Oh the shame of it all. I've been hideous. Me n' sugar, we go a long way back. Well... me and sugar and coffee and wheat and....
I haven't detoxed like this since the three months prior to falling pregnant with Ella in 2003. The memory of that is weighing on me heavily as I do this. It's a different thing I'm doing, a different year, a different house, a different reason. But it's a trip down memory lane. The night I sat in folded-armed silence and hot, hellish anger directed towards my traitor of a husband because he'd sat at dinner and tucked in to a dessert of rich chocolate cake as I sat and watched him and my other friends (one of them 9 weeks pregnant and loudly protesting her morning sickness). I felt like he should have gone out in sympathy with me; that I was making the biggest sacrifice - the food one, for the sake of being as healthy as I could be for hopefully "this time" making a "perfect" baby - and he was to that date still not even popping one pill, sat bitterly with me.
This time, I am struggling with the fact that I am doing this simply... well, for me. I don't take care of myself well at ALL. I am fearful that the LGBB is watching me, all flawed and Tassie devil-like, and learning from me. Perhaps she's learning how not to be. Today, she's taken to watching me carefully with probing eyes (she has such probing, wise eyes!) when I come in to the room, as if to gauge the pressure in my head... "When is she going to blow her top?" ask those eyes.Well. It turned out, the time for a top-blow was nigh, given the past two weeks of almost constant whinging, whining, unsettledness because of her teeth and an incessant cold*, this detox that feels like it's been started on a whim (it didn't last night - last night, it felt so empowering!), a period that's.... oh geez, I don't even KNOW how late now (no, I'm most definitely NOT, thangeweverymuch, but it's not helping the feeling of expectation and general "not rightness" in my body right now) and to top it off, the clanger:
She hit me. It would have been a clean slap to the face at close range, had it not been for the tentacles that are her fingers - how do toddlers digits get so STRONG!??? they dig into legs and arms and other fleshy body parts and leave little bruises, they're like bloody drill bits! - making contact with both of my eyeballs. That's right. Not only did the LGBB clock me in the face, she gouged my eyes. Both of them.
That was the final block that tumbled for me. I gasped in shock. I've had a horrendous headache since lunchtime (phew, nasty coffee withdrawals..... I'm terrible, Muriel)
And I snapped. But my reaction was not one of anger. I burst into tears, turned and walked out after telling a belligerant-looking little miss that "we don't hit people" and left her father to continue getting her ready for bed.
Down in her bedroom, I did the burnt-chop mother routine as I stood packing up today's toy explosion and rehanging her beautiful clothes. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and let all the little bastards that had been niggling at me with their sharp arrows have a good go and just stab me right in my heart. To twist it in a bit further, just as I would expect her to, the LGBB had forgotten her trespass by the time she'd finished brushing her teeth. I couldn't shake it off, so I couldn't read to her - Steve did it (he usually does, it's their "thing", but every so often when she wants that little bit more of me, she'll ask for me). And she didn't even care! Brushed me off, which compounded it all.
I just felt so downtrodden in that moment, after a day of noticing just how very effing much I'm asked questions - useless, lazy-driven questions that the other adult of this household ought to try and answer for himself - and then the spiral stopped. Right at the bottom. From there, one can only ever really start on the incline again. So I'm heading back up - slooooowly - now she's out of my sight and in bed.
Every family has their little traits, patterns, nuances. Mine is particularly tricky, marred as it is by a - well, to put it frankly, there are some elderly members of the large maternal side that call it the "sick gene" - and I am intrigued as much as I am angry about it. I have to look at it from all sides so that I don't head down the same path with my daughter. I constantly think, in these times when we're at "odds" (which sounds so silly, she's only a toddler yet, heaven help me), that I am stuffing up the ONE chance I've got left... and the insidious voice on my other shoulder sits in the darkness and snidely tells me Ellanor was lucky she got out when she could. It's dark, dark, dark where that voice comes from. Dark and cold. It is my mother's voice.
I'm licking my wounds and picking over the events of the day that got me to this state - I want very much to break the cycle, passed down from mother to daughter, who then became a mother and passed it to her daughter (and so on and so forth), and it is my life's promise to Lolly to crack it. To never turn a blind eye to it - that's impossible now, I'm on the look-out that I'm almost uni-vigilant, if that is indeed a way to be.
And boyo, is she keeping me on target with working it out. Deeeeep breaths.
Gawd, what a mess of a day it's been!
* Hey, I'm not complaining she's been sick... but... GAHHHHHH it gets verrrrry tedious caretaking for extended periods sometimes, doesn't it? This is the moment where the light switches on in my head and I slap myself as I consider what it might mean to have a child who is permanently dependent and I feel about 2 foot small for losing my cool...
