let me tell the stories;

Let me go back. Let me tell the stories. They will come out of me in a great heave, the way they always have. All that I have held onto, all that I have held in. Let me release it.

Let me tell the stories.

I will go backward. There will be no chronology. Only the ebbing and flowing of my memory—images, lapping up on the shores of my mind. Little waves. Little glistenings of sunlight dancing on the water. There, a sadness. There, a joy.

Let me tell the stories.

☾

It’s been so long since I’ve been able to share here the way that I would like to. I don’t know when the words stopped coming. It feels like I was running on empty for so long. It was quiet inside of me and the words that have been burning inside of me all of my life, aching to come out, they were gone. Everything was quiet, save for the noise of— this worry, that worry, this pain, that pain.

I was just reading over the last real things that I shared before it all went quiet. Pandemic. Pregnancy. Hyperemesis (for the third time), Prenatal Depression (for the third time). And that’s when it went quiet.

If I really think about it, my twin pregnancy and the difficulty that it brought, piled on top of the pandemic stresses, were just too much for me. I shut down. And after all of that, then came twin motherhood, on top of motherhood, step-motherhood, and all the rest; the hard things that we don’t speak out loud.

☾

In order for me to write, or to create in general, I need to feel. Everything that I create comes from my soul. But for the last year, or maybe two, I was feeling so much that I did not have the capacity to stir up the feelings of my soul and put them into creating. I was feeling so much that I had to go numb in some ways (creatively and otherwise) just to process it all.

Becoming a mother of 6, with twin babies, also took a lot from me, and made the processing/coping/healing take all the longer. One of the reasons that I’ve returned to working full-time outside of the home after 9 years of being a stay-at-home/work-from-home mom is because of all of this. To put it very shortly, you could say that I did it for my mental health, in a sense this is true. But it is also so much more than that.

☾

But here I am slowly… remembering. And, hopefully, ready to begin sharing again too. This post could also be called, “Anxiety in Motherhood,” but I’ll save that for another day.

xx