Getting Real with Tammy Torres
Do you feel like you start seeing the light at the end of your tunnel only to be ran over by the train?
The conductor saw you along with all the other people on the train, but they didn’t care and drove right over you! WAM BAM, no thank you ma’am!
Middle age came into the station and said, It’s time for you to get off the fast track lady, you don’t live here anymore! You need to be on the slow boat!
Allen and I made a sign for our bedroom door for our kids saying “If you think We Can, We Can’t but Always Do! We will be in our room viewing our vacation from google earth sculpting Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes!” Kids take all your vacation money, pride, hope, trust, and energy; plans and dreams get deferred because of someone else’s emergencies.
Night after night, sleep was interrupted when one of the a sweet angels snuck up in the middle of my 8 hours of beauty rest, to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Mom, Mom, MOM” – literally scaring the pee right out of me. Like Bill Engvall says, children should wear a cow bell around their neck.
I don’t remember the last time I followed through with my own dreams or plans and most mothers know this feeling – we give until we are as shriveled as a raisin. Then, they all grow up in a blink of an eye and what’s left? A middle-aged body, mind, and soul needing four eyes to see it draggin’, saggin’ or laggin’!
With the kids grown, I should pop out of bed in the morning like a toaster strudel, but instead, it’s more like Darth Vader’s Mother rising like a raccoon has laid on my face from a CPAP mask. My body sounds like Snap, Crackle and Pop.
And you know why?
My mind, once crystal clear, is now medicated to make it through the day. I have let the world in so much, I feel like a mom zombie in a 47-year coma. My body ferments itself, taking any pleasure of eating, which was always my comfort. Having a colonoscopy to confirm, now my low carb, IBS-C, metabolic syndrome lifestyle has added the FODMap diet and taking 20-40 pills of fiber with laxatives, so my gremlins don’t turn into a painful, smelly farting fermented mess in the grocery store or waking my fiancé from a dead sleep into a hazed green fog!
My relationship of two years was unraveling, tearing down walls of fear, pain and loneliness as I learned what being truly loved is again. So many people let me believe I was doing great in life as long as I was pleasing them and living their realities, because I was so afraid to be left alone one more time. Once confident and standing strong, now quietly hanging on by a thread like everyone else in the rat race. I have seen glimpses of hope and faith throughout my life but my shoulders got heavier, mind murkier and I gave in to survive.
BUT NO MORE!
I quit being a care giver three weeks ago. I stopped taking my depression meds (don’t do this without talking to your doctor). I want to cry about being happy, sad, or excited to whatever I want. I am strong, independent and living my way because I have a good support system to become me again and not just my roles. I’m okay with eating my salad of olives, sunflower seeds, ham, and ranch dressing, living in our tiny apartment with our tiny trailer to come and go when we please.
It’s time someone helps take care of me – so that I don’t leave my glasses in the Mammoth Hot Springs bathroom in Yellowstone on vacation like I did last week…or when I put my daily meds in the same pocket I gather rocks in, so that I ended up swallowing a quartz crystal! How nice would it be to laugh without wetting my pants or having goat hairs growing from my second chin and not know!
I have decided to love living in TammyLand. Nice, peaceful, kind, caring, taking pre-retirement vacations before I retire and die, not being on the Amtrak but a land cruising bicycle breathing crisp air and seeing the change of the seasons.
Find your love, life, and passions and live again to derail that next train off its tracks!
I am MOM BOMB Strong!
