“YOU’RE TOO OLD TO BE A MOM NOW, YOU DON’T DO ANYTHING.”

My seven-year-old keeps telling me that it was a mistake to have my surgery. Yesterday she told me that I’m “TOO OLD TO BE A MOM NOW, YOU DON’T DO ANYTHING.” I’m really feeling for the moms with chronic illnesses. I bet your kids are dicks ALL the time to you. I bet you feel like you’re ALWAYS letting them down and it makes you resent your body even more than you already do for your own reasons. She’s scared, clearly. Her fear and uncertainty translates to anger. She’s still 98% id, so everything gets filtered through rage. I think in her world view, I need to be a consistent, steady presence, or nothing makes sense. She needs me to be a fortress.

This is part of what is turning me so bitter right now. I just spent the past eighteen months riding through my own terror and uncertainty, anger and severe anxiety so that I could present a *mostly* solid front to my kids while they lived through a pandemic. I did NOT want to school them at home. It was terrible. I mean, TERRIBLE. I’ve never been more frustrated and lost in my life. But I had to try to keep my shit tight so that they didn’t see me cracking. Then we lost jobs and business and had to move cross-country for work. I had the difficult, painful conversations with them about leaving everything they knew in exchange for the unknown. So much change at once. And then, just as things were looking a little bit up here, and they had some friends, were getting settled into a routine at school, we had a clue of how our new life might work, I seemingly intentionally…