Treading Water

I always thought drowning looked dramatic. Arms flailing, someone screaming for help… But the kind of drowning Ive been lately in is quiet. It happens at 7:47 in the morning when I’m packing a lunch, answering an email, planning out hockey routes and asking myself “am I at the office or at home today?” I love my kids more than I can explain. I love them the way you love something that also terrifies how much you love them. But there are mornings when I hear Mamma or Pappa for the eleventh time before 8am, and something small inside me just… crumbles. Not because I don’t want to be there. I’m already somewhere else too — in a deadline, in a meeting, in the logistics of dinner, in the mental list that never, ever stops running. Nobody tells you that parenting and working at the same time means you are constantly failing someone. At work, part of your brain is calculating pick-up time. At home, part of your brain is still in the meeting you couldn’t finish. You are never fully anywhere. You become an expert at being half-present in two places at once, and you start to lose track of where you went. My husband and I pass each other some evenings like ships. We say “how was your day?” and neither of us hear the answer. We either get interrupted by a tantrum, a request or just brain fog. If we actually had time to answer, the real answer would take an hour, and we don’t have an hour, and also we’re too tired to hold the weight of each other’s real answers right now. That part is lonely in a way I didn’t expect. You can be surrounded by the people you love most in the world and still feel alone in your overwhelm. I’ve started to notice the signs in myself. The short fuse. The rage. The forgetting things I would never have forgotten before. Like forgetting to pick up one of my kids from School. The way I sit down to finally rest and feel guilty instead of restored. The sneaking suspicion that everyone else is managing this better than I am — that they have a system, a secret, something I missed out on. But lately I’ve been wondering if that’s even true. Or if we’re all just quietly treading water - struggling to breathe and keep afloat - and all the while, only pretending we can touch the bottom.