Jonah's Journey

hysterical

This is an excerpt of one of my regular journal entries, because it concerns Jonah.

Andy has been gone since Tuesday morning on a camping trip with the kids from Wildwood, and he'll be back tonight, thank God. The last two days have been positively disastrous. Had it not been for the blessed break I get while Jonah is in school, I may have lost it altogether.

This has happened every year since Jonah has been born, since the camping trip is an annual thing. (Except last year, when Andy didn't have to go, for some reason). The first time, Jonah was 3 months old and I was in the midst of a post-partum depression that I didn't know was post-partum depression. In the three days he was gone, I went to the doctor and got on Zoloft.

The fact is that without Andy I could not raise this child. Between me and insanity/suicide stands two things: my husband and Jonah's school. Sometimes I am so grateful for them both that it fills me with something akin to terror.

I thought the nights would go easier for us if I took Jonah somewhere to do something. Boy was I wrong! Tuesday night we went to Jim & Jane's house, (Andy's parents), where Jonah was terrible. Hysterical terrible. He tried to rip down a painting they have over their couch, then ran to the door and pounded on it, crying and whining to go outside. He ran crazily into the neighbor's yard when we did go outside, screaming top volume. It's always provoked by someone not letting him do something he wants to do -- like run into the street, for example. And last night it happened again, almost the same way, at my dad's. I chased him through four backyards in my dad's neighborhood before I caught him, kicking and screaming and biting, all because I wanted to hold an ice cream cone for him instead of letting him hold it. Our food was half-cooked on the grill but we had to go home because Jonah was so hysterical that the car seat was the only way to restrain him from hurting himself or one of us.

And now my dad just came over to bring me some food (the rest of what he'd cooked last night) and when we talked about what happened, he told me: Don't unload on your husband. Don't burden Andy with any of this when he comes home.

As if I hadn't thought about how to act around Andy or what to say to him. Give me a little credit, okay, dad? It was all I could do not to say, "It's hard to take marital advice from a man who has been married and divorced three times!"

Am I crazy? Maybe I really am a selfish wife, a shitty mother. It sure seems like it right now.




"Whenever I'm caught between two evils, I take the one I've never tried."
         ~ Mae West (1892 - 1980)

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