Falling Apart

The Season that tried to break me.

Fall has always felt like a magical season to me.

I don’t really know why. Something about the colors and the perfect temperatures. Something comforting about Thanksgiving dinner and crinkly leaves.

2020 needed Fall. This year has been so difficult already, it needed a touch of magic.

I was anticipating Fall all summer, I felt like making it into that season would just help this year be better.

But then life happened.

Fall showed up. But the magic did not.

My marriage was tested and boy did I ever feel like I was failing that test.

We started marriage counselling. Which actually wasn’t as scary as people make it sound. (So don’t be afraid to try it!)

But I struggled this season. I’m still struggling. I’m a young mother of three. I have a child with a disability. It often feels like outsiders are just waiting for the day when I fall apart. The pressure to have it all together feels heavy and at times unattainable.

And just as I was trying to catch my breath, my husband was out of a job.

Out of everything going on in our lives at the moment, his job was the one constant.

Losing that stability in an instant shook me. The weeks that followed were filled with stress, uncertainty, tension, and fear.

We are lucky enough to be okay financially, because we were saving to buy our first home. A dream that was a mere weeks away was suddenly put on an indefinite hold in a matter of minutes.

Everything felt hard.

The opportunities for work were there but nothing that kept us where we wanted to be for our future. Other than one.

A camp job where my husband would live away from us for 2 weeks at a time.

This type of job is not something I ever wanted for my family. I’m the kind of person who values eating dinner together as a family at night, hugging and kissing our kids goodnight, going to bed together.

I felt like everything I thought I knew about the future had disappeared in a matter of 6 weeks.

How did I get from playing at the playground with our kids in our would be future neighborhood to living alone 3 weeks of the month? Nothing felt right anymore.

Everything was falling apart. And as much as I tried to keep up the appearance of normal, there were cracks in the mask. I didn’t have much to say, I wasn’t keeping up with my appointments, I would make plans for things that I never ended up finishing.

So that is why I am here sharing all of this now. I don’t want to wear a mask anymore.

I’m just a person. Trying to be a wife. Trying to be a mom. Trying to navigate having a child with a disability. Trying to navigate the medical system.

And most importantly…

Trying to believe that next year Fall will have it’s magic back again.

Thank you for reading and allowing me to share our story.