The mirror of generations
I wonder if I handle stress as poorly as my mother. Let me be clear that she has many valid reasons to be stressed. However, this week has contained a couple doozies.
1) When we got home from the Santa train, the house was clean. Immaculate. Kitchen, toys, vacuuming, everything but the bathrooms. Now, I had told her I would do housecleaning with her when we got back, but there was a time constraint. She cleaned the house, and she went into her office and locked the door. When, an hour after we got home, I went to knock on her door to ask if she wanted lunch, I got a terse no.
Admittedly, it's not yelling, but it is easily interpreted, by one who grew up with her, as very disappointed by your contribution to the household and mad at you. It pushes all my appeasement buttons, and is part of the reason I exerted myself so much this weekend.
2) When she picked the kids up from daycare, she evidently bitched at the daycare people for having the kids in different rooms. It's a way they load-balance, and Kay is in the little-kid group, and Baz is in the big-kids group. The big kids are about 20 feet away across the parking lot, which is a slight pain when you have to haul one or the other around, and more of a pain when it is sheeting rain, as it was.
And see, because she raised me, and I have the same factory defaults, I know exactly what's happening. Between school and advent and christmas and sil's finals, she is just overloaded. And when she gets stressed and overloaded, she doesn't sleep. And when she doesn't sleep, her civility filters are compromised. I get like that, too, only it takes a HELL of a lot of stress to get me to the point where I don't sleep. Like, it's only happened a couple times in my life. I skip not sleeping and go straight for uncivil.
I know some things I could do to help her. I can extend myself more, cover more of the housework, more of the christmas prep. I can be the person who checks the tree-topper, and plans the meals. Only then my levels of stress may get to breaking point. My new job is difficult and confusing, and there is a great deal of uncertainty on what is going to happen when Oracle finishes acquiring us. Also, my new boss appears to be harboring suspicions that I'm an idiot, and it's not that, it's that the corporate culture is very different, and I'm still feeling it out. The commute has been improved by staying in town a couple nights a week, but it's stressful in different ways to be away from home that much. I have a bunch of things I want to get done for Christmas. So far this morning, I have had two moments when crawling under my desk has seemed like a good and viable alternative to being an adult.
1) When we got home from the Santa train, the house was clean. Immaculate. Kitchen, toys, vacuuming, everything but the bathrooms. Now, I had told her I would do housecleaning with her when we got back, but there was a time constraint. She cleaned the house, and she went into her office and locked the door. When, an hour after we got home, I went to knock on her door to ask if she wanted lunch, I got a terse no.
Admittedly, it's not yelling, but it is easily interpreted, by one who grew up with her, as very disappointed by your contribution to the household and mad at you. It pushes all my appeasement buttons, and is part of the reason I exerted myself so much this weekend.
2) When she picked the kids up from daycare, she evidently bitched at the daycare people for having the kids in different rooms. It's a way they load-balance, and Kay is in the little-kid group, and Baz is in the big-kids group. The big kids are about 20 feet away across the parking lot, which is a slight pain when you have to haul one or the other around, and more of a pain when it is sheeting rain, as it was.
And see, because she raised me, and I have the same factory defaults, I know exactly what's happening. Between school and advent and christmas and sil's finals, she is just overloaded. And when she gets stressed and overloaded, she doesn't sleep. And when she doesn't sleep, her civility filters are compromised. I get like that, too, only it takes a HELL of a lot of stress to get me to the point where I don't sleep. Like, it's only happened a couple times in my life. I skip not sleeping and go straight for uncivil.
I know some things I could do to help her. I can extend myself more, cover more of the housework, more of the christmas prep. I can be the person who checks the tree-topper, and plans the meals. Only then my levels of stress may get to breaking point. My new job is difficult and confusing, and there is a great deal of uncertainty on what is going to happen when Oracle finishes acquiring us. Also, my new boss appears to be harboring suspicions that I'm an idiot, and it's not that, it's that the corporate culture is very different, and I'm still feeling it out. The commute has been improved by staying in town a couple nights a week, but it's stressful in different ways to be away from home that much. I have a bunch of things I want to get done for Christmas. So far this morning, I have had two moments when crawling under my desk has seemed like a good and viable alternative to being an adult.