My brain is lost. My emotions have taken over completely. It is like watching a tidal wave move in and knowing you are helpless before the awesome power of shifting hormones.
It all started at midnight when my husband finally came to bed. I had waited with the light on, which I literally never do. Nevertheless, the light was on. At midnight the stupid light turned off and I fell asleep for what was to be my only hour of sleep all night. 1am baby crying. I do not fall back to sleep easily. 3am baby crying. 5am baby crying. 6:30am alarm. 7am drive to local high school. 7:30am frantic feeding and dressing of 4 other children. 7:50am freak out moment.
When I say freak out, I mean it. I mean yelling, screaming, stomping freak out. I mean swearing. I mean totally and completely losing my mind. I put a ‘lost mind’ advertisement up on Craig’s list. I haven’t gotten any responses yet.
I ate my way through the rest of the day, with breaks to drive people places. I should not be allowed to drive at all in this state. I am pretty sure having a usable brain is desirable when operating heavy machinery going 70. And every single time I think about hormones I get angry enough to ram into the first vehicle in my path. When I am not feeling irritated enough to spit nails I am ready to just stop everything and hang my hands down to the floor and cry….schlumped shoulders and everything. “What’s the point?” I wail.
I cannot believe the unfairness of it all by the way. I guess life would just be too easy with a brain to use 100% of the time. Oh, I know, let’s make all reason and logic fly right out of the car window each and every month…month after month..year after year. Yes, that sounds super good and fair and fun. Yes, that will give them a challenge. Something to work on. Without hormone swings they would be perfectly happy. Hormones are the answer to everything!
So here I am. Locked in my room at my husband’s request. He is trying to save the children. He has some experience. Smart. Before I drown my hormones in hot bath water I have to purge. So here it is. My day in a nutshell, continued:
8am- freak out drive to school and bus stop. 9am eat morning chocolate. 10am- freak out clean out closet moment with a garbage bag. 11am- make lunch. 12pm- clean up vomited lunch off floor. (It looked exactly the same as it did in the pot.) 1pm- more chocolate. 2pm- drive to school and store and another school. 4pm- drive to scouts. 4:15pm- make dinner. 5pm- drive to scouts. 5:10pm- Wii freak out moment (I am officially sick of electronic games of any kind and the kids that play them…mainly mine). 6pm- American Idol DVR…freak out at that spoiled rotten snotty little guest judge girl….I could have easily hit her with my car….repeatedly. 7pm- more chocolate. 8pm- drive to shuttle bus stop and freak out moment involving a gas pedal being slammed to the floor momentarily. Yes, it felt good. 9pm- exile to bedroom with headphones for sanity. Their sanity, not mine.
Maybe if I can’t hear the kid noise I won’t come flying out of the room with a pair of tweezers and a waxing stick. Which is why my sanity is not in question here. We all know that is a lost cause. At least for the next few days.
Happy PMS-ing to all and to all a Good Night!
pandmcox
It makes me so happy to know that I am not the only psycho mom out there who has (way too many) day EXACTLY like that! Love ya!
thank you jen. i am glad you know EXACTLY what i am talkin’ bout. i know you do and that it was makes things bearable.
It was too true to laugh at. Have a good bath…
oh, you have to laugh duncan! you can’t take my posts too seriously…i tend to play it up just for the laugh….well…except for the vomit part…and the pedal to the medal part…..and…….okay, i will stop now….
I really tried not to laugh and did really well until you described the vomit and then I couldn’t hold it back any longer. You are so NOT alone. I was such a psychotic mom. The good news is it doesn’t last forever.
Here’s more good news — from what I can tell — you didn’t have to RUN the scout meeting. There’s a silver lining.
(My children rarely had a dad to rescue them.)
oh kathy – thank you for reminding me of my blessings….LOL….thank heavens i wasn’t running the scout meeting!!!!
when i have a brand new hair do and my eye lashes all in curl. i just float in the clouds like air do, i enjoy being a girl. running out of post ducking haha. i’d like to tell you this horrormone thing gets better but alas i’m suffering from menapause symtoms and i have nothing positive to say. i feel your pain? thats all it got.
good thing you ran mama…i was swinging my waxing stick at you!!!!
Oh, Misty. I’m laughing with you, not at you. (And tearing just a little…) Doesn’t being a girl just suck sometimes?
But then you have to think about how great it is to be a girl all the other times.
Wait a minute. Still thinking….
…thinking….
and thinking……….um………we don’t have to lift the washing machine when loading into a moving truck?
YESSSSSSSS!
Was that last post a troll advertisement? It sounded very “copy” like.
I’m not sure at all that this is all hormones. They have a powerful effect, yes. But I know this pattern. It could have been me writing this, twenty years ago. Same driving. Same interrupted sleep. Same tiny fuse.
A big part of this is sleep deprivation. Guy has been suffering it with Skye for the past two weeks, sleeping with that hair trigger waking you have to use when you are a caretaker. I finally realized that this was mommy-sleep he was having, a thing I knew very well. A thing that always ended up, after three months of regular nursing and tending sick kids at the same time, with me screaming and throwing things at the wall at about three in the morning.
Sleep deprivation is a killer. Literally. And having your sleep interrupted mid cycle by a high-intensity, endocrine ripping sound like a baby crying? It’s like you’re living on adrenaline ALL the time. My mother warned me about that. It’s like you are always running on fumes – and when there’s a real emergency, you have nothing. Less than nothing, and the whole system is thrown into trauma.
You have to NOT eat chocolate. You have to eat protein. Cook up a mess of boneless chicken breasts, dripping with garlic salt and red-wine vinegar. Cut them in strips and stick them in the fridge. When you’re munchy, use that and baby carrots. Dip the chicken in a spicy sweet mustard if you like. But give your body something to run on .
It’s like the way people use caffeine – they drink it because their body is fatigued and can’t respond the way it would if it were 100%. The caffeine jazzes the system, fooling it into thinking it’s got gas to run on, and it kicks in – but it’s not gas. And the body starts eating itself. You begin in a hole. After the caffeine just digs it deeper. If you keep demanding performance without putting anything real into the machine, you will destroy the machine.
One day, just like the one you described, I was driving the first wave of kids to karate. They were talking along, and suddenly, I had this wave of weird temperature that ran all over me, lifting the hair on my arms. I thought, “Is this some kind of spiritual experience? Am I being warned to listen?” But it kept rolling over me.
I pulled the car over, and this racking cold ran over me in bigger waves. I finally went to auto-pilot and started driving with cold, careful, deliberate simplicity of mind. I delivered them. I delivered the second group of kids to North Or. I ran an errand. And as I did all of this, I was standing outside myself – with no short term memory at all.
When I got home, I got a migraine that almost wiped out my mind. It was the beginning of a reaction to years of the kind of thing you’re talking about.
There are several things you need to do here. You need to get that kid on a sleeping schedule. Without anger. Without freaking out. Write to my Lorri about it. She knows how to do it.
You need to zen yourself. No matter what it is, it’s not important enough to be the hill to die on – including callings. You need to stop and be still several times every day. to deliberately take slow breaths. To relax your muscles and do nothing for two minutes at a time. Nothing. Lie on the floor.
You need to say no.
You need to actually lower your voice and speak slowly. By taking hold of these handles, you can actually manipulate your brain chem – kind of like using a windmill to generate electricity, and getting credit when you generate enough to send it back along the lines to the electric company.
You need to be driving your own bus. And feeding it properly. And changing its oil. You need to choose a target Misty and slow yourself down to fill in those outlines – slow, stretch, sleep, eat well.
the hormones will always play havoc with you. It has something to do with Eden. But you can do a lot NOT to play havoc with yourself. You know me. I lived to be old. So far.
great advice in this post. love the advice about the food. i think i’ll follow some of that advice myself. Hope it helps you too dear daughter. love you.
it is very good to realize that our bodies are trying very hard to maintain a delicate balance (temperature, pH levels, hormone levels, etc.) and we can either help or trample on those efforts with sleep, food, and exercise. but here is the thing with life – how to jump from knowing something to doing something. because we only have so much energy and my self discipline isn’t the same as someone else either. i know that i have more discipline than some and less than some others….and i know that just because i have the ability to get out and walk everyday and maybe skip eating the ENTIRE costco chocolate cake (i just eat about half…) that doesn’t mean that suzy so and so has the same level of motivation/energy/discipline/and what not.
anyway anyway…i think i am losing my focus here. really i just want to thank you for taking the time and reminding me that i am not helpless in the face of hormones and children…at least…not entirely.
And sometimes you have to pull over and scream your bloody lungs out.
Love the nutritional advice — love all of it.
“How to jump from knowing something to doing something.” How much more often is it from knowing something to NOT doing something? It’s a mystery. There’s a woman in our ward who had some terrible behavioral problems, and we were talking, and I said, “Stop doing that,” and she said, “Sometimes a person just isn’t ready to stop.”
There is only one way to do something – to want what comes of doing it right more than wanting the thing that comes of doing it wrong. And how do you do that? You pray. You take yourself by the back of the neck and shake yourself. You make your damn mind up and get off your butt. Oh – and here’s something useful. You write down what you aim to do – which makes it more real – and then you write out a plan. What, where, how.
Not like I schedule myself. But there’s a point where I start taking myself seriously. I can keep the kitchen clean now for two to three days at a time – because it calms me to see it clean. I used to be able to keep it clean nearly always when I was riding herd on kids. But now, when there’s more to life than dishes, and no excuse to hold still in the kitchen silence – all by my own little bored self – it’s harder. Still, I can do it – when I need the visual order in my life.
Not the “last” comment. The one before the one before mine.
And it was, actually. Click on her name. Unless you know this person personally, this is spam.
Thanks for the clarification, KDR! I was thinking…I’m not spam! I’m NOT spam!
I thought a reasonable amount of (dark) chocolate was actually good for you? (low glycemic index, high in antioxidants, good for the heart, as well as being a natural mood-booster)
i tried having dark chocolate on hand for a while….the 70% cocoa kind….dr. oz recommends it in his book….1 oz a day….that lasted for a while…till i ate the rest of it (i bought a box).
lol
Lori, could you please define “reasonable”?
Kathy V– I think it depends entirely on your day, and the pants you want to wear the following day. Decent day=4 of the little Hershey’s Special Darks. Day bordering on crappy=8. Day like Misty’s=the whole big Sam’s/Costco bag.
Leslie, go to hell… And that’s all I’ve got to say about YOU!
Sorry if this is a friend of yours Misty…….
no, she isn’t. but you are. and i love you to pieces!!!!
Okay, that was mean and rude but as far as I’m concerned Leslie can just take her PMS pipe and smoke it until her hormonal entrails shrivel up and die!
Oh my gosh Misty! I’d laugh except you literally just described almost word for word my day Tuesday too and YEAH! Brian had to remove me from the premises and all I can think is it is A. Idol’s fault and that little snot of a judge who was hanging on Simon and was so bad I finally turned it off! I couldn’t handle it and I became an even bigger screaching momma.
There must have been something in the air that day. Seriously.
I haven’t read all of the other comments yet but I’m willing to bet everyone except LESLIE would say, yeah. I hear ya sister. I’m with ya. I got to Leslie’s comment and I vomited my hormones in a reply.
My sister called one day. She’d had a day like yours and it ended with her tearing off the blinds and bashing them against the wall over and over and over and then sinking to the floor in a corner in tears.
I hate days/times like these. I truly do. I wish I could say all we need to do is take a pill and say a few hail merry’s or what ever they are but life isn’t like that and so I’m glad you have this group of friends to pour out your heart to and we can gather around you and let you know that it sucks and we’re all in the same dang hormonal boat.
Wow! What a day………
ok, i know your sister is probably bummed about her blinds…but yeah….thank heavens for that story actually. seriously. we should all compare notes and share some things we have smashed to bits….i threw a container of Vick’s against the wall one time. do you know how hard it is to clean Vick’s off the carpet????
Oh, Leslie is spam……Sucky Piece A Manure.
LOL. My favorite comment so far…please don’t make me delete it….
Oh, Rachel…it’ll be alright, girl. Just breathe. In. Out. Then repeat.
Momma bear.
LOL
Oh Momma bear I be breathin’. I’m breathin so hard I’m sucking the paintings off of the walls and blowing them across the room!
Double LOL
I just read Kristen’s post Misty. She’s right. I have to disagree though. Don’t give up the chocolate. Keep the chocolate AND the chicken cooked in red wine.
don’t worry. chocolate is the only thing i have a year’s supply of. my house will be the most popular one in the neighborhood when the world comes to an end. forget the wheat, let’s go to misty’s for chocolate.
Rachel, that was red wine VINEGAR.
A minor technicality Kathy.
LOL I am pretty sure my mind turned off after red wine…I just thought, “Oh!!!!! That’s how they are all surviving…under-cooked red wine….”
okay…okay…OKAY…i am freaking laughing my stinking rear off (i wish) right now!!!!! HOLY FREAKING CRUD…..rachel…..what would i do without you in my life??????? thank heavens for rachel. i haven’t responded yet because i was trying to cool off first. LOL!!!! not my rachel. no mam’. she just jumps right in and does it for me. sigh. my first SPAM comment ever….and i didn’t even have to respond….i just got to sit back and let our cute little atomic explosion waiting to happen take care of things. rachel – i am glad i have you in my corner in this life.
as for leslie and her SPAM….well….yeah….i think i will be deleting HER comment. or maybe i will keep it up and use it as an example of what will happen to you if you SPAM my blog!!!! you will be raked against the coals baby. RAKED.
i will now, very calmly, respond to each individual comment. because i can. because i am not crazy. because i just had the BEST cup of hot cocoa on the planet.
I think this “something” must be in the air. I just can’t stop it – it takes control and I hover above myself thinking “this isn’t me!!!”. Misty – I had a day like that yesterday too. I would open my mouth and the worst attitude spewed forth without any control (or want thereof) inside. That is SCARY!
I’m thinking this 40-something is doubling the effect…yeowch! My poor boys (three little and one big…) ran for the hills and holed up in their rooms. Yes, headphones and electronics devices glowing in the dark praying not to be found by the evil woman of the house haunting them to find something else (could we say constructive!) to do without drawing a diagram.
Now, to be fair to myself, I’m not this way 25 of the 30 days out of the calendar month, so there is a way out for all. It’s through gentle offerings of chocolate, hot bubble baths, jazz music (double yeah!!) and a nice evening with the TV remote and HGTV until I can’t stand it anymore.
Or, sometimes it’s the gym – not so much lately – gut I has been a refuge. Those machines never talk back – I can pound on them, think bad thoughts, give them my blood sweat and tears and they are resiliant! They amaze me, actually I hate them because they have no feelings and are always waiting for more.
Motherhood is a blessed joy – until our patience is paper thin, our chimney stacks backed up, our hormones running loose like a wild mustang. Once we run out of real estate the world around us comes back into focus and get back in the zone. No not the ESPN Zone – the perfect zone of motherhood – the center of our homes universe.
Your the best – enjoy that chocolate. If anyone comes to your rescue you could share some – but more will follow be forewarned.
alana – your a doll. i really do hate feeling that way…it does feel scary at times, doesn’t it? irrational…controlling….
your the best. and i love you life long friend.
Those are the types of days where I question the perfection of Heavenly Father’s plan. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s perfect, I just can’t see it. We are to raise these beautiful children to be beautiful people but how can we when we feel this unmanagable emotion that has to be expressed in some form?!! And by the way, I TOTALLY agree with you about the American Idol judge…the one with the devil hoody. I wanted to slap her face and give her a reality check. She was worse than Simon..Miss, I’m a young, rich singer who dresses like a 14-yr-old boy. I’m sorry…I’m am not inserting a OFF switch onto my mean thoughts and will start being more positive. Thanks for reminding me that other people understand!
no kidding. i know i shouldn’t question things like marriage and family…..but i don’t know…maybe i should…because when i really need an answer i get it.
ugh, the american idol guest judges for los angelos were AWFUL. both of them actually. snotty spoiled bratty rude awful. the WORST american idol episode that i have ever seen. and that’s sayin’ somethin’.
This is a riot — the whole thing. Misty, write another blog entry so we can do it again.
I usually need a few days..for courage purposes….the next blog post may be the “one”….that “one” that stinks so bad my friends are embarrassed for me and people avoid blogging eye contact and they whisper…and they feel sorry for me. It is only a matter of time.
blogging eye contact hahaha, your just too cute for words.