What's Your Brand Of Crazy?

I'm all kinds of crazy. I can see myself spouting crazy, acting crazy, talking crazy...and I can't seem to stop it. I don't know when my mind was overtaken by my own special body-snatching brand of crazy, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the pressure of keeping teeny-tiny humans alive. You see, I used to be pretty chilled. I mean, I was never that chilled. I was never a zen-practicing, green-eating, meditating yogi, but I wasn't prone to real neurosis in the way that I am now. I was a little highly strung, admittedly. I did hear on the grapevine that some referred to me as 'Type A' whatever that means (ahem) but, bat-shit crazy? No, that wasn't my style.

Now however, I'm covered in crazy. Being a momma has turned me, at times, into a monster. I'm not proud of this. I'm confused by it; surprised by it; annoyed by it. I don't LOVE myself when I lose the plot when my husband leaves the dirty dishes on the counter RIGHT ABOVE THE DISHWASHER. I'm sure a simple, "Babe, would you mind putting your dirty dishes in the machine?" would suffice but in my manic, there-aren't-enough-hours-in-the-day state of being, I don't have time for that shit. It's zero to heroically bonkers in a nano-second and let me tell you, it's not exactly working wonders for me.

I know why I'm like this. I'm like this because I wake up in the morning running to catch up. I have these dreams of setting my alarm an hour before the Small wakes up and making sure I'm all over this thing called motherhood before she even flutters her tiny eyelids, but that has yet to happen. Instead, she wakes and in doing so she presses a massive button labelled 'GO AND DON'T STOP UNTIL YOU DROP' and the pressure that brings is enormous.

It makes us über-efficient. It makes us realise that we can't survive the day unless we can load the dishwasher, make breakfast, iron a shirt, clean the kitchen and feed that cats at the same time. We shower while we sing 'The Wheels on the Bus' and we jump in and out, dripping wet, to remove the loo brush from Small mouths every 14 seconds. We dry our hair while we ensure that the Small humans don't swallow earbuds, or chew on lipstick. We drive while serving a three course meal, providing in-car entertainment and hoping to all the Gods available that we don't kill someone on our way. We have lunch with friends and manage to maintain (mostly) a real-life, grown-up conversation while changing a nappy, scraping porridge out of hair and trying not to drink too much wine. We answer work emails while playing peekaboo; we take work calls while cooking organic meals; we do the shopping and write proposals at the same time.

To put it simply, we become masters of multi-tasking which sounds great on paper but is actually a little (read: A LOT) tiresome to live with. As mothers it's easy to become dictators (Mothertators, if you will) of our own worlds and woe betide anyone who doesn't keep up. We become lost in our own orb of ruthless, totalitarian efficiency that we become entirely intolerant of anyone, even our male-shaped parents, when they don't behave in the same way. We become convinced that the world will literally fall apart if we aren't controlling everything in our reach and so, when we face a glitch in our matrix the bat-shit crazy bitch emerges.

Ok...so I've been saying 'we'. I'm actually talking about me, but I can't be the only one? At times I feel like I'm holding on so tightly to everything that if I, even for a second, think about letting go, it's all going to disintegrate into the ether. I'm working on this. I need to - I'm a Mothertator and my brand of crazy is mentally exhausting, emotionally draining and frankly, boring.

Watch this space. The revolution is coming.