The Adventure: Who is in Control?

The Illness From Hell

Over this last week my son somehow contracted a fun little stomach bug resembling the Norovirus. Around 8pm, an hour after his bedtime, I heard his violently coughing and that unmistakable sound of his projectile vomiting all over himself and his crib. I ran in to help him out of his sleeping-sac and jammies and I put him in the shower. Like a champ, he stayed in the shower and played in the water while I removed the puke-covered things from his room. I filled up two garbage bags with rinsed off linens and blankets, towels and clothes that fell victim to his nighttime explosion. We do not have laundry facilities in our apartment so I made arrangements to go to my mothers and do it over there in the morning. I dried the boy off and put him back to bed in clean sheets and clothes. An hour later I hear it again. This time he managed to stay out of it and so I changed his bedding again and his removed the massacred stuffies and blanket. Another garbage bag filled with things to be cleaned. My husband finally comes home after a long shift serving tables and lays down to relax. An hour later the diarrhea hit and all night long we were changing blowouts.

For some reason I believe my Thursdays and Fridays are cursed. They are the only two days in the week I am supposed to make it in to work early and stay on schedule and illness usually strikes on those days making it particularly painful to wake up in the morning and continue on with my regularly scheduled responsibilities. So Thursday, the morning after the exhausting strug-fest that was Wednesday night, I work all morning house-cleaning and come home to take my son to my mom’s house to do the laundry. My husband gives me the update, no puking! Great, I think, as I transfer him to my car. We get within a mile of our destination and I hear him puke again. I pull up to my parents house and ask my dad to throw the kid into the tub so I can dis-assemble his carseat and spray it down with the hose. 5 hours later I finish and bring him back home in a freshly washed carseat, making carefully sure he hasn’t eaten anything but rice or drank anything except Pedialyte. He goes down and it seems like the worst is over.

The clock strikes midnight and my dreams take a turn for the worst. Whatever benign adventure I was on suddenly shifts to darkness and a nauseating feeling wells. I try to fight it off all night and finally at 8am I run to the bathroom and get violently ill. I was so sick I couldn’t leave my bed. My husband announces two hours later that he, too, feels nauseous and then he, too, is bed-bound. We made a plea on Facebook for any one to bring us milk for the baby and crackers for us to try to keep down. There is no way we can get up and make it to a store. An angel comes bearing essentials and we sleep while our boy binge-watches Sesame Street. By 9am the next morning I’m conscious and out of the sick haze.

My Patterns

I tell you this story because I wouldn’t have handled it this well had I been the same me as a few years ago. I have been in recovery for nearly a decade now but I have been growing the “adult” inside the entire time. Part of my interwork is to find patterns inside myself that I don’t like, recognize that I’m in these patterns, and then do what I can to avoid acting out in them. Some of my patterns I have discovered inside myself over the course of this work:

• The Victim: This is one of my oldest and deeply rooted patterns I will most likely fight through the entirety of this lifetime. This pattern I know shows up when I don’t want to do something but I feel like there is pressure to still do it. Most of the pressure is made up in my own head but these thoughts and feelings are completely controlling. If I try to take care of myself over these thoughts I immediately feel guilt and/or shame and override what I need by doing what I feel I have to do. All of this fits into my victim pattern. Example: If you asked me to call the insurance company to see if there was a mistake in the billing, I would feel like a victim to the insurance company for this happening in the first place instead of understanding that this is a common occurrence on earth, where things aren’t perfect and don’t always work the way they should. Instead of moving about the moment I would feel personally hurt by it in order to justify getting upset and then probably acting shitty.
• The Child: The Child pattern is the one that doesn’t want to take responsibility or show up as my best self. The child does something like not taking steps to set themselves up for success. Example: Like if you asked me to come over for dinner and I never write it down with reminders in my calendar, it’s easy to say it was an accident, but I know, for me, this is an old pattern that keeps me from being a responsible and functional member of society. Or if someone asks for something to be done a certain way, The Child would do what they wanted and change it into something they wanted to do. Example: a homework assignment is given, The Child would do something similar but not quite right as a way to act out or have control.
• Guilt and Shame: Part of my relationship to my eating disorder and addiction is the sense that I cause harm or hurt someones feelings and therefore should feel Shame and Guilt for my actions. Because of this, for many years I felt like these feelings were justified to perpetuate self harm and binging and purging. I needed to suffer the consequences of my actions and so I would let those feelings control my every move until I was snapped out of that pattern. Example: You asked me over to dinner in The Child pattern example, and I said yes and then never showed because I forgot to set a reminder in my calendar to remember to show up. The I get a call form you asking if I was still coming and I am then in the moment I created where I need to cancel. I am disappointed in myself for creating the moment and I feel Shame knowing the time and effort you put into making the meal for us to share. I feel Guilt knowing that you are going to look at this relationship differently because you can’t entirely trust that I will show up and not be flaky, or something similar.

And so forth. In a future post I will go into better detail about these patters and more as they are a cornerstone in looking into myself in a deeper way. So lets look at these for now in relationship to the illness from hell…

The Old Me Would Act Out

The old me would have felt the need to act out in these patterns to deal with the illness I talked about before. I would have been a victimized child feeling guilt and shame instead or a capable grown-up that can handle anything. I would have felt victimized by the world that this happened, “why me??” Instead of understanding that these things happen to every one of us. I would have felt like a baby not knowing how to clean up the giant poopy and pukey mess my poor son was making. I would have just stuffed everything into those bags instead of washing them off first and the laundry probably wouldn’t have gotten as clean, or been permanently ruined. Or I could have done a poor job cleaning up, or left it for my husband to clean. I could have been a victim to the fact that he missed almost all of the clean-up because he was at work. Or I could have felt guilt and shame that I felt any irritation at all and then wanted to “eat my feelings” so I could feel a tiny bit of comfort and cover up the other feelings. I could come up with a million ways my patterns could have controlled the moment.

The Me Now Feels It All

Let’s go back to when my son threw up that first time. My first thought was, “I don’t know how to handle this.” My second thought was, “I can do this, one step at a time.” My initial response after all these years still isn’t “I CAN DO IT!” I still have to go through the overwhelming feelings and thoughts and then do the work to recognize these as my patterns and then push past them. I got my shit done and I did it to the best of my ability but AFTER I had a little internal meltdown.

Over the years I have also learned to have compassion for myself, this helps me overcome the guilt and shame, too. I’ve learned to be real about the moment, “This does suck, a lot,” don’t push away your feelings even if your not proud of them. They need to be acknowledged or they will still be stuck inside. “Even though I don’t want to deal with this moment, I can and I want to because I want to bring my son and myself into comfort again.” Then I can act on it slowly and step by step, playing out the outcomes of what each action will create for me. If I don’t wash the baby puke up first what will the create? Damaged clothes, gross shit in the washing machine at my parents house, disappointment from my family that I made their washer gross, smelly bags of laundry that will sit in my living room until tomorrow. After thinking that through, then yes, I want to wash off the stuff before putting it in bags to be cleaned tomorrow.

Sometimes I think we jump over our thoughts and feelings because we know the ultimate rightness in doing something but it can be so valuable to really take it step by step to gain consciousness into our actions.

In Conclusion

One thing I’ve recently been looking at having a second child. The thing I mostly hear from others is that having two+ is like multiplying the difficulty by 10 per child, and I have been looking at it through that lens because I don’t want to be blindsided by the amount work and stress that come along with a second. I have been imagining what situations (such as this illness) would look like if I had two and consideration if I could handle more. I know that the work and stress that two will bring will take me to limits I’ve never seen before, but I know my ability to adapt and grow has multiplied along with my sense of self and desire to love and take care of myself. I believe this consciousness with what is real about myself is freeing. By knowing what I’m facing inside myself, I know how to support my strengths and weaknesses.

Sometimes I feel like moments like the illness from hell are moments designed by the universe to reflect who I am inside. I took a situation where a great deal of suffering could have occurred and learned to see it as a reflection of who I have chosen to be today. I took control of the moment, I asked for help when I needed it, I did things in rightness even when the desire to take a short-cut seemed great. At 33 years old I am finally feeling like an adult making adult choices. I am taking command of how things will be, and all of this is the wondering and self reflection makes the life-adventure rewarding and utterly fantastic.