No Stress

My mantra this week is "no stress." I'm at the point where I get residual anxiety. I'll be sitting around, watching TV, and be seized by panic and dread. Part of it's from being a mom, I think. For no reason some awful thought like Ben getting hit by a car or John falling down the stairs will pop into my head.   Then I can't sleep. Or I'll get stressed to the point that I scream at the kids, to the point where I feel enraged.  I hate yelling at my kids. It makes me feel like the scum of the earth.  I can't be getting enraged every day.

So, what, yoga? Meditation? I'm exercising, and eating right, getting mostly enough sleep.
 
We're trying to get pregnant, another reason why I can have no unnecessary stress. In March I had a miscarriage, so that makes this process more annoying:

- Try. (That's the only good part.)
- Wait.  For weeks. While abstaining from caffeine, beer, advil, jogging (listed in order of importance).
- Get "fake-out" cramps that come and mysteriously go away ("This must be it!").
- Get period and remember what real cramps feel like.
- Drink too much for six straight days until it's time to try again. (It's the "If I get pregnant I won't be able to drink for a year, so I might as well drink now!" party! Doesn't every woman do that?)

Of course, the other scenario is actually Becoming Pregnant. Then a whole new family of stressors will invade my life. And my body. Ever see Alien? Pregnancy sucks all the energy out of you, then wakes you every hour to pee. It disengages your esophogeal sphincter so that you get heartburn up to your tonsils. It swells your ankles till they look like your thighs. (Well, in my case, a little smoother.) It expells from your body an infant that only likes to be awake between 1 and 5 am and screams bloody murder from 5 to 9 pm.

So no stress relief via a cold beer at the end of a long hot summer day chasing and screaming at my 2- and 4-year-old boys. Meanwhile, my job as Mom entails keeping the kids entertained, changing the sheets, vacuuming and dusting, cleaning the toilets and tub, doing the laundry and ironing, and of course shining the sink, plus grocery shopping, cooking three meals a day, trying to use all the veggies from the veggie co-op, running the dishwasher, mopping the floor for the fiftieth time this week, because my 2 1/2 year old won't stop pitching his bowl of yogurt across the room ...

My other major stress-relief tactic has been criminalized as well. I've been informed that we are "hemorraghing financially," so the days sitting glued to my PC, surfing from Barnes and Noble to Overstock.com over to eBay, Banana Republic, Gap, Pottery Barn are over. Even my $4 books and $10 shirts. IT ALL MUST END.

Go to bed at a reasonable hour, eat every three hours during the day, drink 1/2 gallon of water a day, excercise, meditate, go to church ...  I know I need to do all these things. But sometimes even they are not enough to unstring my high strung resting metabolism. But WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?