The frustration is getting to fever pitch. I’m sitting here, stabbing at my keyboard like it had it coming, and it’s like this feeling is never going to end. The remnants of the morning rush pulsating through my veins, hard to calm down, hard to concentrate on work. This is what it feels like every morning at the moment – I spend so much energy rushing things along and getting angry that I get to work and can’t function. And I think it’s this feeling that slows me down at night now too – this all-consuming mode of thought that drains the power straight out of me. At first I thought it was the pressure of having three kids now, but it’s not that – it’s the pressure of getting Little Mango 1 to school every day. It sounds lame, but it’s there so it must be true. And so now I get to work looking like a coke-head who is just about to fall off the wagon. And then I have a coffee. I don’t know if coffee ever makes you feel better in these sort of situations, but for some reason I am drawn to it. And now that I’m sitting here with my coffee and taking deep, slow breaths to try and slow down a little, I go over exactly what it was about this morning that made me like this. It might have been the waking up later than usual. But it’s not. It’s something that happens every day, no matter whether I’m organised and up early, even if the boy is ready straight away – it’s still there. This morning, specifically, I decided that there would be no more shouting in the mornings, there would be no shouting, there would only be his actions and the consequences. And so I kept myself calm, even as the clocked ticked later and later, trying to move things forward positively. Whether it worked or not will really be seen tomorrow, because today the feeling is obviously still here. And it shouldn’t be, I did everything I could to breath through the angry thoughts and react sensibly to everything that was happening. I think I actually feel worse than ever today, it’s as if I bottled that anger rather than dealing with it. Can’t hold it in, can’t let it out. Is there something within anger itself that makes it hard to let go, hard to forget about? So I start thinking about anger.
Anger is a strange thing. It sits in you, heavy and hard, and clouds your vision. I’m thinking of the trip to school and back and the fact that I don’t remember anything of when I left the car to when I got to work. The rest is a blur of me trying to get him there, and of trying to get away. I remember thinking as I was driving to work: how do people in cities do this, where their work isn’t down the road, where there’s so many more frustrations to go through before the day is out that I am freed of living regionally? How do they stay sane and keep this game up? Also, I keep having these conversations with him on the way to school that seem to be more of a venting of my frustrations then anything else; of things he needs to do, expectations I have of him, and threats to take things away if he doesn’t pick up his game; and I know they mean to nothing, especially not to him. He’s a five-year-old! Five-year-olds can show responsibility but not appreciate the need for it. All he knows is this is another trip to school with his Dad lecturing him about something. And it just fuels the anger, it makes it worse, and I let it for the simple fact that I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to deal with it.
And that’s a very odd occurrence for me. I don’t know how to deal with this frustration. Coming out of my childhood with a decent share of anger, I learnt very quickly to push it out, let it go, deal with it as I went or face it consuming me later. It didn’t always work, I have come through a lot of times when the anger has made me say or do things that are completely unacceptable (maybe everyone has, I don’t know) but I never liked the thought of it. I could see anger in people close to me and how it had affected them in their lives, how addictive it was. I didn’t want that and so dedicated myself to learning to control my feelings. To let the feelings slide off the back of you, to detach yourself from it and realise the complete unimportance of it in relation to the universe. If you let things slide, at the end of the day the world will keep spinning, we’ll see the sun fall and rise again and nothing will really be any different. But it’s getting harder and harder to see it like that now.
I try to think about when I started feeling like this again. I try to trace it back and it’s hard to find the starting point. I love my kids and they always make my day feel good, but that generally means I feel bad before that. So I try to picture when that didn’t happen, when seeing them was a bonus and not a reprieve. I can’t really focus on it and perhaps that is because it has slowly being coming back for years now, the anger has been working it’s way into my life little by little, revealed by the tiniest of frustrations that come from general day to day life, especially when you’ve got no money. That literally just came out of my head just now, and it has opened up some general light feeling that I might have nailed it. In the decision to have kids early, we have also committed to not being full of money for some time yet. We didn’t wait until we were “financial stable”, whatever that is, we just did it. And perhaps the years of stepping through life slowly and surely, while my fellow man was raging through like a freight train, living well and drinking until the early morning, buying cars and houses, going upwards in their career no matter the risk; of the growing needs of our children as we have them and they develop, what we need to provide for them both psychologically and financially; and the need to balance it all up in the limited time we have with them, both day to day, and in the small space of their lives that they are actually children. It all comes to down to pressure, and I think perhaps I have to realise that it is affecting me, whether I think it should or not. I know it’s not a race, and I can appreciate the wonderful things that I have been given and how they actually compare in importance to cars and houses – I know the decisions we have made are different to everyone else's and that is probably why it is such an isolated place to be.
But how do you escape the isolation? How do you handle all these juggling balls and keep going as a sane, calm individual? How do you make kids do what they need to, realise their responsibilities and still let them be kids?
These questions play on my mind every night when I come out of the book-reading fest and want to collapse; every morning when I push the boy along to get him to school and he fights me every step of the way; every moment when I am literally stuck, unable to move because I cannot figure out for the life of me, what to do. How do you balance it all?
When Little Mango 1 gets into the car every morning, and I’m pushing him along to go faster and faster, he struggles with his seat belt. And even though I don’t yell at him then, I support him and tell him to calm down, he fights with the belt, struggles to remain calm, and the angrier he gets, the harder it is for him to relax. I remember back to when I was young and I did the same thing, and how just yesterday I got angry about something I couldn’t find and took it out on him, and I realise the affect I am having.
I have to address this now. It must not go any further, or the anger he has, which only I could have given him, will become something he struggles with in life as well. It is as inevitable as the spinning of the earth. I don’t want to give him that burden when his laugh is the most wonderful thing in the world. I don’t want to let that smile fall.
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