When feeling the feels affects your driving...

Have ever had to take medication with the warning "don't operate heavy machinery" while on it? 

The last couple of days has felt a little like that for me, the medication being too much damn sadness and it's all just too much and the "heavy machinery" well that has been our family car.  Let me fill you in on some of the going on's.  I am going to list them in bullet-point (honestly, I don't even know how to say that); it would be great fun they would line up nicely in my brain.  

• My children: School has been hard.  And they are such intense human-beings, all 3 of them.  And parenting them is so difficult when there is a little too much life (read medication)
• Oliver: he gets his own bullet point for landing in hospital with croup at some point in time in the middle of everything. 
• Lika:  She had to be put down.  
• Emiel:  my beloved husband sprained his ankle, badly.  I have had to take over all the driving (we share a car, but he does the majority of the driving).
• We had to find a house:  We have been living with my mother and my little sister ever since we returned from Japan in 2013.  We all get on really well, and it worked, better than any of us thought it would, but life happens and my mama is selling her house.  Somerset West is stupid expensive, and finding a home was proving difficult, but God is good and we were so blessed to find a home right near the beach and we should be moving in by the end of October.
• Beatrice: Yes, she is one of the 3 children, but she gets her own bullet-point.  She has not taken it well that we will be moving.  She is more distracted and emotionally detached than ever before.  We have decided to get a sensory profile done, the first step in getting her assessed. 
  
• Grief (who would have thought a new blog would have so much grief wrapped up in it?)
• Mourning: A bunch of months ago my maternal grandmother came to stay with us.  She was in extreme pain and needed to see the doctors here.  She was diagnosed with osteoporosis.  After getting some help it was decided that she would make Somerset West her home, thus leaving her home of 60 years in Mbabane, Swaziland.  I can't quite describe the feeling of loss, of the home that is the setting of so many of my memories, of the country that is so entwined in my growing years, of the people, Martha.  My heart breaks... 
• Work: so much, there is just so much always happening and there are so many of the people I work with and care for going through really hard times.  
• Zukiswa:  Zukiswa is my mama's housekeeper.  She has worked here for so many years.  I don't think I know another person who has experienced so much personal tragedy and then, in the early hours of Sunday morning, 4 men broke into her home and stole everything of value.  I am so grateful that she woke up and screamed blue murder, or it could have been much worse.  
• My granny is sick: She has cancer and her prognosis her bad.

I have been crying for days now, mostly about my granny, but also about everything else.  I realised today that I am a little raw when yet another car hooted at me for doing something wrong on the road.  There is just too much all at once and there is just too damn much sadness and it's effecting my ability to operate not only heavy machinery (our family car), but but also my tongue (most dangerous piece of machinery.)  By the end of this glorious day, and it was glorious-ish, (we had adventured off to Simon's Town for fish and chips), I was screaming at children who really didn't need to have me become a monster and the one, the Beatrice one, she does not get terribly affected by the screaming, in fact she changes the subject which had a vein bulge from my forehead (not really, but it felt like it).   

You wouldn't think that I had just shared  a video about not letting emotion rule the world. 

Tomorrow, should be better.  I am aware.  

I hope that this finds you well.  If it doesn't, you are welcome to send me a mail and a prayer request, my email is philippaliebenberg@gmail.com

Here is to another week.

Much love 

Philppa 

(if there are grammar errors, I am sorry, I am too raw to care.  And if I should have used affecting in place of effecting, again I am sorry, I just can't remember the rule (is it a rule, I should go to bed)