binges made sense in this context. I spent so much time and energy stressing out and obsessing over how I was going to manage to pay the rent and bills, that it was so refreshing to turn my brain on to World of Warcraft and obsess over something else for twenty hours at a time. One might criticize me for not spending that time searching for a better job or doing something more constructive (indeed, my father said such things; part of the reason I don't talk to him anymore). But given my mental state at the time, solving all my problems simply was not possible. It was the gaming, connecting with other people there, and the blatant escapism, that my brain needed. It was better than wishing myself dead. And isn't that precisely at the heart of suicidality: escapism?
Once I had this out, once I knew that I felt dumber because poverty was gobbling up my mental bandwidth (what a savory concept, mental bandwidth), the menacing voice that whispered to me You're stupid, what's the point of living if you can't think right anymore? completely dissolved. It was the same with this incident; once I knew that my irritability was a result of just being tired, rather than some moral failure on my part, all the anxiety and shame associated with my failure to control my mood completely vanished. The new problem at hand was simply to get some sleep, which, granted, was it's own struggle, but once the baby was down for his nap I managed to get the rest I needed.
When I woke up, it was five o'clock, and Jesse was telling me to get up, sounding irritable with me, his volume escalating. Again, I felt resentful, and wanted to continue sleeping. The baby was awake, sure, but he was cooing calmly in his crib, entertaining himself within the confines of a safe area. The only real pressure on me to get up with any urgency was Jesse. At the time, I was just annoyed with his attitude, and it didn't make much sense to me why he was being so urgent given that there was nothing to get pushy about. I did eventually get up and let the baby out of the crib, but not without engaging in a short shouting match. Even when I was awake enough to get up, I didn't want to move. Perhaps out of spite. Perhaps from the anxiety imposed by his shouting. Either way, in retrospect, I understand that he's responding to a pattern of my behaviors, and not taking the time and energy to analyze the individual situation. My patterns of sleep have been an ongoing problem, and he is still annoyed with me when he sees me sleeping at times he deems inappropriate. There have been times that I have slept through entire mornings, and well into the afternoon, not even beginning to rouse at my baby's cries from his crib. Those are the times I have felt most like a failure as a mother, such that the shame I feel over the incidents is tangible. I am almost too ashamed to even confess it here, but I know I must. His anger, given this established pattern, makes sense, though in this particular moment, when the baby and I are waking from our naps at the same time, he is being unreasonable. Now he is just getting angry at me out of habit, and is too cognitively lazy to fully assess the individual situation.
While I'm feeding the baby in the evening, I notice that my mother has finished doing half the dishes. I am relieved, though again I feel guilty. I had been wanting to tackle the dishes for the last two days for her, but couldn't bring myself to do it, for the same reason I couldn't bring myself to search my room for a dirty pair of shorts. Just the process I have to go through to do the dishes brings up so many emotionally draining thoughts and stresses that I can't even begin to deal with it. I don't normally have to worry about the dishes, and neither does she, because her father usually does them. But Papa broke his hip this weekend and is in the hospital, and we don't expect he'll be back anytime soon. Even when he does recover, my mom plans on putting him in an assisted living facility, since she can't be home to care for him. He's been pretty independent up until recently, with periodic seizures and dementia that makes it difficult for him to remember to take his medicine or even remember what he's taking it for. Not to mention he's cranky all the time. I would pitch in in caring for him more, but I can barely take care of myself as it is, let alone my son, let alone an elderly person with memory loss and a sour disposition.
I really hate doing the dishes. But so does everyone else in the household. And my mom is working all day, and absolutely deserves a free pass on dealing with that extra chore. Jesse is usually in school, but even when he isn't, his sensory disorder makes it difficult for him to do the dishes and deal with water (coincidentally, same reason I usually end up the one who has to give the baby his bath). So the responsibility now falls on me.
Though now that she has done half of it, and sorted the unfinished dishes in neat piles the same way I would have done if I had been able to bring myself to do it at all, I feel like the rest of the chore is realistically doable for me. (Granted, the dishes are still only half finished... but at least now I feel the chore is possible. I just have to commit the time and attention to completing the task, which is a whole different can of worms.) When I noticed, I thanked her for doing it, and told her I meant to do it myself, but couldn't bring myself to do it, explaining that when I looked at the pile of dishes, I became overwhelmed. She replied that it was really simple to deal with, that you just take them all out and sort them in piles (as she had), but I had to interrupt her. I knew the process I had to go through. But I simply couldn't even get started on it. I just couldn't. There was not much explanation needed. My mom knows the feeling; she has been diagnosed with anxiety herself. The difference is, she's medicated for it.
While the baby ate, my mom was on her laptop, browsing Facebook and watching videos. "Look at this rehab center, it's like a spa!" This sent me off into a spiel about the function of luxury and comfortable settings when treating people for drug addiction, which she nodded her head in understanding, entirely missing the disconnect in communication that just happened. "I think Papa will really like this place," she said.
I was so far inside my head when she directed my attention to the video, that the tangent I flew off on was completely disconnected from the context of the situation. She was researching to find a rehab center she could put Papa in, and it should have been obvious to me that this was the kind of rehab she was talking about, not drug rehab. I was embarrassed for a moment, but less so since I was the only one who seemed to notice what happened, and also a little alarmed when I realized what had occurred. On the whole, I feel a lot better. I can already tell I'm thinking more normally. My cognitive capacity is where I think it should be. It's like when I was depressed, all of my neural connections were shut off, but now that I'm writing again, I've flipped a huge lever that has turned the whole system back online, and there are so many connections, it's insanely easy to get lost in them.
This absentmindedness is manifesting in other small ways too. Like when I was preparing food for the baby, I was getting steps mixed up, almost forgot to set the timer on the oven, forgot what it was I was planning on doing when I walked into the kitchen initially, etc. They are the briefest lapses in memory, and I recover from them quickly enough, but they are unnerving. I fear they foreshadow a more crippling disability in old age. Not an unrealistic fear, given my family history.
While and after we put the baby to bed, Jesse and I were talking and I noticed I had things to say. A lot of times, he has a lot of ideas to bounce off of me, and that's all they do: bounce. I have trouble reflecting anything of substance or merit back at him. But now, I really seemed to be engaging in the conversation and bringing something of my own to the table. At one point while we were talking later, just before he was ready to go to bed, he had an "Aha!" moment after I explained how my brain was working and why I have some of the problems I'm having. It suddenly clicked with him the similarities between that and his sensory processing disorder. I got glassy-eyed and asked him, "Can you write that down?" I wanted him to explain it and write it down the way I have been writing here. It wasn't that I didn't understand what had clicked, it was that I wanted to lay out his idea and examine it more thoroughly. But since his thoughts aren't in my head, they're in his, I can't just examine the ideas in my head. I don't know what clicked as well as I want to. As we continued talking, it happened again, this time talking about an interaction he had with someone at school, and how his decisions in dealing with others impacted them. Again, I wanted it in writing. I could see so many other ideas I wanted to explore with the story he was telling me, but I felt like writing it down or being able to read it would make it so much easier to make those connections.
I slept late again. After playing Minecraft and working on a project with friends, I went to bed at about four in the morning. Again, sleep came naturally, and there was no anxiety about going to bed like there normally is. The trouble with sleep isn't always just racing thoughts. I have anxiety directly related to sleeping and all that entails. A lot of times I just feel like if I sleep, I'm going to miss out on things, or that its wasted time. Time, time, time. There are so many things I want to do in life, so many things I want to accomplish and read and learn and make, sleeping just feels like time wasted. It's like a curse, robbing me of so much potential. I'm dreaming away all my opportunities. And so often I get hung up on this. Why sleep? When I could be doing this or that or the other thing. I feel pulled in so many directions, sleep gets lost in the tussle. Now that I'm writing, this particular brand of anxiety has evaporated. It's as if, for all the things I want to do, as long as I'm writing, I feel satiated.
This morning, I woke with a start at the first sound of the baby crying, and sprung out of bed to begin the day. Achievement unlocked.
Even my gaming binges made sense in this context. I spent so much time and energy stressing out and obsessing over how I was going to manage to pay the rent and bills, that it was so refreshing to turn my brain on to World of Warcraft and obsess over something else for twenty hours at a time. One might criticize me for not spending that time searching for a better job or doing something more constructive (indeed, my father said such things; part of the reason I don't talk to him anymore). But given my mental state at the time, solving all my problems simply was not possible. It was the gaming, connecting with other people there, and the blatant escapism, that my brain needed. It was better than wishing myself dead. And isn't that precisely at the heart of suicidality: escapism?
Once I had this out, once I knew that I felt dumber because poverty was gobbling up my mental bandwidth (what a savory concept, mental bandwidth), the menacing voice that whispered to me You're stupid, what's the point of living if you can't think right anymore? completely dissolved. It was the same with this incident; once I knew that my irritability was a result of just being tired, rather than some moral failure on my part, all the anxiety and shame associated with my failure to control my mood completely vanished. The new problem at hand was simply to get some sleep, which, granted, was it's own struggle, but once the baby was down for his nap I managed to get the rest I needed.
When I woke up, it was five o'clock, and Jesse was telling me to get up, sounding irritable with me, his volume escalating. Again, I felt resentful, and wanted to continue sleeping. The baby was awake, sure, but he was cooing calmly in his crib, entertaining himself within the confines of a safe area. The only real pressure on me to get up with any urgency was Jesse. At the time, I was just annoyed with his attitude, and it didn't make much sense to me why he was being so urgent given that there was nothing to get pushy about. I did eventually get up and let the baby out of the crib, but not without engaging in a short shouting match. Even when I was awake enough to get up, I didn't want to move. Perhaps out of spite. Perhaps from the anxiety imposed by his shouting. Either way, in retrospect, I understand that he's responding to a pattern of my behaviors, and not taking the time and energy to analyze the individual situation. My patterns of sleep have been an ongoing problem, and he is still annoyed with me when he sees me sleeping at times he deems inappropriate. There have been times that I have slept through entire mornings, and well into the afternoon, not even beginning to rouse at my baby's cries from his crib. Those are the times I have felt most like a failure as a mother, such that the shame I feel over the incidents is tangible. I am almost too ashamed to even confess it here, but I know I must. His anger, given this established pattern, makes sense, though in this particular moment, when the baby and I are waking from our naps at the same time, he is being unreasonable. Now he is just getting angry at me out of habit, and is too cognitively lazy to fully assess the individual situation.
While I'm feeding the baby in the evening, I notice that my mother has finished doing half the dishes. I am relieved, though again I feel guilty. I had been wanting to tackle the dishes for the last two days for her, but couldn't bring myself to do it, for the same reason I couldn't bring myself to search my room for a dirty pair of shorts. Just the process I have to go through to do the dishes brings up so many emotionally draining thoughts and stresses that I can't even begin to deal with it. I don't normally have to worry about the dishes, and neither does she, because her father usually does them. But Papa broke his hip this weekend and is in the hospital, and we don't expect he'll be back anytime soon. Even when he does recover, my mom plans on putting him in an assisted living facility, since she can't be home to care for him. He's been pretty independent up until recently, with periodic seizures and dementia that makes it difficult for him to remember to take his medicine or even remember what he's taking it for. Not to mention he's cranky all the time. I would pitch in in caring for him more, but I can barely take care of myself as it is, let alone my son, let alone an elderly person with memory loss and a sour disposition.
I really hate doing the dishes. But so does everyone else in the household. And my mom is working all day, and absolutely deserves a free pass on dealing with that extra chore. Jesse is usually in school, but even when he isn't, his sensory disorder makes it difficult for him to do the dishes and deal with water (coincidentally, same reason I usually end up the one who has to give the baby his bath). So the responsibility now falls on me.
Though now that she has done half of it, and sorted the unfinished dishes in neat piles the same way I would have done if I had been able to bring myself to do it at all, I feel like the rest of the chore is realistically doable for me. (Granted, the dishes are still only half finished... but at least now I feel the chore is possible. I just have to commit the time and attention to completing the task, which is a whole different can of worms.) When I noticed, I thanked her for doing it, and told her I meant to do it myself, but couldn't bring myself to do it, explaining that when I looked at the pile of dishes, I became overwhelmed. She replied that it was really simple to deal with, that you just take them all out and sort them in piles (as she had), but I had to interrupt her. I knew the process I had to go through. But I simply couldn't even get started on it. I just couldn't. There was not much explanation needed. My mom knows the feeling; she has been diagnosed with anxiety herself. The difference is, she's medicated for it.
While the baby ate, my mom was on her laptop, browsing Facebook and watching videos. "Look at this rehab center, it's like a spa!" This sent me off into a spiel about the function of luxury and comfortable settings when treating people for drug addiction, which she nodded her head in understanding, entirely missing the disconnect in communication that just happened. "I think Papa will really like this place," she said.
I was so far inside my head when she directed my attention to the video, that the tangent I flew off on was completely disconnected from the context of the situation. She was researching to find a rehab center she could put Papa in, and it should have been obvious to me that this was the kind of rehab she was talking about, not drug rehab. I was embarrassed for a moment, but less so since I was the only one who seemed to notice what happened, and also a little alarmed when I realized what had occurred. On the whole, I feel a lot better. I can already tell I'm thinking more normally. My cognitive capacity is where I think it should be. It's like when I was depressed, all of my neural connections were shut off, but now that I'm writing again, I've flipped a huge lever that has turned the whole system back online, and there are so many connections, it's insanely easy to get lost in them.
This absentmindedness is manifesting in other small ways too. Like when I was preparing food for the baby, I was getting steps mixed up, almost forgot to set the timer on the oven, forgot what it was I was planning on doing when I walked into the kitchen initially, etc. They are the briefest lapses in memory, and I recover from them quickly enough, but they are unnerving. I fear they foreshadow a more crippling disability in old age. Not an unrealistic fear, given my family history.
While and after we put the baby to bed, Jesse and I were talking and I noticed I had things to say. A lot of times, he has a lot of ideas to bounce off of me, and that's all they do: bounce. I have trouble reflecting anything of substance or merit back at him. But now, I really seemed to be engaging in the conversation and bringing something of my own to the table. At one point while we were talking later, just before he was ready to go to bed, he had an "Aha!" moment after I explained how my brain was working and why I have some of the problems I'm having. It suddenly clicked with him the similarities between that and his sensory processing disorder. I got glassy-eyed and asked him, "Can you write that down?" I wanted him to explain it and write it down the way I have been writing here. It wasn't that I didn't understand what had clicked, it was that I wanted to lay out his idea and examine it more thoroughly. But since his thoughts aren't in my head, they're in his, I can't just examine the ideas in my head. I don't know what clicked as well as I want to. As we continued talking, it happened again, this time talking about an interaction he had with someone at school, and how his decisions in dealing with others impacted them. Again, I wanted it in writing. I could see so many other ideas I wanted to explore with the story he was telling me, but I felt like writing it down or being able to read it would make it so much easier to make those connections.
I slept late again. After playing Minecraft and working on a project with friends, I went to bed at about four in the morning. Again, sleep came naturally, and there was no anxiety about going to bed like there normally is. The trouble with sleep isn't always just racing thoughts. I have anxiety directly related to sleeping and all that entails. A lot of times I just feel like if I sleep, I'm going to miss out on things, or that its wasted time. Time, time, time. There are so many things I want to do in life, so many things I want to accomplish and read and learn and make, sleeping just feels like time wasted. It's like a curse, robbing me of so much potential. I'm dreaming away all my opportunities. And so often I get hung up on this. Why sleep? When I could be doing this or that or the other thing. I feel pulled in so many directions, sleep gets lost in the tussle. Now that I'm writing, this particular brand of anxiety has evaporated. It's as if, for all the things I want to do, as long as I'm writing, I feel satiated.
This morning, I woke with a start at the first sound of the baby crying, and sprung out of bed to begin the day. Achievement unlocked.
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