"Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty,
and he who controls his spirit than he who takes a city." Proverbs 16:32
No surprise to anyone that pregnancy carries with it -- not only babies -- but crazed emotion.
My emotional frenzy however, didn't seem to start with the pregnancy hormones, but has been a battle {and increasingly so} really for about two-three years. Perhaps longer?
And I struggle to understand why sometimes acting like you are feeling is generally so unacceptable. Granted, I don't want emotion to be leader of my life or my actions. I don't want to sin in my anger and frustration either -- and I most always do. I get worked up and in a few minutes my undies are in a knot -- and the discomfort of it all lends itself to an emotional explosion.
My biggest regrets in life are these emotional meltdowns; these overwhelming emotional disasters that leave others wide eyed -- leaves my eyes stinging from tears -- and makes donuts look like Eden's forbidden fruit.
You are probably wondering, "What happened...?"
Oh, not just one isolated event...
A year ago, I married my best friend. And I had an emotional moment during the reception when a family member interrupted the father-daughter dance. Not a earth-shattering incident. But it devastated my ideals. The forever recovering perfectionist became a puddle of anxiety and cried for the wrong reasons through the whole dance. This self-control-fail haunts me every time I think about my wedding day. One of those sacred moments we and Hallmark place on a pedestal -- poisoned by my lack of composure and self-constraint. So in a small way - as I celebrated my first year anniversary, a piece of me grieved... and I hate it. {oh, there's that dang emotion again}.
Once upon a time, I had prenatal appointment. I assumed that said appointment would involve an ultrasound. And I made an ass of myself when I came to find out that my husband and I would not be seeing our baby and that the appointment was merely an office visit--check-in. You would have thought that my best-friend had died or that some other tragic misfortune had transpired, for the tears and the wailing that came out of me was absurd. It seemed only logical to me that in a world where microwaves have "kid's meal" buttons and cell phones can do everything -- that all prenatal visits would involve a quick look at the miracle-child. And so I was, disappointed, frustrated -- and devastated in emotion and by my emotional response.
Just the other night a spilled bottle of Gatorade was the final straw -- to a meltdown about the persistent chaos and mess in our apartment. I've craved control since elementary. And right now, when my body is not my own, when clothes feel awkward {and when they still don't have a home in our closet}, when the dishwasher isn't big enough, when I'm wrecked with exhaustion, when work is new and still mostly overwhelming, when I don't have what I think I should, when the government is on hiatus, etc etc. Control remains illusive - entirely out of my hands. And so the volcano of emotion overflows.
So I'm an emotional grenade. And yes, pregnancy is a great cop-out. But it probably isn't fair to blame my poor choices on this yet unborn child.
Women are gifted with emotion. It is beautifully and necessarily intertwined in this human experience.
But it can also flare up as a demon and strangle me. As with probably every good gift, there is a fine line between its beauty and its perversion.
It is frightening to think of trying to raise a human, when I "feel" so inadequate and really like such an amateur when it comes with coping with such a ridiculous and so often infuriating world. How am I to abate childish tantrums when I will likely want to respond similarly in response to the child's behavior? Or how am I to discipline and say no to screaming, when I can totally sympathize with the magnitude of even petty frustration?
When have your emotions seized you and your best reasoning? How did you recover, forgive yourself and prevent a recurrent episode?
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