A few weeks ago, I had an awful nightmare about my friend Angela. In real life, she is a nurse, mom, and recent law school graduate. She’s been super busy the last few years, but has handled all the stress beautifully. In my dream, however… not so much. At first, when I woke up covered in sweat and tangled in the blankets, I couldn’t figure out why my heart was pounding so hard. Then it came back to me, the vivid, awful images causing bile to rise in my throat and my head to swim. It was the kind of dream that stays with you throughout the day, the memory of it resting just behind your conscious daily thoughts. For the next week, images from the dream would pop up in my mind several times a day, each time bringing the same wave of nausea as when I first remembered it.

My therapist could tell there was something on my mind, and she waited patiently, watching me with her calm, intelligent eyes until I was ready to talk. My voice was quiet as I recounted the dream to her. I couldn’t look at her as I spoke, but I told her everything that I remembered- how sleep-deprived Angela was in the dream, confused and irrational. How she was hungry after studying for hours and hours, so she went into the kitchen to make a snack. How she went looking for her son, not finding him anywhere. How she began to panic, realizing something was terribly wrong. How she ended up back in the kitchen, and came across a pile of bones… How the memory of what had happened came to her slowly, as if she herself had been dreaming…

Retelling it was horrid, and I snuck a glance at my therapist to see if she was as disgusted by my mind as I was. But, like every time I feel like I’m crazy enough to be committed, she manages to convince me how normal I am. “You need a break,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“That dream is an indication of how deeply exhausted you are. Tell me, the feeling of sleep deprivation that Angela experienced in the dream, is that familiar to you?”

“Well, I guess,” I said. “I do sleep, but I still feel tired and stressed out all the time.”

“You need a break,” she told me firmly. I knew she was right, but it seemed so hopeless. Being a mother requires me to be on-duty twenty-four hours a day. And yet, there still never seems to be enough time to get everything done. The tasks are bland and monotonous, but they are necessary for the well-being of our family. If I don’t do them, they won’t get done. The responsibility of that is overwhelming. As the days have gotten shorter with the change of the seasons, I have felt my stress levels rise even more. I feel closed in by the dark, damp afternoons. Around 4:30 every day, with both kids tired and cranky and bored and taking it out on me, I start to lose my mind. Productivity goes out the window and the day becomes about simply making it through. Making it until dinner, until Ammon gets home, until bedtime. And then they finally go to bed, but the laundry is still piled up and you could create an entire meal from the crumbs on the carpet and the poor neglected fish is swimming around in a few inches of smelly water… And I just don’t know what to do. How to cope with it all. Throw in a couple of extra stresses like getting dumped by a good friend and preparing for a surgery that doesn’t happen, and that’s when the things I talked about in number 4 on my list start to look really good. Doing drugs, smoking, and cutting myself were indisputably destructive behavior, but I did them because they worked for me. They got me through. But my life evolved and became healthy and fulfilling, and those behaviors no longer became justifiable- even to myself. So, with lots of hard work and starting over and taking things step by step, I stopped. I quit smoking. I got sober. I threw away the razor blades. And I thought I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t account for the days when your two year old hates you, and your four year old hates your two year old, and you’re out of groceries and clean clothes and your husband calls and says he has to work late. Days like that require serious coping, and when you’ve given up your only known methods, all you have left are tears. And let me tell you, crying has gotten really old.

I joked with my husband that it’s pathetic that I have to go so far as having surgery to get a break around here. I was scared of the general anesthesia, but my goodness how I was looking forward to the rest. When the hospital called and told me they had lost power and couldn’t do the surgery, I was so upset. So yesterday I decided to take my therapist’s advice, and give myself a break. I talked to Beth, went online, and bought myself a ticket to go visit her for four days. A plane ticket may be a bit more expensive than a pack of cigarettes and a razor blade, but it’s the only thing I’ve got right now. It will be completely worth it.