By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann

I hear the music, likely Coldplay or some 90’s hip hop, before my hand reaches the side door. Stepping into the house, I’m greeted by dishes—from what must have been lunch—lining the countertops and my husband, Chris, shouting “We’re in here” from the living room. Two of the three kids, then ages seven and five, run over and hug my legs. I’ve been gone for two and a half hours.

Earlier in the week, I’d told my husband, “I really need a break.” I love staying home with my kids, working in the hospital on the weekends, but I am tired. And irritable. And occasionally hostile. The slightest variation in plans, the most innocent little disruption, and I turn harsh—a clear sign something is wrong.

“Go out for a few hours on Sunday,” he suggested. And I nodded, though I knew when the time came, I’d likely drag my feet, reluctant to leave while also desperately wanting to go. I’d be unsure how best to use my precious time alone and would instead think of the million things I could do at home if I stayed. All the while, I’d be resentful I wasn’t already out the door.

Such a wild web we weave.

Walking in, my husband lays on the floor with cards in his hand, probably playing Go Fish with our daughter. The laundry sits unfolded in a basket near the stairs. The baby is napping. Plastic trucks and stacking blocks dot the rug. And I will bet you one thousand chicken nuggets that a bathroom still needs to be cleaned. But the kids are happy and Chris is smiling and, I wish I didn’t, but instead of stepping into the levity and contentedness of the moment, my insides start to tense up.

I turn the music off.

At the coffee shop, despite the men at the table behind me having a way too loud conversation, I found more peace and quiet in those moments away than I had in ages. Millimeter by millimeter, my shoulders returned to their proper position—closer to my rib cage than up by my ears. The space behind my heart opened, like a puddle of melting ice. My forehead relaxed. My hips settled. And my feet reseted solidly on the ground.

But I was never not aware of the time. The ticking down. The impending return.

“Mom, Mom, Mom” is most of what I hear all day. My kids either need me or want me—or don’t want me—but because they’re at the age where climbing atop furniture is a fun and dangerous adventure, I have to be within arms reach of at least the baby at all times.

My days begin with tiredness, end with tiredness, and every moment in between feels heavy with it, too. I didn’t think raising kids was supposed to feel quite this taxing, and I’m concerned I must be doing it wrong. Because lately, I just want to get away. For five seconds, I think about getting in my car and driving with no destination. I’d come back, for sure. I never let myself indulge these thoughts for too long, for fear of forming an actual plan. So, I jostle it out of my head like a dog shaking off water and quickly return to reality.

To the life I want. The kids I love. All of it, that I sometimes can’t stand for one more minute.

Chris smiles at me from the floor and asks, “How was it?” I smile back, but say nothing as two competing thoughts race to mind. In the first: my kids are all safe, they’re happy, they love this exclusive time and extra attention from their dad. In the second: it’s too messy, too loud, and there’s too much to do around here to simply enjoy playing with the kids. Without meaning to, my shoulders return to their unnatural place up by my ears and my liquid heart re-freezes.

“Do you feel better?” my husband asks, and I wonder if he genuinely believes that two hours away would fix whatever it is that’s been going on with me. What is going on with me? Is it exhaustion? A lack of help? An inevitable stage of motherhood I didn’t expect or know about?

Was it enough? I think, stifling a sardonic laugh.

I take in the laundry, the toys, the dirty floor, the kitchen where I will soon go to make dinner. I run through the list of details necessary to run our lives that I cannot keep up with, about how tomorrow will be the same as the next day and the next and the next, all while my ears filter through the chaotic noise of our home. Regardless of what I do, it feels like I will never meet everyone’s needs. Someone will always be crying, disappointed, or needing me to find their Baby Bear so they can fall asleep. While I should be enjoying this time with my kids—it goes so fast, right?—I can’t get over my exhaustion or the simultaneous guilt I have over feeling this way all the time.

How do I explain that even in these first moments back home, this irritability, this feeling of unsustainability, this I-don’t-even-have-a-name-for-it has returned. I look at him dead in the eye. There’s no accusation. Just honesty. Was it enough?

I feel exactly the way I did before I left, exactly like I did when I said I needed a break earlier in the week. Exactly like I’ve been feeling for endless months in a row.

“No,” I shake my head with a quiet voice. “It’s never enough.”

***

The heart beats approximately 100,000 times per day—thirty-five million times a year. Heartbeats are made of chemical, electrical, and physiological movements; slow them down, and it’s almost a dance. This opens, that closes, blood enters, then leaves.

But if a tired heart receives too much stimulation, too often, and it occurs during the wrong moment between heart beats—called a relative refractory period—an already irritated heart can be thrown into a dangerous life-threatening rhythm.

In the medical world, it’s understood that if an arrhythmia happens once, less and less of a stimulus is required for it to happen again.

In other words, an irritated heart is more easily irritated.

***

The memory is so distant, I hesitate to write it. I cannot tell you what my children said, what each one did, or exactly how old they were. If I had to guess, it was around the same time I’d asked for a break and started leaving my house for a few hours each Sunday afternoon. I don’t know what they wore or what day of the week it was other than a day of school.

We were trying to get out of the house. Trying to get to school. My children needed help finding socks, putting on shoes, getting their shirts over their heads, brushing teeth, emptying rocks from their bags, and filling up water bottles. Maybe the baby was crying or crawling on top of the table or emptying out the drawer full of plastic containers.

What I do remember is that it was morning, the kitchen was dark, and I felt pulled and flattened, as thin and fragile as a layer of flaking pastry dough.

I remember a crushing weight. A building pressure. A gnawing hollowness.

What creates the memory itself, what solidifies it in my mind like a carving into stone, is when I begin to yell. Was my reaction caused by another question, another “I need help,” or something as simple as a child not moving as fast as I wanted? I yell so loud, with such intensity, that my children freeze, staring at me in fear.

But even as I yell, I am also helpless. What I don’t want to happen is happening. A stimulus at the wrong time. An action and reaction, a reaction and an action. I do not have a name for what is going on inside me right now.

I wish I could say I burst into tears, grieved over my lack of control. But it was like a monster had been let out of its cage, too wild and free to go back to being contained. My heartbeat surged and a force I couldn’t stop traveled from the tips of my fingers, through my chest and up to my head. I grabbed a wooden spoon from my white utensil crock on the counter and lifted it high.

While still yelling, I slammed it onto the countertop, splitting the wood in two.

***

In the hospital I worked at, we took care of what we called “the sickest of the sick patients.” For some, those whose cardiac rhythm needed intervention, we’d give a drug that would completely stop the heart.

A chemically-induced break, a rest, a reset.

Five to ten seconds later, when the drug wore off, the heart (and my own breathing) would begin again—hopefully, at a slower, more sustainable rate and rhythm.

***

I walk into the house and my kids, now teenagers, are fighting. “Mom, he … ” “Mom, she … ” “No, you … ” “They didn’t … ” As one speaks, the other interrupts. They get angry all over again, raise their voices, accuse and defend.

I try my best to intervene, but it’s more like I’m dealing with two grown adults than the noisy little kids I once came home to. I do not try to solve their issue, nor can I make them work it out with a hug. Instead, I take a deep breath and notice that while my shoulders want to edge up near my ears, they stay low, almost relaxed.

It's been at least a decade since the wooden spoon-splitting morning, since the children were so young and needed me in such a specific and particular way, since those weekend afternoons where I’d abscond to the coffee shop, not a mile from my home—those hours like gasps for air in the middle of an ocean of unending days when I felt as if I were drowning.

I still have moments when I raise my voice. Get upset. Feel pressure returning to the space between my eyes and frustration to a shelf deep-set in my chest. My house continues to be loud. And full. And as much as I try to organize and systematize and minimize, life’s demands constantly overstimulate me.

But anger and frustration and overwhelm are no longer my chronic emotions.

I want to tell you how. And why. And I wish I could. But I don’t know exactly what changed.

Is it that the kids are older? That I am older? That I learned to ask for help and recognize I have my own needs that are necessary to care for? Is it prayer? Friends? Counseling? Is it that I started to guard even the briefest moments—what often feels like just fractions of a second—to give myself time to rest and reset?

In part, I think what happened was that my tender soul-heart began to remind me of those irritated physical hearts I once took care of. And with this image, I finally had a name for what was happening to me. For what it felt like to be stimulated and re-stimulated and re-stimulated before the actions from the last ones had stopped.

A mother can no sooner hit pause on her life than she can stop her physical heart from beating.

And sometimes what we need to change is to recognize what is happening, and then give it a name.

Sonya Spillmann lives in the DC area with her husband and four kids. She is a staff writer for Coffee + Crumbs and also writes on her blog. You can sign up for her newsletter and listen to her and Adrienne on the Exhale podcast every month.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.