And she mentioned how everything is just extra hard right now.
It is!
It's true.
Things that weren't so hard before, seem amplified in difficulty.
We are stressed.
Our kids are stressed.
"Stressed" backwards is "desserts", hence, why the Quarantine Fifteen is a thing.
I replied to my friend and told her, yes, things are very hard right now.... and I think the way I am coping is by throwing myself into a survival mode.
Jeff and I are no stranger to survival mode. We have had some pretty, dang stressful times in our marriage.
Generally, the stressful time peaks during a few days spent in the hospital, and then it tapers off and the stress ball releases slowly after that.
Sometimes very slowly.
THIS time.… in THIS situation....
We are living through a fairly high stress situation.
The stress ball hasn't been released yet.
It's just kickin around.
Mostly my kids are kicking it around.
Hypothetically.
Ha ha ha
As I was talking to my friend, I thought about the other times I have placed myself in survival mode. It became obvious to me, that those times were all surrounded by a near death situation.
When Jeff and I had only been married for 9 months, he ended up in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism.
Go Google it, if you would like to understand the severity of that situation.
He was told, too many times to count, that he should have died.
Dozens.... so many.... doctors told him he should have been dead.
He had a blood clot the size of his fist was in his lung.
The pain he had been feeling in his chest, had been happening for a LONG time. He had pretty bad pain for about the 6 months - a year before he wound up in the ER that fateful January evening.
He spent 3 days in the hospital feeling great, actually - while every nurse told him he was their most critical patient.
I was young.
Jeff was young.
We had NO clue.
NO CLUE, man....
On how to handle THAT situation.
My new (ish) husband was in the hospital from something that was pronounced "very fatal" and yet he sat there and acted like nothing was happening.
It was the weirdest thing. I had no choice, but to thrust myself into survival mode.
Being in survival mode, I was just trying to exist.
It often felt very numb.
People from the outside said I was coping so well, and seemed so put together...
While it looks right from the outside, that's not true, when it really comes down to it. Suppressing emotions has never been the healthy way.
…. and yet. That's what you do in survival mode.
Our next survival mode experience was when Grace was just 10 months old.
I've blogged about this one a LOT. A whole lot.
And that is because... well... it is.... my whole life.
When I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, I threw myself into survival mode and clung on for a long time.
Now, nearly five years later, sometimes I've wondered if I've ever, truly, come out of survival mode surrounding my diabetes.
I remember… vividly remember.... sitting in the hospital bed all alone.
There were many times that Jeff was with me, many times my mom came with Grace and sat with me.
But there were also times when I sat alone in that hospital room by myself.
It was in those times that I'd hear nurses, doctors, even diabetes educators come say to me encouragingly:
"You seem like you are really understanding all of this and doing SO well!"
I've learned to smile through the confusion of new things.
I'm nothing, but polite, even if I'm feeling a lot of pain.
I was in a major survival mode at that time.
My life, every last thing that HAD been normal, was now different.
I've had to adjust to a lot over and over these past five years.
So, especially in the beginning of that I just made myself.... survive.
The third most memorable survival mode for our family was when Hunter was born!
That boy.
Oh I love him, so dang much.
Hunter was in the NICU for the first eight days of his life.
We weren't expecting that!
AT ALL.
After he was born he did really well. I actually got to hold him, which was not the case with Grace when she was born.
It wasn't until after I held him for awhile that the doctors said.... he's not okay, we need to take him to the NICU.
What?
How?
The next week of our lives was the rawest survival mode I've ever lived through.
In lots of ways I felt like I was swimming.
I was so tired.
I was so sad.
I was being pulled in so many directions.
I felt helpless!
I made myself just survive and nothing else.
That's all that felt possible at that time.
Because I did not own up to my emotions, at that time, I struggled with post partum depression the worst of all my children, after having Hunter.
I look back at that NOW and think of how differently I should have handled that.
I should have talked to people more.
Heck, I should have talked to JEFF more.
I wish I could tell myself back then that I didn't need to JUST survive.
So here we are now. In another survival mode of sorts.
I think the biggest defining factor why THIS period of time is survival mode for me, is because I'm trying to protect my children.
In a lot of ways I have placed myself in that numb feeling, because I don't want to scare my kids. I want them to feel safe. I want them to know we are going to come out the other side of this and things will be normal again.
My kids ask daily, if not several times a day, when things will be normal again. They ask me. They ask Jeff. They ask each other.
My kids are NOT used to staying home.
We are out and about (or were before March, I guess) almost every day. I am an out and about kind of mom.
It is very different for my kids to stay home endlessly.
And for them it seems very endless.
For ME it seems endless.
I can theorize and guess with my friends and family how long we'll be in this state, but that might drive me more nuts.
I'm trying to own up to my emotions this time.
I can see this for what it is.
I am very aware of my mental health, but it's taken me a long time to get there.
All those other survival modes you read about are things of the past, where I was pretty unaware of my insecurities. I was pretty uneducated about HOW I cope with hard things.
I have learned through those survival modes that God is never gone.
We might think He is.
We can sit in that empty hospital room and wonder why He isn't there.
He is always waiting for us to lean on Him.
I know that is true!
And boy is it ever true now...
In this survival mode.
I know He lives and loves us.
Despite the confusion.
Despite the pain.
Despite the loneliness.
Despite the uncertainty.
He loves us!
He loves you!
He will never leave us.
So I'll keep plugging through.
I'm trying to keep my emotions in check.
In the end we are all doing our best.
I can only hope that this survival mode turns out just as reflective as the rest.
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