I got home from work at about 3.30 this morning and before I went to bed I refilled my water bottle from the jug in the fridge. Now while I’m doing this I managed to make my bottle overflow three times. That’s right, not once, not twice, but three times.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I stood there just pouring water into an overflowing bottle for fun. Each time it overflowed I drank some to bring the water level back down. But then I’d take it down too far and needed to fill it back up again. Lord knows that when I wake up in the middle of the night (or rather ass-crack of dawn), thirstier than a guy who’s crawled through the desert for three days, I’m going to want that bottle full of cold fresh water to be full.
So after the third time there’s a taunting laugh in my head that sounds oddly like one of my brothers. Which then leads to the thought that I’m either a slow learner, or I’m going insane. Despite said brother calling me an idiot numerous times growing up, I have anecdotal proof that he’s actually the slow learner of the family.
So I settle on insanity and not because of the hearing my brother’s laughter in my head. I came to this conclusion because I was doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. And then a different thought comes to mind. I am the water bottle. (Insert scene from the first episode of Friends were Rachel yells at her dad that she’s a hat).
Oh yes that’s right. I’m about to use a real life incident and turn it into a teachable moment. I’m going to make a great mum one day, if for no other reason than because I can turn almost anything into a life lesson to haunt my kids forever.
I’ve been running on fumes since….November, which was not great to begin with. Then I went and worked full time shift work over Christmas, which wasn’t great for my relationship or my mental health. I was working every weekend and during the week I’d be leaving for work as my fiance was coming home. We saw each other for maybe…five hours a week where we were both awake and functioning. It was not a great system.
It also didn’t help that I was so stressed out from work that by the time I got home at 4am, I couldn’t sleep until almost 7am and that was purely because I was so exhausted that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Half bottle.
Add onto this that I was planning a wedding, mostly on my own, and also trying to get my book ready for publishing and take care of the house and make sure that there was food and clean clothes…I may have lost my shit a few times.
Fiance tried to help, but he’s the only child in an Italian family and he was spoilt. He was used to having everything done for him. He was also working full time and his job was mentally draining so by the time he got home from work at night, God love him, he was useless to me. Full bottle.
You’d think that now would be a good time to chill right? You would be absolutely correct by the way, but that wasn’t what I did. No, like an absolute wombat I decided to dig myself an even deeper hole. Sleep deprivation, the fine line between too much caffeine and not enough and feeling like I had to take care of everything myself and suddenly I’m overflowing at the slightest inconvenience.
I come home from my third late finish Wednesday morning and the dishes still haven’t been done from the weekend. Overflow. Laundry still hanging up in the living room from five days ago. Overflow. Kitty litter wasn’t checked before fiance went to bed. Overflow.
Now this might sound like the man I’m set to marry is the root of all my problems. He’s not. He’s frustrating as all hell and sometimes I wonder how I haven’t smothered him in his sleep yet, but he wasn’t the main reason that I was losing my shit. I needed his help, yes, but I’d forgotten that this was all very new to him.
Only child. Mumma’s boy. Spoilt. He had never really had to deal with a whole lot of responsibility at home, but here I was just expecting him to be on the same page as I was. Now that wasn’t fair.
To his credit, during this time if I communicated to him how hard of a time I was having trying to take care of everything myself, I would come home to find, very much to my surprise, that the laundry was folded (not put away mind you. He needed me to KNOW that he had folded the laundry and had displayed it on the kitchen table like a cat bringing it’s owner a dead mouse), the dishes would be washed and put away and the couch would be de-fluffed (we tried to keep the cats off the furniture but we lost that battle very quickly).
It was also around this time that we realised that we were both good at taking care of each other but not ourselves.
Now is where I circle back to the life lesson. I kept making my bottle overflow for months, taking a drink occasionally to bring the water level back down only to make it overflow again a day or two later. I was doing too much and expecting too much of myself. I wanted to be able to do it all. My mum did so why couldn’t I?
Something that my mum reminded me when I cried to her on the phone one day was that all the times she had been doing everything on her own she had also been very stressed and she shouldn’t of had to do everything on her own. There will be times when one person needs to take on more of the responsibilities and there will be times when the other person does it. However one person cannot do it all the time, it’s not sustainable and it’s not fair. We were both working full time and both live in the house so we should both be taking care of it.
In the last few months my work roster has calmed down, I’m not working every weekend or having to stay back three hours longer than I was meant to be or getting paid for. There is now a calendar that outlines who does what chores around the house and when. There have been many conversations about what we expect from each other and how we are going to work together. He cooks dinner once or twice a week and checks the litter before going to bed…still doesn’t fold the laundry unless I’m on the verge of a mental break down but baby steps.
Suddenly my bottle is looking a little less full.
There’s nothing wrong with doing it all yourself if you have to, but there’s also nothing wrong with asking for help from the person who’s meant to keep you from going off the deep end. With everything that’s going on in the world right now and the stress that’s putting on everyone, take time to take care of yourself BEFORE you turn into a semi-functional blubbering mess.
S.J Smith Books 