Hope keeps us focused, keeps us strong.
Personally, hope gives me purpose.
Helps me through the hard and darker times.
Whenever I feel myself start to get lost in all that is being thrown at us. I try to ground myself. Everyone has different coping mechanisms and some are healthy while others are not.
Mine are a mixture of both.
I make time in the evenings when the children are asleep to do something little that makes me happy.
A bubble bath, reading a book, savouring my favourite chocolate and sometimes having a nice large rum and coke.
Some days I am too exhausted for even the little things.
I head to bed early, full of the day’s events and thoughts weighing down my shoulders and I try my best to drift off to sleep. To forget for a while all that troubles me.
My biggest issue is bottling things up.
That’s my main coping strategy, it’s not healthy and it’s not to be encouraged. But it’s what gets me through.
A couple of times a year it will backfire and everything will bubble to the surface, demanding to be heard. And for a while I will drown, waves of emotions crashing down on me like sledgehammers.
Recently I started having counselling.
I recognise that I need to adopt a better way of dealing with my emotions, yet my life is just not compatible with this approach it seems. Appointments have been rearranged and cancelled due to my twins’ illnesses.
My strength and resolve to tackle some deep-rooted emotional stumbling blocks regarding Violets diagnoses has faltered and I am now at the point of abandoning this route for now.
So, a new journey is about to start.
I am very self-aware, I know I need to be gentle with myself. But I also need to be strong and push through some of the more toxic approaches I sometimes adopt.
Talking to my husband about my inner most fears and emotions had never troubled me until we had our children.
I feel we have been through a war zone together, both traumatised and changed by Violets evolving medical journey.
It’s those thoughts and fears I struggle to share, because I know he feels them too.
We are a balancing act of one half of our team being strong while the other half can have a moment or two to be weak.
Sharing the momentous load and talking often about our worries is what gets us through.
So, I will continue to enjoy the little things, try to limit the bad things and take pride and strength from sharing this turbulent but beautiful journey with the love of my life.