Yesterday: a phone call first thing. Then therapy. Then an appointment call I wasn’t expecting. Then school pickup, then rushing dinner because one of the boys had soccer, and on the way to soccer I realize the medication I’m completely out of still hasn’t been approved. So now I’m calling the doctor from the car trying to rush an approval while watching practice run late.
Practice ends. It’s 7:00. We run a pretty tight schedule at our house, and 7:00 at the pharmacy is not on it. I had called ahead. I had approved everything ahead. The pharmacy tells me none of that went through and it’ll be thirty minutes.
The kids are hungry. They want to go home. They’re being silly and climbing on things, and all I can think about is germs and the schedule and the thirty minutes, and every sound in that building is happening directly inside my skull.
I wasn’t in danger. Nothing was actually wrong. And I was a bitch to everyone I love anyway.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about overstimulation. It doesn’t feel like “stress.” It feels like the volume knob on the whole world snapped off at max — and the people closest to you get the worst of a thing they didn’t cause.
Here’s what I’m working on, and I mean working on, not “here’s my five-step system”: I set the tone in my house whether I want the job or not. If I treat a blown schedule like a tragedy, my whole family lives in a tragedy that night. The pharmacy, the practice running over, the approval that didn’t go through — none of that was mine to control. My tone was.
So last night, when we finally got home, I didn’t follow everyone inside. I stayed in the car. Alone. A few slow breaths — long enough for my body to come down, because the body has to calm down before the mom can. I talked to my fiancé for a minute. And then I walked in and we had a genuinely good bedtime — the routine where we ask the boys questions, and they had funny answers, and we got to be playful, and the day that almost ended as a tragedy ended sweet instead.
I didn’t stay calm yesterday. I recovered calm. Right now, that’s the version of this I can actually do — and I’m starting to think the recovering matters more than the not-losing-it. If you’re an overstimulated mom sitting in a parking lot taking deep breaths before you go inside: you’re not failing. You’re doing the job.
— Kay 🤍