You read that right. Sometimes, even at 44 years old, a grown woman with a mortgage, a husband, kids, dogs, and a grandbaby needs to fall apart in her mother’s arms like she’s seven again and someone took her Barbie.

 

Let’s dig in…

 

It all came to a head slowly, and then all at once, the way things typically do. The vacation I look forward to for an entire year had me feeling weird and confusing feelings that I couldn’t really explain. My daughter took her son and her dog, packed up her stuff and moved four plus hours away to live with the love of her life. Tragic, I know. My son is counting down the days until he moves into his new dorm…two hours away. He should just tell me he hates me right now. (JK.) My husband doesn’t know if he’s retiring next year or not, which means I don’t know either, which means my brain has decided to have opinions about it at 3:00 AM. The house feels like too much, in space and dollars. Work is just…work. A friend I love is walking through something I already survived (twice), and knowing she is going through it is breaking my heart all over again. My dad is throwing himself a pity party because his own choices keep him lonely, and somehow that keeps circling back around to being my fault. My dream of packing up and starting over somewhere new looks about as likely as me winning the lottery (I can’t even win bingo so the lottery is more than a longshot).

 

I could keep going, but the point is, it all stacked up until I felt like I was being crushed under it, and all it took was one totally forgettable question from my mom to snap me in half.

 

I don’t even remember what she asked. I just know that before I had time to stop it, I was sobbing and yelling “I HATE MY LIFE!” like a woman who belonged in a mental ward.

 

Do I hate my life? Honestly, no. I have a good one.

 

I have a husband who loves me like it’s his job, because in a way, it is. We fought hard to get here. Years of marriage counseling. Seasons where we genuinely did not like each other. Hearts broken more times that either of us likes to admit out loud. And somehow, we clawed our way to a marriage built on being each other’s best friend, which, if you’d told 30-year-old me that’s where we’d land, she would have laughed and then cried…probably.

 

I have two grown kids. My daughter is married with a two-year-old son who has turned me into a full-blow Mimi (complete with giving him what he wants and spoiling him rotten). She researches everything before she tries it with him which is ironic because I couldn’t even get her to do research for a school paper that was work more than half of her grade. She loves that baby boy with a fierceness I don’t think I had in me at her age. She used to think I was public enemy number one and now I’m her bestie, which is wild considering there was a stretch of years where she was drowning in darkness and I couldn’t reach her no matter how hard I tried. She fought her way back to the light and found a strength I always knew she had and now she’s thriving. Committed to her own growth in a way that honestly humbles me. My son has been with his high school sweetheart for five years this December, and yes, I see the family pattern too. He’s an incredible soccer player who’s played in Italy, Sweden, on the Maryland Olympic Development team, multiple club teams, and was an All-Star his junior and senior year. But more than that, he’s wise in a way that skips whole decades. Driven. Kind. Faithful to God and His Plan for him. During the years he should have been mortified to be seen with me, he kept me close like I was one of his best buds. I don’t take that for granted, because I know a lot of parents don’t get that. It used to bother me when people didn’t understand my relationships with my kids. Now I mostly just feel bad for them. They don’t know what they are missing.

 

I have a wonderful relationship with my mom, who also lives with us. She’d give anyone the shirt off her back even if it left her cold. She helps me hold it together when I’m three seconds from unraveling. She’s been my biggest cheerleader my whole life and I don’t think that will ever stop, God willing.

 

I have a beautiful home, even though I’ll be honest, it took me a long time to feel like it was actually home. I didn’t want to move here in the first place. I missed my smaller house and small community, but it made my husband and kids happy, it kept us safe, and at some point I just had to embrace it. So, I made this house our home.

 

And I always have enough. When I need something, I get it. That’s not nothing.

 

So how, looking at all of that, could I possibly say I hate my life? I can see clear as day how blessed I am, and I mean that wholeheartedly. But something has been off lately, and if I’m being honest, with you and myself, I don’t remember feeling this particular degree of whatever the hell this is, not even during the actual dark times, and trust me, I’ve had some genuinely dark times. But there I was a few days ago, letting my mother hold me together like both of our lives depended on it while screaming that I hated my life. Days later, I’m still sitting here trying to figure out what cracked me open like that.

 

Here’s what I’ve landed on –

 

Two things can be true at once.

 

I can have a good life AND feel like I’m being crushed by it. Those two facts can site in the same room together, uninvited, and just stay there being annoying. It’s inconvenient, but it’s also true.

 

So why am I telling you all of this instead of keeping it to myself like a normal person with a shred of dignity? Because I have a hunch, a strong one at that, that I am not the only woman white-knuckling her way through a breakdown she can’t fully explain. Maybe someone out there stumbles into my little corner of the internet and feels a little less insane for it. I know some of you are reading this thinking I’ve lost it. Maybe I have, but I’d bet money I’m not the only one, which is exactly why I keep writing this stuff down here instead of just journaling it in private place like a sane person would.

 

Here’s the truth under the truth:

 

I don’t hate my life. I hate where I currently am in my life. I’m not thrilled with who I’ve become, how lost I feel, how numb yet completely overflowing with feelings I am (usually at the exact same time), how unmotivated I am even while looking (from the outside) like a woman who has her shit together. I hate how much time I’ve spent just treading water. I hate how my moods have started swinging like my sleep schedule during perimeno……

 

Oh.

 

Oh, wait.

 

PERIMENOPAUSE.

 

You absolute menace. Is that you? Are you the reason I dissolved into a puddle over nothing and everything at the same time? Am I out here trying to psychoanalyze a hormone shift like it’s a personality crisis when really I am just raw-dogging the shit out of you?

 

Well. Here’s to another unfinished episode of She’s Trying to Hold it Together, because I genuinely do not know.

 

XoXo,

Carrie