Being Still

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a bit crazy when I have a meltdown. I am kind of known for my meltdowns with the people who know me the best. Lord help everyone if I have one after drinking whiskey.

Yesterday I had the worst meltdown since my conversion.

For the about the last 15 months things in my and my husband’s life have been stressful. I can’t even use the word stressful anymore, because it is beyond stressful stuff. Some of what has happened to us, happens in normal everyday life, they are no big deal, but when you add them all together and look at the fact that I never stop talking about Jesus and my husband supports my constant “I love JESUS and want to TELL THE WORLD!” dream, you realize that it’s more than just stress.  I’m sure that is a run-on sentence, and I’m sorry to anyone who’s eyes are now bleeding from reading it. I should just warn ya now, it’s not gonna get any better from here on out. This is a meltdown blog post.

First let me say that we lived in one house and then after 3 years of renting that house we moved to this house, which is right next door. In the old house there were very creepy weird things happening.  Noises, lights going off and on, doors opening and closing (all of which happened when I was home alone) and my nightmares. I had terrible nightmares for about a year, some in that house, and some in this house. And I would wake up in the middle of the night and I could feel someone staring at me in the dark. It would scare the pants off me and I finally told my priest and he came and blessed our house. It calmed down but when we moved, we made sure to get our Pastor to come and bless this house ASAP. Especially since right after we moved in, my husband heard a diabolic voice say “You are never going to get her away from me.” My husband is not dramatic like I am, so when he freaked out and called a priest himself, I knew that it was real and not just me being crazy. After our Pastor came to bless the house the series of unfortunate events began. It began with the pipes busting. Here are a few of the other things that happened just to name a few. Keep in mind that every single week since the pipes busted some kind of crisis has happened, sometimes more than once a week.

• My husband’s dad got sick and passed away
• While we were visiting him, our truck got broken into and all our stuff was stolen. My laptop, bible, rosary, prayer book, liturgy of the hours book etc. etc. all Catholic stuff.
• Our insurance didn’t cover any of the stuff.
• All our computers started acting up, freezing, crashing and just all around acting crazy. My husband’s computer had the password changed and he thought it was me who did it. There was no way that it could have not been someone, but it wasn’t either of us. It caused a huge fight
• Speaking of fights, my husband and I have been in a yearlong fight, we make up and then BAM we are fighting again. We have never fought like this before. It’s awful. It’s caused a lot of damage.
• Every single one of our company trucks broke down one after the other.
• Text messages between my husband and I got squirrelly which didn’t help with the fight thing.
• We had an employee who was systematically destroying our company from within like a cancer.
• My son and his girlfriend got pregnant and while Ariana is a blessing to this family and the baby is the best thing ever, supporting them as parents is stressful.
• We have had flat tires in the worst of situations, sometimes in the rain.
• For a week the kids got sick with high fevers and weird symptoms only to go to the doctor and there be nothing that anyone can tell wrong with them, so the doctors say it was a “mysterious virus” and send us on our way.
• One of our employees and my husband’s friend passed away suddenly.
• Even the guy who pooper scooped our yard died.
• The house is falling apart.
• My husband has wrecked his truck twice.
• We have been sued.
• I got in a wreck.
• Our dog had two allergic reactions that required us to take him to the Vet in emergency both times and then once cut his paw and there was blood squirting everywhere and ended with emergency surgery for him.
• I had a terrible infection in my jaw and had to have 2 root canals and one pulled.
• We both got sterilization reversals, which were expensive and painful, but we still aren’t pregnant. Meanwhile, everyone else is.
• About 30 things else that are too personal for me to put on a blog post

And then the last straw that really made me realize what has gone on: My angel pushed me down the stairs. HA! Not really, well, I don’t know, maybe my angel was a part of it, but I missed the last three steps on my stairs while walking downstairs and I landed with all my weight on my left ankle/leg. X-rays showed there is nothing broken, but it could be a hairline and x-rays don’t show tears.  It’s very painful and I’ve been stuck in bed for the last 8 days.  In these 8 days I have figured something out. I have avoided suffering since my conversion.

Not only do I avoid carrying my cross but I run in the complete opposite direction from it. Until I fell down the stairs, hurt my leg and was unable to run anywhere.

Here in my bed, stuck, without being able to do anything or go anywhere I was forced to be still. The message that I’ve always loved is “Be still and know that I am God” but I really suck at it. I am a fighter and I am always fighting. I fight to be better, I fight to defend what is true, I fight to protect my husband, I fight to protect myself from being hurt, I fight to be right all.the.time, I fight to do the right thing, I fight, fight, fight. I never shut up and I never sit still and let God be God. I try to be God.

If my husband has doubts of faith, I fight. And I make it worse.

If my son has doubts about life, I fight. And I make it worse.

I fight God. I fight my angel, I fight the devil. I am tired of fighting. I’m tired of always trying to “do” instead of trust. I trust no one but Candie and my kids. I try to trust my husband, but I am always waiting for him to realize that he made a mistake in marrying me and leave. Since living with someone who constantly fears that, sucks, sometimes he does want to leave.

As I sat here crying for two days so hard that my eyes hurt,  I realized that something my husband said the other day was so true. He told me that I am not funny anymore. I used to laugh and be fun and funny. People LOVED being around me. Now? Not so much. Part of it is all the stress of all the things going on that I listed and part of it is that my husband and I have been fighting so I am just sad a lot. But the truth of it is that I’ve been in fight mode this whole time. Who the hell is fun when they are in the middle of a battlefield? Nobody. Even soldiers have R&R to get a break. I have not given myself any R&R. It is fight mode all day. every day. But now the only option that I have is to sit here and be still.

My husband has to help me take a shower, shave my legs and the kids bring me food. It’s like being in jail, you just eat whatever they bring up to you.

I thought that I would love this if it ever happened, but I don’t. I don’t like having to face myself.

My husband is awesome. Yesterday he left the house without saying good-bye to me and we had fought so I had one of my epic meltdowns. For some reason my calls kept going to voicemail and so did his but I thought he was ignoring me and I was going to be left here all alone. I don’t really know what happened, maybe it was the lack of sleep or the fact that my pain meds were gone, but I freaked the hell out. When I finally got him on the phone I just began sobbing and talking at the same time. It was like an ugly Kim Kardashian cryface meltdown. Finally, when I was done talking we hung up and I fell asleep. I woke up to him standing by the bed with a Starbucks Latte (shut it about what they support, this is a man whose wife was having a sobbing meltdown telling him she has no reason to live), a John Legend CD and a cheesecake brownie. BEST.HUSBAND.EVAH!

I realized that I’ve been so busy nagging and telling my husband what to do that I have failed to just let him love me.  OR trust that he loves me. Same exact thing with God.

The reason for all that is that I am neck-deep in political news all day long. That puts me in fight mode and not saint mode. My next step is to clear my Facebook feed of political news as much as I can and talk about other stuff other than Catholicism non-stop. I have no idea what people talk about other than politics and being Catholic. I obviously talked about other things up until 5 years ago, but I have no idea what they were. I have forgotten.

But I’m going to work on it. I want to take Papa’s advice to smile and be joyful.

So, what else is there in the world to talk about?

PS as for all the crap that has gone on, I’ve talked to a priest and he has agreed to come bless our house and say some prayers with us to elevate the spiritual warfare so that we can deal with things with some peace. Please pray for us.