There is a chaos in my home which is both beautiful and wild. There is a noise, musical yet piercing. A feeling, one of extraordinary love and of extreme desperation. There is a mess, one I look at and see that happiness was created yet I look at and feel defeat. This is a home of contradictions, I am carrying many twisted emotions, multiple confusions.
I have been a Mother for three and a half years and within that time I have succeeded and I have failed as triumphantly as any given Mother. I am no one special, just a young girl who carried a child and birthed her into this world. I have raised her with a nurturing heart and I have loved her with passion and intensity. I have fought darkness, I have survived it. I became a young woman who grew her family by two more; who have joined my home and bought with them love, fun, chaos, challenges and beauty. Over the past three and a half years I have grown, blossomed, changed. I have risen and yet I have fallen only to rise again.
Motherhood has shown me corners of the world that I wasn't aware existed. It has shown me a true and beautiful happy. It has given me unconditional and incomprehensible love. It opened my eyes to a dark and twisted depression and it has given me a strength that can overcome it all.
While I carry my three precious babies within my heart, along with the incredible love I have for each of them, today I carry a heaviness. I have come so far over the past 18 months and yet I feel as though I am at the beginning again. I look at the chaos within my home, the noise, the mess and I feel as though I have fallen short. My time is spread so thin, can they all know how I love them so? Our lives are so busy, full of demands, needs, spills and falls, kisses and cuddles, how can I be there for them all equally?
This weekend I watched my kind and gentle heart, Evelyn lean down and cuddle her baby brother. A beautiful moment. Until he shrieked with fear and pain, her cuddle was merely a mask for the set of teeth she sunk into his hand. Once I realised what had happened I had to practise so much constraint not to smack her and scream. Rather sending her to her room and hoping to find my cool. I was in absolute shock and terror of what she had just done.
Zalia, my wild and spirited girl, has been learning how to stand her ground. Shadowing her elder sister and projecting her treatment down onto younger children. She is loving, of course she is, but she is experimenting with asserting her independence. She requires me to hover above her, showing her what is acceptable and what is not and her reactions are huge, they are heightened.
With my beautiful Son Asher, comes the common demands of a breast feeding baby. The cries to be held close to my beating heart, the fight for sleep, the angst in not enough sleep, not enough milk, too much wind. He is a beautiful baby, a wonderful child. However mixed with the demands of two older children, I find I can quickly become overwhelmed by how I can tend to all of their needs.
I adore all of my children and my life brings me great happiness. I am proud of my family and incredibly proud of myself. There is love, great love. But today there is this heaviness that I have been unable to lift for some time.
I find myself at the very ledge, disappointed in how I have been managing my time with my children. Disgusted in the state of my home. Saddened by how my children are behaving to earn my attention. Motherhood is hard, it is challenging. When you think you have control, the reigns slip and you are taken on a wild ride.
I am riding out this wildness, trying to cling to hope, trying to keep on top but I fear my head is about to slip under these pounding hooves. I fear I am about to be flattened by the incredible weight and pressure.
Won't someone pass me the reigns, please let me get my foot back in the stirrup and get back up...
