Tonight will pass and so will this

Tonight, I feel like I’m losing it.

And everything started off so well earlier.

Poor B has a nasty mouth infection and isn’t sleeping. I slept downstairs with him last night and felt surprisingly ok this morning, despite only getting two to three-hour intervals of sleep.

Once up, I comforted him, gave him medication, tried to encourage him to eat (not happening). Made sure he’s getting enough fluids. Read, played, let him watch Howls Castle on repeat. Managed to get him down for a nap and started my workout.

See, I’m trying to exercise every day during lockdown; mainly to keep the madness at bay.

The workout got cut short because he woke up. Poor bubbas mouth is in agony.

I started the mamma cycle again but as the day wore on, I could feel myself slipping, and tonight, the madness won. B’s screaming sounded like it was in a megaphone. I felt overwhelmed by how much he needed me. Like I was drowning and completely alone.

Anyone that knows me would probably say, at the very least, I am impulsive and outspoken. And that’s being complimentary. Anyone that knows my family knows, that it has always been coloured by mental illness.

My mum, my sister, nanny; all bonkers. I grew up watching my sister slide in and out of psychiatric units. The wards of East Sussex are no stranger to me. My adolescence and early twenties were punctuated with numerous incidents of attempting to navigate an endless stream of drunken suicidal phone calls. Desperately wanting to help her, my heart breaking to see her in so much pain and yet, simultaneously resenting her, every time her illness stopped her from being the strong big sister I so selfishly yearned for. I watched (and now I realise, very much participated in), my mum systemically destroying nearly every relationship she had in her life. In her prime, our undiagnosed, but most certainly bipolar grandmother, would show us the wares of her regular manic shoplifting hauls; depleting Eastbourne’s shitty Arndale Centre of the best make up, hair products and lingerie she could fit in her handbag. I remember the excitement when she would let you take whatever you wanted, from what we reverently referred to as “nannies’ cupboard” in her bedroom. The most sixties white wardrobe unit with built in mirror and a vanity cupboard, that harboured all her stolen bounty.

I always prided myself on being the one that got away.

I thought I’d escaped the crazy. I was more like dad. More grounded. Impulsive yes but crazy no. Turns out I was an arrogant fool. You are what you’ve lived, and I’ve lived in mental illness my whole life.

But now, since having B, something’s shifted in my brain and my mental health has not been the same.

Now it feels like a constant noisy conveyor belt of dark thoughts. Doom, worry, anxiety and self-loathing pursue me.

Ordinarily, I manage to temper the darkness with a hectic routine of motherhood, relationship, career, friendships, domesticity and the odd night out or weekend away together, if we’re lucky. The intrusive thoughts are hushed by the busyness and then I’m so tired at the end of the day, that sleep comes easily, and the negative narrator is gagged for a few hours.

But since lockdown, my thoughts have been getting louder and darker again.

Today that negative voice inside my head temporarily took over. I am aware I’m due my period. I try and grip onto rationality, as each irrational wave of thought washes over me. But it doesn’t always work.

You’re shit.

You can’t even comfort your own son.

There’s something seriously wrong and it’s all your fault.

You missed the signs for whatever this illness is.

How have you let this happen?

You’ve let him down.

He is going to die.

If that happens, you may as well kill yourself.

You need to start thinking about how you’d do it, so you have a solid plan.

Shut the fuck up, I tell it.

I stand washing B’s bottles at the sink, staring flatly into the majestic trees that surround out flat.

The dark thoughts tempt me into hating everyone and everything.

I bet Bruce likes being at work for 14 hours, so he doesn’t have to be near you.

I bet he’s glad to get a break from this shit.

It goads me.

It taunts me. It tells me I’m nothing.

It reiterates again and again, that I have no one.

I tell myself I fought for the privilege of choosing my own family now, and that I’ve have chosen well.

The darkness tells me, you will never escape the cycles of your family.

It makes me think about suicide. Methods, shops, places. How? When?

Then it tells me I should be ashamed, for thinking of such a horrific thing. And of course, how much of a piece of shit mother this makes me.

I try to meditate, and it does help. But I’m inconsistent and B’s lack of routine during lockdown, makes it so much harder. Or is that an excuse? And then I ask myself, is this a legitimate excuse or is it the darkness up to her old tricks again? I don’t fucking know anymore. It’s exhausting.

But even in the midst of these waves of depression, I do know one thing. I know what the darkness can’t overpower. And that is the fact, that I know B wouldn’t be better off without me. Because I know that pain inside out. The pain of losing a parent as a child. The pain of losing a parent as an adult. Them never being there, to ask why.

Or to know you or just to see you fucking...live.

No matter what, I know I can never do that to my son. I will never cause him that pain.

So, I muddle though.

I try to take breathers.

I count back from ten.

I carry on trying to meditate.

Trying to exercise every day.

Trying not to be a fucking psychopath fiancé.

And I regularly fail at all of them; especially the latter.

I make myself list everything I am grateful for at night as I fall asleep.

Reasoning that this bizarre OCD prayer might protect me from losing it all, or at the very least, from fucking it all up.

I try to be the best; most authenticate and loving mother I can be.

And I pray I get that one right more often than the others.

But the darkness would have me think otherwise. Constantly tormenting me with self-doubt.

When I’m feeling strong, I tell the dark voice to go fuck itself.

I try to do as much as I can to keep the darkness at bay.

The darkness tells that I’m not trying hard enough.

But I try.

I try every day.

I’ve got to keep trying.

For me.

For him.

For us.

For anyone out there who’s struggling.

I tell myself that dark thoughts are just that, they are thoughts, and I am not my thoughts.

I am not my thoughts.

I am me and there is a pure and divine essence underneath all this shite.

I tell myself that the dark will pass.

This will pass.

Tonight, will pass.

And it does.

This time will pass.

And it will.