Jealously

 

Sometimes it’s hard for me to speak out loud how I’m feeling. Because I feel that I’m being self-righteous and that I shouldn’t feel the way that I do. And I know that there is 1 million other women that probably feel the same way that I do. But yesterday was just a challenge, Mother’s Day, my 26th year as a mother. While I was showered with love unconditionally from my older kids & I struggled with my younger kids that day, overall it was a decent day.

But the fact that the one thing that I want more than anything is the recognition from Tony. Why is that? Maybe because we started this journey together. Maybe because I carried so much of it myself for so long. Maybe because I want him to see how hard I’ve worked & how much I’ve tried & how exhausted I am. I want him to appreciate me, I want him to be grateful for me, I want him to tell me how thankful he is that I have taken over and stepped up & raised his kids to the best of my ability while he has just sat on the sidelines. 

I want to be recognized as the strong, independent woman that was born out of the chaos & destruction. I want to be recognized as someone that he admires & thinks highly of because I have literally raised his kids. I want to give him some of the credit, but at the same time I don’t. I feel like I shaped them into who they are today & that might seem incredibly selfish & self righteous, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there for the majority of their lives. It’s not fair that he gets to sit on the sidelines and heal while I continue to suffer.

Yes, he’s probably in his own kind of hell but for me so am I.  I feel like the flames are swarming up around me & they’re suffocating me. I come up for air, but only because I have to. Only because I have to put one foot in front of the other only because I have no choice then to keep moving & keep pressing. But so much of me wants to just be swallowed by the flames & just be done. I want to be done with it all.

I fight with this agony daily. When I wake up I have a split second of peace & then I sit down on the toilet & I realize I am in the same nightmare. No matter how much I try to be okay with it & to be grateful for what I have, I am consistently swallowed by what I don’t have, what I lost.  What I lost was Tony & to try to figure out why that matters so much is incomprehensible , why is he so important to me? He should be the least of my thoughts & my energy. But he’s not….