I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I just discovered it a few days ago when my friend Tina invited me to work out at a park in North Phoenix. We were going to invent a fun workout running between the swings, the slides and the monkey bars. I was up for the challenge, water bottle in hand. But I wasn’t prepared for the dark secret of my past that reared its ugly head upon our arrival. The park was infested with happy young mothers who were enjoying conversing while watching their toddlers scamper across faux wooden bridges, dart into carefully crafted tunnels and whisper into the all-time favorite metal whispering funnel that carries little voices from one end of the playground to the other. I started to have trouble breathing.
“Are you OK?” Tina asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine. I’m … just having a little reaction I guess.” My heart started racing and I felt slightly lightheaded. “I used to …” It was painful getting the words out. “I used to … take my kids to the park when they were little. It was so … so … HORRIBLE!” I finally allowed the ugly utterance to escape my lips.
“What do you mean, it was horrible?” Tina was slightly aghast at my unexpected revelation.
“I used to hate it,” I said. “I never seemed to make friends at the park. Everyone was already paired up by the time I arrived. No one ever wanted to chat with me. It was like I kept missing the memos that we were supposed to show up an hour earlier, all in LuLu Lemon, with matching water bottles. I always felt like the awkward teenager at the dance alone, with my overstuffed, unkempt diaper bag and extra duffle full of food, dry clothes, sunscreen and a multitude of kid-friendly beverage choices. I was like the least organized mom on the planet and it showed.”
“I’m sure you’re exaggerating,” Tina said, smiling warmly. “You make friends so easily.”
“I’m not!” I said emphatically. “I did not fit into this world. It was like I didn’t want to talk about whatever moms talked about, and I wasn’t put together like everyone else seemed to be. I was a wreck, all the time.”
Suddenly we were interrupted by a cadre of muscular moms rushing past us as they race-walked through the park pushing their three-wheeled, all-terrain BOB Revolution joggers with sleeping babies snuggly tucked inside. My breathing became labored. I felt myself losing balance.
“Breathe,” Tina cautioned. “You’re as white as a ghost.” She shuttled me over to a bench and maneuvered me into the infamous “head between the knees” position. “Your kids are much older now. You don’t ever need to take them to a park again. You’re safe now.”
After a few minutes I felt myself calming down a bit. “I’m so embarrassed,” I confided. “This just brings up so much for me.” Since Tina was childless by choice, I didn’t feel like sharing all of my maternal angst. But there was one thing I couldn’t hold in any longer.
“The worst part of going to the park,” I blurted out, “was having to leave. It was like this cruel, ironic joke. My kids would BEG me to take them to the park all the time. But no matter how often I took them, or how long we stayed, they were inconsolably miserable whenever I announced that it was time to go home.”
“But you seem to love being with your kids now,” Tina said, trying to jostle me out of the darkness.
“It’s much easier for me now,” I explained. “I just wasn’t good with the baby and toddler stages. I was constantly freaked out about … everything. I wanted to make them happy and play with them, but no matter how much fun we had, they were always disappointed that the fun couldn’t last longer. Do you understand how frustrated that could make someone?”
“I do,” my kind friend affirmed, with a genuine warmth and compassion that gave me permission to dig further into my past pain.
“Plus you see how all these kids are playing together, and all the moms are gabbing away in the distance? My kids never left my side. They refused to ever play with anyone but me. It was like I was the only playmate they wanted, and I was tired and I didn’t really want to always climb the rock wall and hide in the dungeon pretending I was stowing away on a cargo ship. I mean, once in a while I could be that mom. I just couldn’t be it 24/7, and I feel really sad that I couldn’t. It’s like I continually let them down.”
By now I was crying. This was truly embarrassing. Tina wrapped her arms around me and just kept saying, “You’re a good mom. You’re a really good mom. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
As days have passed since “the incident,” I see things a little more clearly. I need to accept that I wasn’t great at the 24/7 mothering thing. I tried. But it wasn’t who I was. I needed adult time and time to work, to write, to create art. I just couldn’t survive without those things. I’ve come to realize that I’m more like a maternal sprinter than a marathon mom. And that’s OK, because we aren’t all going to fit into the same motherly mold.
I love my kids more than anything in the world. I’m sorry that I didn’t take them to the park more, that I always felt like the mom from the Island of Misfit Toys, that I was so neurotic I couldn’t relax and just play for hours on end. But life goes on and they seem to be really good, really happy young men. So maybe I should lighten up a bit and just accept myself for who I am. Because frankly, there’s no other alternative.
Debra Rich Gettleman is a mother and blogger based in the Phoenix area. For more of her work, visit unmotherlyinsights.com.
