it feels like rage.

like metaphorical acid reflux, lava-hot. it splashes up without warning, spatters out of me in mutters and expletives and tears, my face raw and shocked.  i am all powder, fuse worn down to a nub.

i am fine, and insane, all in the span of thirty seconds.  and when i am fine i think the insane is probably a drama queen, self-aggrandizing and blown out of all proportion.  and when i am not fine i think we cannot all get out of this alive.

it is lack of sleep and the bitter loss of the happy, weary infancy i’d dared think we’d finally gotten, third time lucky.  it is two weeks of asthma attacks and flu and both children up several times a night, in addition to the colic, the brutal colic, the sweet-merciful-Jeebus-seriously-who’d-i-torture-in-my-last-life colic that stomps on my last, frayed nerve and breaks my heart and makes me feel helpless and cruel, a mockery of comfort and motherhood.  it is the laptop broken and the furnace rusted out all at once and all the lightbulbs burnt in chorus and the diamond earring lost raking leaves, my only diamonds, ever, gone…like money hemorrhaging, like lurking failure and chaos have found me easy prey.   it is the call i got yesterday that Oscar’s ear surgery – scheduled for this Thursday – has instead been postponed to the day before Christmas Eve.  because heck, when better to trek to the hospital with a two year old and infant for the day?  what else would i be doing that time of year?

it is all these things, and none of them.  it is that they all add up.

one last straw, again and again and again, and in my head i listen for the laugh track and hear only crickets and then the anger surges and i am awash and afraid all at once.  i see red, literally.  i flail, inside, look for things to throw and then despair even of that release because, fuck it everything’s broken anyway.

everyone else’s happy babies send me into paroxysms of mourning and self-beratement.  the warm buzz of the early, contented-ish weeks and you deserved a break this time around has fallen silent.  i did not deserve a break, after all.  apparently if i can squeeze out a live baby i should expect no further mercy from fortune.  apparently it is my lot to watch helpless and frayed as my children suffer, one after the other.  colic is better than tubes and a ventilator and blue-black toes and death, i know.  i know.  and yet it all feels bizarrely similar from where i sit watching my days unravel…the useless mother, unable to comfort, unable to protect.  perhaps that is where the rage comes from.

there are few witnesses, save for a screaming infant and the little boy.  i hide my face from them, afraid of this ugliness, this fury.  i do not want to be this way.  i do not want to mark them, leave them pocked with  acid.  i do not want them scarred.  i do not want to excuse rage as a reasonable, acceptable response.  i do not want to be what i am right now.

it will end.  the part of me that is fine and rational intones this.  the insane part knows that doesn’t matter in the moment, unless it ends now.  another month, perhaps, given that she was nearly a month early….in the grand scheme, it seems so little to endure.

but in the moment, exhausted, choked with bile, it is too much, too unfair, too big, and i wonder if the next cry or the next stupid broken household item will be the one that breaks me, and i long for a protector myself, for someone to rescue me from this powderkeg while i am still fine some of the time.

unstable/embittered but housebroken thirty-six year old, up for adoption.  seeks mother.  will travel. likes pina coladas and predictability.  free to good home.  bonus miniatures included, requiring tlc and earplugs.