Just Kristin

I did…I pur­chased this month’s Oprah mag­a­zine. It is all about stress. How could I pass it up?

Any­way, in one of the arti­cles, a mother admits that she wants to devour her chil­dren when they are away from her, she misses them so, but she can­not take their cling­ing when she does finally have them back with her. I was aghast. I strug­gle with these same feel­ings, and it was lib­er­at­ing to hear some­one else talk about them. Bet­ter yet, her com­ment was fol­lowed by the state­ment that all par­ents feel this way at least some of the time. *whew*

I mean, I have admit­ted mor­bid things before. When I’d first left my ex, I thought about how cleans­ing and revi­tal­iz­ing it would be if all my fam­ily but me would die. I cer­tainly wasn’t wish­ing them death, nor did I wish them pain or sad­ness. I was just so far down that even my day­dream­ing self felt that this was my only option for freedom…that or my own death.

Sorry. Didn’t mean that half as darkly as it sounded. Just that, when I admit­ted it to a bunch of friends, they all looked shocked and then admit­ted that they weren’t shocked at my feel­ings, but that I’d stated them — feel­ings that they all had gone through as well.

I think we are all mor­bid some­times. I think that we all think things that we wouldn’t tell many if any oth­ers. I won­der, though, if we’d be bet­ter off if we did. Read­ing that I wasn’t the only one who occa­sion­ally feels put out by one’s own child made me feel like less of a monster.

I’m still not sub­scrib­ing, tho, Mr. S. :P