“We are here to live out loud.” – Balzac

Yesterday as I was loading the car for a special Palm Sunday drive-in show for kids at our church, I accidentally knocked my toddler down the two steps leading to the crawl space. We were going to the event with my mom and her friend, both over 80-years-old so I had gone in the crawl space to get camp chairs for them. I didn’t realize that my toddler had followed me up the little step stool and was just outside the door so that when I opened it to come out, it knocked him down. My five-year-old daughter went screaming into the house because she was sure he was dead, somehow the bike next to him also fell over (but I don’t think that was any significant source of pain) and fortunately when I went and gathered him in my arms, there was no obvious injury and he only cried for about 30 seconds.

But I still needed to get some pillows out of the crawl space so to make sure we didn’t repeat the same thing, I let the kids play in the car so that he wouldn’t follow me. After I got the pillows I got in the car with them, my daughter in the driver’s seat, son in passenger seat, me in the back. My son locked the doors and then pulled the door handle which set off the security alarm. I didn’t have my keys on me so I couldn’t turn it off and every time we tried to unlock the doors, it would automatically relock them. The horn was honking, the lights were blinking, the kids were crying – it was a fiasco! But I managed to get a door open, get them out of there and the horn stopped blaring.

It’s no wonder that I’m exhausted at the end of the day. I’m so busy taking care of everyone else’s moods that I don’t care of my own. Until after they go to bed and then I watch TV I don’t even care about, drink a glass of wine or spend too much time surfing the Internet. Those feelings – the horror that I knocked my child over, the frustration that I can’t do something as simple as getting things out of my crawl space without unleashing a whole chain reaction of undesired events, the relief that no one was hurt – they just sit in my gut and bubble all day long. Instead of being able to exercise, go for a walk or meditate, I just put them aside where they sap energy. And I know that I’m not alone. Everyone sitting at work with their boss and co-workers watching can’t exercise their emotions when they are frustrated. Any care giver or health care worker can’t show their emotions as they carry out their jobs. No one with any celebrity can make a parenting mistake without someone catching it on camera for everyone else to comment on.

But as someone who no one is watching, I wonder: Am I doing this right if I can’t take a moment to feel things through once I’ve taken care of making sure the kids are okay? Should I be parenting differently so that they see me take care of my mental and physical health? Because actually the most important audience of two is watching me after all.

I have a long history of being a caretaker, working very hard to be prepared so that things go smoothly and finding my inner sunshine and optimism. Which is to say that change will not come easily but I’m hoping awareness goes a long way to help get me started. Because I’m not sure that I knew how much I wasn’t expressing on the day before yesterday that wasn’t nearly as dramatic. That is the miracle of living out loud for me – that naming things has real power to shine light on doubt, wounds and habits and to start them healing. No doubt I will make plenty of other mistakes and the process will have to repeat but I hope to at least share the story along the way.

Postscript: We finally made it to the Palm Sunday event yesterday – it was cold and rainy. My daughter and my mom got out and danced while the rest of us huddled in the back of the car, enjoying both the warmth of being close and opportunity to be in a crowd, albeit a small, socially distanced, drive-in crowd. The chairs were not necessary because it was too cold and rainy to be sitting out in the open. But I had them just in case.