that kind of tired

on grief, motherhood, and showing up anyway

Flaming June by Sir Frederic Leighton produced in 1895.

i am so damn tired. not the kind that happens when you don’t get enough sleep, although that’s part of it too. it’s the kind that swirls through your soul and weighs heavy like iron chains around your heart and mind. the kind that makes your limbs feel like they are moving through sludge thick as lead.

that kind of tired.

fuck. this life is hard.

and yet, here we are. showing up. day after day.

i woke up to the sound of the chickens squawking in distress as i bolted upright to look out my window, only to see two coyotes chasing them, one with a fat white hen in its sharp jaws.

the cycle of life.

my middle daughter and i are upset. between the two of us (i have four kids, but we are the ones who self-selected to take care of our feathered pets), we both have adhd, so it happens often that we forget to close them in at night. and this is the result.

nature has its way.

be the hunter, not the hunted.

a phrase that keeps circling in my awareness lately.

i’ve crawled back to bed to write this. my kids are at school and the house is a wreck.

it’s a privilege to be able to crawl back into bed.

so why do i have tears ready to spill at any moment? some already have, as i sat on the toilet when i got home and then just stayed there an extra long time. feeling all the feels.

like, why am i so sad when i have so much to be grateful for?

my oldest told me yesterday i should go on antidepressants and adhd meds.

i shook my head. no, i don’t need them.

then why did you say last week that you sometimes don’t feel like you want to be here? she asked.

i only said that because it was officially confirmed that the break with my family is real now, and it finally hit me, i replied.

that set her storming off ahead of me.

stop it, she cried. you just reminded me, and now i’m triggered again.

we continued through the frozen courtyard, making our way back to the car through the maze of hospital buildings after her checkup, where the doctor said the skin where her tonsils used to be is healing fine. it’s healing like we are learning to do now that the scalpel has cleaved away my family, as they took sides against us when our truth emerged.

i look up to try and stay present as she stomps off ahead of me. i see the long porch where cancer patients go to sit outside during their chemo treatments. i remember finn and me being there too, as they pumped his veins full of poison in a futile attempt to save his life.

i look back down and start to name all the colors of the gravel i am stepping over. it’s a dbt skill i picked up during the parent groups, from when my oldest was in a treatment center after her mental health crisis. that’s the pc way of describing what she was surviving back then while finn was in treatment.

so i say aloud to myself: grey, pink, white.

then i notice some bright blue ones that must have been spray-painted for road markings. artificial color, like artificial intelligence splattering its way across human consciousness.

i am typing this as it comes, and i don’t have to run it through ai chat anymore.

i did when i started writing these more journal-style entries, because how could my thoughts possibly be coherent or good enough to publish alone?

but now i crave the texture of sentences untouched by ai. so i use it only for spelling and punctuation.

because i have read so much of it, both my own and others here. and i don’t judge anyone for doing what i did as well to get the stories and thoughts out of their heads.

but now i treasure our human rawness that pours onto the page uncensored and before it’s turned into machine writing that permeates our pages here and everywhere.

i am here typing away... and i have started crying. why?

in pausing for a second, the tears that have been held in are right there again.

but why am i so sad today?

isn’t it such a luxury to be in bed typing to you all?

yes, it is.

but it’s always sadness i come back to when i feel the loss of betrayal.

the loss of not being able to keep my oldest baby girl safe.

the loss of my beloved to cancer.

i hear her getting up now. she gets to sleep in, as her heart-based private high school worked with us upon hearing everything we are navigating behind the scenes.

always navigating so much behind the scenes.

i can’t even write openly about most of it, so i just dance over the surface—much like we all do with our lives. running two programs at once.

the one we’ve been conditioned to run that politely greets with,

hi, how are you? and fine, thank you,

as we run our errands, pick up our kids, go to work.

and then there’s the other program. the one running the messy thoughts, the tears that wait, the fears that bite.

that program.

i guess i am lucky, though. while i am still learning how to live in a world where the people i came from are no longer part of my life, and the love of my life is actually dead, my oldest is doing so well.

she is in a supportive relationship, heading to italy next year, working, getting all a’s—not that i’ve ever pushed grades as a waldorf teacher and alum myself.

grades are just another symptom of our broken education system that trains humans to feel badly enough about themselves that they will fit nicely into the cages society has built to keep us in—running on hamster wheels and consuming what they sell us.

but here we are. here together at last on this platform.

it’s built just like so many others, but we are making it our own.

it’s a quiet revolution.

a softness revolution.

where we linger on words spun by human hearts. where we offer a heart back through the like button, and offer words of encouragement through our typing fingers on our keyboards and phone pads.

and in this way, we help keep each other afloat in a world drowning in tears.

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thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞