Last blog was dated May 5, we are now on May 24. Life flew by way too quickly…my oldest daughter is now a high school graduate, my middle two children are now both in high school, and my youngest completed her first series of appointments for major dental work. Needless to say, I’ve been beyond busy, so I’m taking the opportunity to blog while my daycare children nap today.

The last 2 weeks — no, really it started 2 months ago — I have been an emotional wreck. A bit of this is from all the deaths/funerals. A bigger part of this can be attributed to a very common premenopausal symptom that most women in their 40s begin to experience: sensory overload. Holy crap, it has been so bad! It’s been so bad that I have started avoiding being rooms when certain tv shows are on. I cannot stand yelling, I cannot stand fighting, I cannot stand over the top anger, I cannot stand the sound of police sirens going non-stop, I cannot stand snoring…it’s just awful and my mood dissolves into a runny puddle of annoyance pretty fast. I didn’t even know that premenopausal sensory overload was a thing until someone posted an article on Facebook. Don’t worry, I did the responsible thing and took that information and did some quick research of my own, I’d hate to be a headline bandit!

The third, and biggest, part of my foulness is being run down and worn out 20 years. Despite living in the year 2019, somehow all the responsibilities of maintaining a home, cooking, cleaning, raising the kids, managing the kids’ schedules, all the while still working 50-60 hours a week running a daycare in my home has all been put in me. I’m going to put this very clear and simple…

I. Am. Done.

I can’t do it anymore. I had my moment where I nearly snapped, and I mean full on mental break, on Tuesday. I woke up, got straight out of bed to wake up everyone else to get ready for school, went back to my room to take a shower, then back out to yell at everyone who promptly went back to sleep after I woke them the first time. That’s when I heard the sound of rushing water splattering on the concrete floor down in my storage room. For those who have been oblivious to the weather for the last several weeks, Kansas has seen record rainfalls and flooding has been catastrophic and widespread. Although I live way up on a hill, far out of the flood zone, that doesn’t mean the ground around my house isn’t completely saturated to the point where water will start forcing its way in through any crack or crevice — it found its way in where the main water line comes into my basement.

For the next 5 hours I would sit on the cold concrete floor with all six of my daycare toddlers and babies running circles and climbing all over me, nonstop crying because the loud shopvac scares them to death, and with a giant box fan blowing (which was absolutely freezing because I was soaked).

Here’s the thing, though, I was not home alone.

I was constantly calling over the shopvac out to the other adult who was upstairs laying in bed until 11:00am playing games and screwing around on his phone. Then, actually had the balls to come down to the basement and announce he was going to head over on the gym. In that moment, I knew what it meant to be so mad you see red. Staring straight ahead and avoiding eye contact, the only things in my sight that stuck out were all the things that were vibrant, pulsating, blood red: the red ball pit balls, the red trains, the red keys on all the xylophones, the red milk jug caps with ABCs written on them that had been thrown everywhere. I was so mad I felt hot.

Our home was flooding with water in a corner of our basement. Our huge, beautiful home that we pay an arm and a leg for to live in a very nice, safe neighborhood. But please, by all means continue to treat it like a shitty rental property. Pay no attention to the potential of mold growth and poor air quality while 6 people live here and 6 others come here for care 5 days a week. I hope whatever was in that phone was really fucking important, so important that it was worth your wife almost walking out the door.

This is not an isolated incident, this is how the last 20 years of my life have gone. Examples?! Of course, I have plenty! First up…how about the time the main toilet in our old house started leaking out of the base (not just the wax ring, there was a crack up inside the toilet). There it sat for over a month, leaking hazardous waste onto the bathroom when we had 3 children under the age of 5 at the time, I wiped, scrubbed and sprayed clean and sterilized after every flush. After ignoring it over a month, I gave up on him doing anything to keep us safe and loaded all 3 kids in the car, went to the hardware store, lifted an entire new toilet into the cart by myself, paid for it, then went home and watched a video online to learn how to install it. By myself.

NEXT…oh yes, the great ice storm Emporia had about 13-15 years ago (not sure exactly of that time, it all blurs together). An enormous ice storm nearly took out the huge 70 year old elm tree in our backyard. It looked like a war zone, our entire backyard was covered in huge, broken limbs. And there it sat…for months. My dad lent us a chainsaw to take care of it, and yet, or backyard was unusable for months because I could never find time to fire up a chainsaw in the dead of winter with 3 tiny children always on my heels no matter where I went (even if it was in below freezing weather to do hard manual labor they’d follow me, also I was having severe lower back and hip pain at that time from 3 pregnancies so close together). So, eventually, my dad got pissed that it wasn’t getting done and he and my mom came down for a weekend and cut up ALL the limbs and loaded them into his truck so he could go dump them on his hunting property. My parents did all the work on this, and I still feel horribly guilty about it to this day.

NEXT…my current dishwasher. It hasn’t been cleaning the upper rack and has been holding water in the bottom at the end of every cycle. Started doing this a YEAR ago, has progressively cleaned less and less. Now, it’s pretty much useless…you would think that we should just install the brand new dishwasher that’s been sitting our garage, right? It’s gonna get fucking done this weekend, Amie and her sidekick YouTube to the rescue again. By myself.

NEXT…all the countless times our septic system backed up in our Emporia house. I was there, cleaning away with anywhere from 1-4 kids trying to climb on me while I am shoveling, scraping, vacuuming literal shit. By myself.

Guys, I could go on for days and recount every tiny thing, every huge thing, and all the things in between. No joke. I unclog every sink and every toilet, I fish slimy “hair snakes” out of every shower drain, I have done 100% of the potty training on all 4 kids and washed every shit-filled pair of underwear, I wash 90% of the dishes (my second child does actually help me the most with this), I clean out the storage rooms, the garage, the closets

I

Can’t

Do

It

Any

More

If I’m in this alone, then leave and let me truly do it alone. It’s easier that way anyways. I will never return to health and drop a pound of this weight with all this stress on my everyday. Never. Unless this cycle is broken, I will stay exactly where I am both emotionally and physically.

The perfect song for this is “One Less Bell to Answer”, I really like the one on the Glee soundtrack volume 3. I’ve just gotten myself all angry again just writing this, I better get going…

~~Amie