Falling Apart

***Working it out on paper.  I cuss.  A lot.  I gave it up for Lent.  So what?  I don’t have the energy to care right now.  Totally disjointed ADD ramblings.  It’s where I am right now.***

Have you ever had a mental breakdown? A humming discordantly to yourself, flapping your hands desperately, tugging on your hair, wild-eyed mental breakdown?  I’m teetering on the edge.  I’m watching myself from somewhere outside of myself and thinking “Shit.  I’m totally losing it here.” But in an observer-ish kind of way.

I’m completely overstimulated. My brain doesn’t seem to know where to rest and just keeps speeding up.  There’s no place to stop.  I have no place of calm.  There is no day of rest.  Ever.

I wish I could hire a maid.  Like in the book The Help?  I need someone to come in and order my life. Or at least my household.  I need it to be clean.  My husband keeps telling me to have the children do it, but that’s just one more layer of stress and responsibility.  I just need it done. I need someone to be in charge of the clean.  I need a Captain of Sanity around here.

I need the children to go to the magical land of Somewhere Else while I collect my thoughts and get hold of myself again.

I’m completely overwhelmed.

Family members have offered to come and help but they aren’t the right ones.  I don’t know which ones the right ones are.

I need my mom.  That’s who I need.  Not the brain-damaged woman I’ve had for the last 20+ years, but the hyper-controlling slightly bitchy one from my childhood.  I crave her competence and steady hand right now.  Can she come back and put it all into order?  Please? Forget that that woman no longer exists anywhere on this earth any longer.  I need her to come back.

Can you hire someone like that?  Coolly professional and in control with an air of no-nonsense command?  An employee who could show up, be in charge, and then go home? Someone to take over the running of things so that I can go sit in the corner and quietly fall completely apart?

I wasn’t home for any of last week, constantly on the go.  This week is starting off the same way.  It’s 1:20 AM now and in 6 hours I need to be walking out the door to take #4 back to the hospital for more shots.  It will take all morning. When I get home, #1 will need a ride down to the office.  I won’t be home until after 3:00 to stay.  Maybe.  Unless someone else needs something from me.

By the time I get back home in the afternoon, the tiny bit of clean which I have carved out in my crazy midnight obsessiveness will be completely subsumed (that’s a word, right?) by the “I don’t give a fuck” attitude of my boys.  I don’t know how to make them care.  I don’t have the energy to do it.  To be honest right now, I don’t give a fuck if they do care.  I just want them out of my house.  They need to go outside and not mess up the fragile orderliness which I wish would take hold.

I can’t afford to pay anyone to order it all.  Can I put all the children, even the baby, in school for a few weeks?  I just need them to be gone.  I can’t think of what they need.  Having a conversation takes more than I have in me.  All I want is time alone.  Silence.

I’m drowning here.

There is an undertow of people who need things from me.  They take and I give and I’m empty.  I need to recharge. I don’t know where to go to do that, and  I don’t know how to begin.