Too much

If I think back far enough I can remember wanting to do nothing more than being a stay at home mom. I dreamed of the stories I would read with my kids, the time we would spend laughing on the floor and how I would make the best lunchbox snacks. Nowhere in the dream did I imagine that I would be so lonely when I was home with my kids. Never did I imagine that afternoons would be filled with therapy appointments instead of trips to the park or the library. It didn't occur to me that I would eventually become so exhausted that I would stop feeling, stop caring and become little more than a mother robot, going through the motions of life with so little meaning. It wasn't the dream, but that is what life has come to. I fight it but on some level, when your afternoons consist of holding your 7 year old on your lap as she passes out after a seizure and your 4 year old turns the oxygen on and insists that she needs it for her seizure there is little choice, it's just too much to feel on this little energy. Honestly, that day I wanted nothing more than to just turn off, completely and for a little while I did and it wasn't good. There was no hope, there was no joy, no relief, just emptiness and now that I am a little further from that I can see that is not what I want for my days. The struggle is, how do I turn on, just a little. I want to see the kind person at the checkout who lets me go ahead when the girls are getting restless. I want to see the love that Jared has for the girls after a long hard day at work. I want to see Chloe's sweet intentions when she climbs up and sits on Claire to give her a hug and a kiss. But I don't want to risk the pain, the heartache of epic porortions that comes with the stuff that fills my days. Right now I am too tired, too exhausted to be able to deal with that. I suppose that's where the tension in my head is coming from right now, trying to find a balance, feeling and seeing a little, trying to find the balance in what is enough.