Mr Hyde morning

The Mr. Hyde of my emotions crawled out of bed this morning. Based on the day so far (and it's still very early), I should have stayed in bed. I woke up grumpy and irritated. As the morning progressed, I got more grumpy and irritated. I now have a headache from crying and want to crawl under my desk for the rest of the day.

The morning started with a bunch of little irritations: someone in my house depleted the school treats without my knowledge, I had trouble finding something satisfactory to wear that didn't make me feel like an elephant, the conversation of the kids (as always) sounded like they were arguing, waffles ended peanut butter and nutella side down on the kitchen floor, etc.

Then the morning progressed downhill when Noah provoked disagreements with Michael. For some reason, Noah omits information or argues with Michael's requests. It pushes Michael's buttons and he gets angry. The result: two males yelling at each other. Me, as a fixer, tries to intervene. But I can't fix the underlying problem. They have to work it out.

So I talked to Noah and explained I feel he's purposefully pushing Michael's buttons. He's acting like the kids at school, who know he's bipolar and do things they know will make him angry to get him in trouble.

For example, Michael gets upset when Noah's room is messy for too long, so he asks him to clean it up. When that doesn't happen, Michael asks a couple more times and then gets angry (with good reason) when Noah doesn't comply. But Noah doesn't volunteer that he and I made a deadline of 5:30 this evening. When Michael gets angry, Noah says, "Talk to mom." So Michael gets frustrated and comes to me to complain about Noah's non-compliance.

So I had a little talk with Noah this morning and told him he's not respecting his dad when he doesn't volunteer information that would satisfy Michael's requests. Noah promised to try harder. We'll see if that works.

I know all of this is such small potatoes. No one is injured, dead or in the hospital because of what happened in my house this morning. We aren't involved in a natural disaster like those in Haiti. It's normal, every day, family stuff. In fact, I now feel silly this is affecting me so much.

But I'm tired, which only exacerbates the situation. Yet my tiredness isn't due to lack of sleep because I retire early enough. I'm guessing it's due to the weather and stress. I feel like I'm in a vice that is slowly squeezing me. Argh!

It's amazing I can go from being so positive one day, to down in the dumps the next. My emotional roller coaster keeps on chugging. But that's life so, I'm not alone in this experience. I'll just keep taking it one day at a time.

Tina