How to be Good at Life

How to be Good at Life

When you hit the absolute breaking point, what do you do? 

What I do, and what I want to do, are sometimes very different things.

The pressures of parenting and life and generally holding it all together can be too much sometimes.

People say, when you are overwhelmed, focus on gratitude.

That is fine and dandy but when you just forked over $1,000 to fix your kids piece of shit car and they drove it all of one day before it shit the bed again, sometimes gratitude feels very far away.

I can hear your judgements, too: “why is your kid not paying for the repairs?”

Listen.  We all parent differently. I do not leave the burden of car repairs for my kids to manage alone. I hold the burden of some things for my teens, so they can have fresh minds to work on growing, dreaming, developing, and resting.  Exhausting themselves just to survive is something I made the commitment I was not going to do to my kids. That is on me.  And yes, I am exhausted.

I am exhausted, but I cannot give up.  Not right now. What I’m doing is working, my kids are thriving. I have to keep holding it together, because the proof of these efforts is reflected back every time one of my kids maneuvers a hard conversation with a peer or faces a challenge that confronted their bravery, or when I watch them encouraging each other. They are becoming secure, kind and aware people. They are hardworking and responsible. I have to hang on, I have to be strong, be the grounding force, the energy zone, the catch-all for these kids. Their future success and fulfillment depends on what we do, and how we live, now.  I expect them to help and give and cook and support, but only at the level I feel is appropriate for developing kids to give. Nothing less, and only rarely, more.   

I think back to six years ago, fresh from divorce, three young kids, unregistered mini-van that I couldn’t register because it was in my ex-husbands name, farming full-time with the dicey income that provides, and how scary it was. I would lie awake and night and wonder how I was going to fill the oil tank, or the wood shed, or get a car of my own. It was scary, being so stressed and alone in figuring it out.  I didn’t want my kids to feel that pressure, I didn’t want them to have that trauma, and so I sheltered them from the worst of it. I managed those things quietly, and worked on what I could do to ensure they never ended up in a similar situation. Instead of letting it smother me I forced action. I taught them how manage life by being brave in the face of hard things. I changed careers. I bought a truck, and explained the payments to them. I taught them about budgets and interest rates and credit scores and why I didn’t and don’t have a credit card. We grew, and little by little, life got better.

Getting the call while in a meeting, from my kids on the side of the road, that the shit car I bought from my boyfriend, the one who dumped me over text the week before, was a slap of overwhelm in the midst of an already hard week. Let me digress for one moment: the text dump happened at 10:30 at night, when it was convenient for my (now) ex, and he did it out of fear, out of rigidity, out of not believing I would never betray him like his past had, and not from lack of love, which almost made it worse. It is really hard to let go of love when love is not the problem. It’s true though, that healthy relationships are about so much more than just love. It was a good wake-up though; I finally realized I am worth more than that sort of easy way out and after four on/off, confusing years, it was suddenly all too clear. Clear enough that when he texted me with remorse three weeks later, again, I was finally strong enough to not respond, and I know I will never go back again. Finally.

Back to the matter at hand, however: my teenagers stranded. This felt especially overwhelming because on top of being dumped, one of my kids hit a deer with my other car and totaled it, so I had to buy a new car, now this one was broken too….you know, it was just a shit sandwich of a week. This particular vehicle breakdown meant a few immediate, overwhelming things: it meant the kids had to walk the last ¾ of a mile home, in the winter, without jackets because, well, what teenager wears a jacket? It meant I had to drive two kids to basketball practices, making rounds from 5:30pm until 9:30 pm for the next- maybe forever, which meant dinners will be haphazard, which meant I have to get that fucking car towed, which I had towed two weeks ago, and it’s Christmas season, and everything is expensive, and my heart hurt, and… FUCK. I want to cry, so, after the meeting, I do. I cry on my drive home and swear and wish I could march in the house and tell them all to eat cereal and life sucks and fuck this and I am going to bed, until I feel like getting up, which would be never. I wish I could just get drunk and force fake joy, like I used to do with my ex-husband, except I don’t like that either. I don’t like fake. I don’t like escape. Joy does not come from a can, that is not how drinking should be done. I know better.

 I spend my life, in my career that I dearly love, teaching people how to handle the smackdowns of life but fuck I don’t want to take my own advice right now. I wish I could just be selfish and feel sorry for myself, have a tantrum, be a mess, but I know I can’t. I didn’t put adult worries on my kids six years ago during divorce and I won’t do it now. Things are better now, the fuel tank and the wood shack are full, we have everything we need and we have cars to drive, *most* of the time. I suppose I could count those blessings, but right I don’t want to.  Right now is still fucking hard.  Really fucking hard. It is hard to be the one grounding force, the good example and the strength for people who are watching me as the example for how to get through hard things.

 My kids deserve better than a selfish, melting down mom.  So I cry on my drive, and snot, and swear, and gather myself together before walking in the door. This is a shitty situation. I can laugh or cry.  I already cried, so now it’s time to smile, explain what’s next in ways the kids can understand, the money side of what a broken car means, and deal with it.

The challenge, as far as I can see, about being a single mom with three kids, or maybe it’s raising kids in general, is financial stress is just plain old hard. And cheap cars are actually expensive. Money stuff is hard, because you can’t always just make more money.  Living is expensive, and I can’t see my way out of that truth, I don’t see that changing. The thought of working this hard for the rest of my life is sometimes suffocating. Just because you heal your trauma and work hard and be your best self doesn’t always manifest the material things you sometimes simply need.

But.

What I am noticing is that being good at life takes focus. Being good at life takes staying calm even when you don’t want to. Not letting the big picture of scary responsibilities and disappointments stifle the joy that is present every day. Staying calm though, is not the same as stuffing feelings. Staying calm means, letting  feelings come and go without letting them crush me. Being good at life means  accepting what is, evaluating what I can actually do to make things better and what I have to let go. With the car, I have to let go that I have to pay for towing and fixing and that sucks and it means money gets tighter.  I can cry about it, but then I have to let it go.  I have to picture lighting a match and burning that cash and just letting the smoke of it all take my overwhelm with it too. Being stable and consistent is hard when life is the opposite of stable and consistent, but that’s how I know I’m stable, which I guess, is comforting. I know I am building genuine intellectual and emotional resilience, which is trickling onto my kids, and I am proud of that. I am also looking forward to the days, when the ups and downs of life are a little less scary, and a little more in my control.  It will come, and until then, I will just keep making sure my kids know that it is possible to keep moving forward even through the very hard things.

** Update to this story: The car was out of gas. Yes the gas gauge doesn’t work, so you have to track the miles.  In the cold the car is using more gas.  The kid forgot to account for this. He was SURE the car wasn’t out of gas. New moral of the story: don’t flip out before you are sure you need to, it just might not be as bad as it seems. Sometimes all you need is a new tank of fuel.

#motherhood #singleparent #teens #hell #life #carsthatbreak #winning