Becoming

You wake up and before your feet hit the floor, someone needs something. You make the lunches, find the shoes, answer the question, manage the morning, and somehow get everyone out the door. Somewhere between "did you unpack your backpack" for the third time and the moment you finally snap, the guilt lands before you've even pulled out of the driveway. Then you get to work and spend the next eight hours performing. Holding it together. Answering Linda's 10pm emails because that's just what you do. Absorbing everyone else's stress because you're good at it. Because you have always been good at it. You come home and you're already empty. So you pour yourself a glass of pinot and scroll Instagram while your family moves around you, watching everyone else's vacation photos and feeling something between longing and low-grade jealousy you don't really want to name. How come they get to do that? You close the app. You open it again ten minutes later. At some point you asked your kid to clean something up. They didn't. You asked again. Still nothing. The third time, you lost it. Over a backpack on the floor. Over a glass of milk. Over nothing and everything at once. The guilt is immediate. You apologize. You over-apologize. You lie in bed that night running through everything you did wrong, and somewhere in the quiet the thought comes: They deserve better than me. I should be doing more. I should be able to do it all. You've Googled "why do I keep snapping at my kids" at 11pm. You've researched anxiety strategies. You've downloaded the apps, read the books, sat across from your therapist and done the work. You understand yourself, probably better than most people understand themselves, and you are still here. Same loop. Same guilt. Wondering when it's actually going to change. You can understand a pattern completely and still be trapped in it. Because understanding why you do something and actually responding differently when the moment hits are not always the same thing.