Slow the fuck down. This is my movement.
Slow the fuck down. I have to tell myself this now. Mostly because I just don’t have the physical energy to keep up with my brain now, in my 50’s. But I used to. And I exhausted myself more than once doing it. Slow the fuck down. The only thing I can still do as fast as my brain wants it to is type. I can get frantic. I have been frantic. Many times. Or I’ve felt it but you didn’t see it because I am so good at hiding my freneticism.
Sometimes I feel it. Like my body wants to be frantic — and I have no reason to be. For many years, my life was frantic whether I wanted it to be that way or not. With eight kids total and usually 4 or 5 or 6 underfoot at any given time, I am used to being busy.
A kid at baseball, another at play practice, a deadline for an article looming and a crock pot that I may or may not have turned on, I can multitask like a well, you know. I have always been this way. Anyone who only did one thing when they could do three or four at once, just isn’t trying hard enough.
I’m mostly kidding. Having a lot of kids — however they came about, though — can really test your ability to do a lot of things at once. I definitely have learned. That pace, however, has also become a habit. In some ways, a good one.
I get everyone up and out the door every morning without fail. Even if I am really really sick — and I can count about five total days when this happened and three of those I had COVID badly — I still get up and make sure everyone has everything, I’ve arranged an alternative ride to school. I still dry snow clothes and make sure backpacks are packed. I just go back to bed after.
But it also means that if I do go back to bed, if I haven’t fallen asleep, then I argue with myself about how sick was I really. And my boss will probably start getting super irritated that I’ve been so sick. Or if you can get up and help the kids get to school, you can probably finish writing that grant.
Unless I start to get so dizzy that I cannot focus, I’ll keep working.
Why? Why? That’s insane, isn’t it? Why do I keep working?
I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to that yet. But I do know that I have, on multiple occasions, had to tell myself that it was ok to risk being fired in order to feel better.
And then, of course, I work twice as hard for weeks trying to make up for the guilt of it all. “You always did have a lot of energy,” the mother of a schoolmate told me, fairly recently. I hadn’t seen this woman in many years in person, although I did have her on my Facebook.
I was working in a pharmacy and she came in. Because she was picking up a prescription, I didn’t identify myself as knowing her (HIPAA) and all that. But she recognized me a bit and so I was able to confirm that I knew her. We chatted for a second and inevitably I told her how many kids I have (she did ask, having seen several on Facebook herself) and she was aghast. I am fairly used to this reaction now.
In fact, I built it into any talk I give because whenever I say it, I have to wait for a reaction. Slow. The. Fuck. Down. I have to say it to myself when I do the dishes. Facing a pile of dishes — and I do mean a pile — at least twice daily in this house of many people — can be intimidating. Way back in the old days, when I had babies and was just learning how to be a mother of many, I hated them. The dishes.
They just loomed over me until I got a good ADHD head of steam going and tackled them all in one shot. I still do this to a large degree. And I fantasize about the day when it will just be one or two simple plates, a couple of forks and a mug or two. And that’s it. But I also know that I don’t really want that. I just want someone to voluntarily do all of the dishes all of the time. I am wholly in favor of robotic “Alice” type tech that doesn’t mind chatting with me occasionally and maybe load and unload the dishwasher.
I was so overwhelmed sometimes by the mass of dishes and generally cleaning that I had to do, that I took to heart some advice I read in a book by Thich Nhat Hahn. He said that no matter what you’re doing — whether you like it or not — smile through it. I remember being a little pissy one night that I had dishes and counters and big mess of a kitchen to clean. But I got up my gumption (as Laura Ingalls would say) and I dug in.
I saw my reflection in the window in front of me and it was definitely that of an angry woman. Maybe now, 30 years later, I can be kinder and say she looks tired and overwhelmed. I stared at myself in the window for a second and then, remembering the sage Buddhist’s advice, I smiled — like an assholy, smart-ass smile. I looked at myself, for an extra second, and kept ridiculously smiling. And then I got back to the dishes.
Still making the ridiculous smile. Nodding my head back and forth to complete the ridiculous feeling that I was feeling, but I kept washing dishes and I kept smiling but soon I my face tired of making the ridiculous smile and I allowed it to relax into a silent smile and I kept it up for the whole time I washed dishes.
A tug on my leg reminds me of a now very big child who was once very young, tugging on my leg and I leaned down to answer in that halfway we do with the dripping wet hands dangling over the sink but the shoulder turned and the knees slightly bent… And as I answered my child, I was smiling. Already. Because, well. You know. And while I am a skeptic at heart and generally inclined to believe that a lot of self help stuff is bullshit, this hit me a little harder.
An aha moment if you will — taken straight from the self help section at Bear Pond Books — the best little Vermont bookstore. I leaned down, smiling, and realized I fell for it. Damn you Thich Nhat Hahn! Ha. Ha. It always hits me when something like that works. Go slow. Fucking smile.
And not in that way that men tell you to smile. Or that you would be prettier if you smiled more. But in a self satisfied, this is my life and I am grateful for it here and now. And maybe it’s not where I want to be someday or next Tuesday or even tomorrow, but it’s where I am now. And I’m really happy about that.
Because I’m not where I was. And no matter how slow or fast I got here. I’m here. And I can make my next day and the day after whatever I want. It’s been difficult to live a life that you weren’t sure was what you meant. I worked very hard to get here, and yet — this wasn’t where I intended to go. And I struggle with that sometimes. I struggle with that a lot. Why do I feel like I’m meant to do something — and why don’t I feel like this is supposed to be it?
And yet…it’s what I do. I imagine a life where I am on my own (finally) and yet, I have eight kids and I have been actively parenting for 33 years and with the addition of my grandson to the household, in addition to a middle schooler and a teen or two in the mix, I’m still in it — whether my ex husband of 23 years has bailed and left us or not. Five years ago he walked out the door, never to return and while I was not unhappy by the action — I was gutted by it in so many ways.
There were a lot of reasons for him to go. I had been trying to get him to move out and sign divorce papers for over a year. But the way he left — before Christmas — without telling the kids — taking their money and just leaving. It was brutal. It was brutal to watch and brutal to live through and I felt more betrayed than I did when I found out he cheated on me.
Because that was just me he thought was worthless — this was a discarding of them. And I love the children more than anything — so discarding them so brutally — and never talking to them again — has been a gut wrenching thing to witness.
For the record, it’s been five years. He still hasn’t called them. Slow. The. Fuck. Down. My breathing gets more rapid. My sobbing is out of control. Slow. The. Fuck. Down. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t keep it together. I don’t know how. How do I do all of this by myself? How do I feed and clothe and house five children all by myself? It’s impossible. I can’t do it.
The panic took over. Night after night. I couldn’t control it. I was lucky I had a good job. But that couldn’t be enough could it? Slow the fuck down. And I did. Day by day. I got better. I did my job. Friends brought spare fire wood (our furnace had also broke and we got two feet of snow in a driveway so steep no one would plow it for me) and another friend brought a tractor for my driveway.
The kids went to school. I sold an old camera on Ebay and had enough for Christmas. My work gave me $1000 out of an employee fund to fix the furnace. Slow. The. Fuck. Down. I stopped crying all day, but still had panic attacks every night unless I drank enough to sleep through them. The kids were all still home from school for COVID.
My son was having shoulder surgery. We had a dog that had 12 puppies. All in the two months after the leaving. We slowed way down. We stayed up way too late and played games together. The kids slept in while I attended zoom meetings and kept working. I had panic attacks but I was still able to hide them from most of the kids. Slowing down. Smiling. Breathing. Occasionally taking a big stick and beating the shit out of the rock wall. Praying. Screaming into the void. Trying to understand that it was all a lie and that 23 years didn’t matter.
But it mattered to me and I got all of these cool people out of it. Sometimes I get dressed frantically. I have some weird internal system that makes me think that I have to move fast, be early and anticipate everything. It’s also possible that’s from a life of being emotionally abused by literally every person you have ever loved. But either way.
I was frantically putting on a pair of leggings because I told myself to do my run and work out at 11:15 everyday — and I made that commitment and now I have to stick to it…except…slow. The. fuck. Down. Michelle. Jesus.
I am going to fall over and break a hip at my age trying to jump into my dang leggings. Slow the fuck down, Michelle. Do your work. Raise your kids and your kids’ kids if you have to. Plant your garden. Smile while you dig. Try and appreciate how far you’ve come but don’t rely on it.