It's 4:30 a.m. Welcome to My Brain

So, it's 4:30 a.m.ish and apparently my sleep is done for the night. My head is full of thoughts and it has been anything but a restful night. We have had storms which resulted in a 7 year old in my bed, closely followed by a dog throwing up on my bed. Attempting to go back to sleep now would be futile, so I decided to unburden my brain.

Please bare with me, because I kind of know what I want to say, but I have no idea how it is going to jump from my brain, to my fingertips to this blog. I guess we all will be surprised.

To start with, I got called "passive aggressive" yesterday. Now trust me, I have been called worse by better, and names usually just slide off my back, but for some reason, this stuck with me to the point that I woke up thinking about it as I cleaned up dog puke. Usually, if something sticks with me this long, I am struggling with the fact that either there is a grain of truth to the accusation or it is so far out in left field that my brain is trying to process how someone could even think that about me, let alone say it.

It had to do with a post that I made yesterday. The fact is, even as I write this, I am not sure how the post ended up on my facebook page as I don't remember seeing it, until someone messaged me about it. By the time I went and looked at it, it had quite a few comments and in my comment back, I stated that I didn't even know that I posted it. Of course the post had to do with all the craziness going on in our world currently and someone called me out and said that me saying that I didn't remember posting it, was passive aggressive. Maybe because I have lived around, and known those that were passive aggressive and couldn't stand the thought of being clumped into such a group, it kind of made my skin crawl. I have always considered myself a lot of things, but passive aggressive has never been one of them. Whether I am conversing with people one on one or through social media, I always try to be very direct and straight forward. I don't usually shy away from the tough, unpleasant stuff and I try to leave people knowing exactly where I stand on just about any subject. It kind of turns my stomach to think that I might come off to someone in a way that I kind of find icky in others. Then again, I am not responsible for how others view my posts, my thoughts or my opinions. All I am responsible for is my intent, staying true to myself and being as honest as I can be in all things. So if someone sees me in a way I don't find flattering....oh well. That is their business and not mine. I guess, now seeing that in written word.....I am good with it. Was that too passive aggressive?

The other thing that is going on in my brain right now and nearly suffocating out any "normal" thoughts, is all that is going on in the country/world today. It seems to be a mess of missiles coming from all directions that seem to keep exploding on social media and in the news media. There is so much that it causes ones head to spin and makes it nearly impossible to focus on any one event. This it appears, is the theme of 2020....Confusion, Deception, Corruption, Distraction and Misconception. 

We seem to be a world of complexities right now. Nothing is easy or simple if you look at it on the surface. Everything seems to have layers and to do the research or focus on just one thing distracts from all the other things going on in the world. There is to me a great feeling of smoke and mirrors, as if a puppet master is setting a bunch of fires everywhere so that we are too distracted to see the giant inferno that is about to take us all out. Melodramatic? Maybe or maybe it is exactly on point. So how do we survive? How do I survive the garbage this is causing in my brain?

My mother was a brilliant woman. Sadly like most children, I did not appreciate her brilliance until I was old enough and wise enough to know that she was not out of touch with the world, she just simply had more experience in it than I did. She used to tell me to "keep it simple." When everything was chaos and it felt like there was too much or an overload, she would tell me to find the simple core and stick to that. Life organically is simple. It doesn't get complex until humans try to improve on that which doesn't need improved on. Then we just make a mess of everything.

So what is the simple core? It is finding the positive in the negative. It is realizing that none of us can fix the world, but we can take it to the least common denominator....ourselves, and fix us. We can live our individual lives simply, quietly, positively and within the bounds of what we know is right and true.

I have been thinking a lot about that lately. How do I find the simple core with all that is going on around me now? The important thing is to stay true to me. It is easy to get lost in everyone elses beliefs. It is also easy to question my own values and morality when I am inundated from every direction with the negative and the propaganda of the current times. Facts are though, the truth remains the truth, good remains good and evil remains evil. It doesn't get any simpler than that and veering from those three facts only puts layers of confusion and misdirection in the mix.

In my heart and my soul, I know who I am as a human being. I know my positives and my negatives and I know what I as a person need to work on to improve myself and my little part of the world. I cannot let others who don't know me, tell me who I am, how I should or shouldn't behave or that I should feel a certain way contrary to what I know to be true and good.

Right now, I live in a world where good and evil seem to be at war and the two have been vastly confused in the eyes of many. People are so immersed in what they want to believe that the truth doesn't phase them. Simplicity is under fire because the simple core is truth and we have fallen victim to liars and lies. What's worse is the old saying, "Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see," has become "Believe nothing of what you hear or see." We live in a world where lies fall off the tongue of those who govern us and our world of technology makes a lie a proven fact with the touch of a keyboard and little computer ingenuity. We follow evil and proclaim it god, while we trample and blaspheme God as if our very souls were invincible to hell. We claim hell doesn't exist and yet we aren't smart enough to realize that what is going on in the world right now, may just be a G-rated prelude to what many have to look forward to in the after life.

We have become a world of narcissism, disguised as activism. No longer do we care about our fellow humans, we are all about self. Everyone has an agenda and at the highest levels that agenda is money and power, and we the people have been nothing more than an experiment to see how scared we are, how easily lead we are and how quickly we will trade "security" for our rights. If the last few years have taught us anything it has been that as a whole, we are terrified sheep who believe that we will be taken care of if we let the government have their way with us. And the worst part is, the money and the power didn't even have to put up a fight. We handed them our freedom without batting an eye. Why? Because we lost ourselves. We forgot that as a country we were a work in progress, not perfection. We forgot that we were all human beings...none above the other. We forgot all those that had fought and died so that we have the freedoms and rights we have. We forgot what it felt like when Pearl Harbor was bombed and again on 9/11. We have lost our strength and our bravery and the spirit which brought us to this country in the first place. We have traded all of this for apathy, ignorance and "security." We quit being proud Americans and became ashamed of who we are because the media and the money and the power told us we should. We quit using our intelligence and allowed social media to do our thinking for us. The bottom line, we are quickly becoming the history horror stories we used to hear about. Remember when you learned about the Hilter regime and you asked yourself, "How did the people not know?" We should know. We are being told. We just aren't listening.

So I take it back to simple. I cannot, as one person change this world. I can however, stick to what I know to be true, right, moral and good. I can keep my social media very small and my news media non-existent. I can block out the smoke and mirrors and live my life as positively as possible. I can consistently work on doing the next right thing and I can quit listening to the money and the power that tells me right is wrong and good is bad. I can stand my ground and hold to my convictions as a human being, a Christian and an American.

Well, WOW! Just wow! Yes, that was all in my brain. No wonder I can't sleep. I imagine that many of us have similar brains right now. I urge you, like myself to also keep it simple. The reality...there is strength and power in blocking out the complexities and getting down to the simple core. There is also a good bit of peace in doing so, and who among us can't use a little peace right now? 

This Morning......

So I had an interesting conversation with my son this morning. He pointed out to me that lately I have been a bit neurotic, a lot OCD and a rather large, pain in the butt trying to micro-manage not only him but everything in the free world. His 19 almost 20 year old face was perplexed and I could tell that he was clearly irritated with my fixations on the cleanliness of the house, his where abouts and my constant and total exhaustion. It really got me to thinking.

This is not unlike other moments in our life when he and my other kids get frustrated with the fact that I repeat myself a thousand times, catch myself walking into a room only to absolutely forget why I was there or to lose complete track of what I am saying in the midst of saying it. From their perspective, I am sure they are already picking out skilled nursing facilities to put me in.

Sadly, I remember feeling these exact feelings towards my own mother. My patience with her was very low when I was in my 20's and 30's or as I like to call them, "my know it all years." It drove me to distraction that my mother called me 100 times a day to see what I was doing, that she repeated herself over and over or that she couldn't remember where her keys were, her glasses were or what she was saying in the middle of a sentence. I remember honestly wondering if she was in the early stages of Alzheimers. Now though, I know she wasn't. She was just a mom with a full plate and many years of information fighting for space in her brain.

Kids have no idea what parents, but mom's especially, hold in both their hearts and minds. Sometimes the two are very closely connected even if anatomy tells us differently. Mom's are usually the center of the home and the place where all security, information and need is tossed with the knowledge that Mom will handle it. If Mom is the only parent in the home, she also becomes Dad and is solely responsible for everything both good and bad that happens. It is a daunting, sometimes unforgiving and unappreciated role, because it is simply taken for granted that Mom can do it all....mentally and physically. And most of the time....we can, but not without the consequences of things such as looking for our glasses when they are perched on our head or frantically looking for our phones as we are talking on them. This is always followed by the eye roll and obvious questioning of our mental health from our kids.

At any given moment my brain is running at full tilt thinking of all the things I have to do for the kids, for the house, for David especially. I have to think about and worry about bills and finances and then throw in the problems of the people I love, things others come to me with and the many small things that are just everyday life and there is a lot that fills my heart and my brain daily. Sometimes I am exhausted and ready for a nap before my feet ever hit the floor in the morning. Then there are those things that kids simply have no understanding of such as parents worrying about their kids health, their futures and their safety. That is not something a parent can turn off, although there are times we surely would like to. Our kids are our hearts and until you have a child, you never understand that tie that will bind you until one of you leaves this earth. Add in the speed bumps of health, family issues, doctors appointments, holidays, jobs and the scheduling that keeps us going from one daily event to another and it is a complete miracle that a mothers head doesn't explode at least once, on a daily basis.

Yes, I forget that I have asked you if you have fed the dogs for the third time, but I can remember every medicine David takes, the exact dosage and the date and hour of his last seizure. Yes, maybe I am OCD about my house. Why? Because I can control how my house looks, but I can't control that someone I care about is hurting, that I may not always be able to provide a roof for my children or that if my car quits working I can't afford another one. Yes, maybe I say lets clean together, cook together or watch a movie together....A LOT.....because I know...one day very soon you will be gone and so will this moment in time. And yes, maybe I want to know where you are and what you are doing because it gives me some peace in the moment and sometimes that is really all this mother needs.

So yes, I am neurotic, OCD and micromanaging as hell! I am not however crazy, psychotic or ready for the home. I am simply a mother with a mothers brain.....and someday God willing, you will understand.