Rock Bottom

Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash

July 2021

The moment when my body declared itself ready to sleep is a tiny speck in the rear view mirror, and my 6 month old son has been crying inconsolably for the last hour.  I have attempted to implement every feeble solution I can conjure in my foggy, sleep deprived mind.  We wander through our dimly lit home, trapped in a sepia tone photograph of a memory I’d rather not recall.  I've held him gently against my bare chest while singing the full repertoire of soothing songs I can withdraw from my memory bank which went bankrupt several months prior. I’ve walked dozens of monotonous laps around our small abode while playing the role of an overly enthusiastic tour guide for a tour that just isn’t that interesting. “Here is the kitchen where we cook the food and wash the dishes.  Here is the bedroom where I wish you would go to sleep.”

The tour even includes bonus additions like the chance to play drums on all of our pots and pans (which is one of the least tolerable sounds for my eardrums to receive in the middle of the night) and some collective self reflection playing peekaboo in the bathroom mirror (which is covered in greasy little fingerprints from previous tours).  I’ve bounced hysterically on the yoga ball at every imaginable tempo and rhythm, stopping just before I followed the impulse to catapult us both through the french doors that lead to our deck. I’ve collapsed onto the sofa, hoping to be swallowed alive by the large, faded black cushions, taken a deep, pained breath and stared intently into my son’s eyes, saying “I surrender. I give up.”  I have officially crossed my threshold for what I am able to endure physically, emotionally or spiritually.

Now I am feeling angry and taking his behavior as a premeditated personal attack. My mind begins to spiral into a black hole of despair, and I find myself rapidly projecting my insecurities onto my son’s behavior with every sound that escapes his mouth.  Instead of trying to support him through his suffering, I am now thinking “My care isn't good enough for you? After everything I've done for you, you are shrieking in my face and telling me I’m a failure!” Surely, this is not the job that I willingly applied for 16 months ago.  

My wife, who has crossed her own threshold months ago, senses that I am entering into dangerous terrain and abruptly removes my son from my fatigued arms, afraid that I will bring harm to everyone under our roof if she doesn't intervene.  The look on her face says “I would rather get hit by a bus than to be left alone with our child in this moment, AND you need to leave the room now.” I briskly traverse the living room, which is strewn with land mines in the form of wooden building blocks, stuffed animals and board books, and slam the door behind me with a resounding thud.

I immediately collapse to the floor and begin to do push ups with the intensity of a gladiator preparing to battle to the death. Each ferocious exhale feels like a tsunami of anger being ejected from my core. When my arms can no longer lift the weight of my beleaguered body, I collapse in a cold pool of anguish. In an inebriated whimper, with spittle flying haphazardly from my lips, I mutter the words, “Why is this soooooo fucking hard?! I hate this. I hate my life.”  Woah. I have never uttered these words before. It feels like battery acid has been poured down my throat. “I hate my life.”  In any other chapter of my life before becoming a parent, these words would have seemed preposterous.  Even through the angst and self destruction of my teens and twenties, I never had the thought “I hate my life.” For nearly a decade, there was nothing that I yearned for more than becoming a father, and now that I was fully immersed in the experience I was hitting rock bottom and seeing no viable path forward. I sank deeper into my pit of despair. “What is wrong with me? Where did I go wrong?”

This was not the first incident of this kind.  In fact, the entirety of my son’s life felt like one long battle of clinging to sanity interspersed with fleeting moments of joy.  For months, I had been building a case against myself, creating the story in my mind that said “I cant do this. I don’t have what it takes to properly raise a child.”  Sure, I could probably keep a child alive, but to actually be the parent I would like to be seemed like such a far stretch from my reality that I felt doomed to failure.  

Rock bottom felt like the rug of existence had been pulled out from under my feet.  My biggest fear was failure, and it felt like I was failing big time.  My wife appeared to hate me. My son appeared to hate me.  And now I even hated myself.  I hate my life! This was the antithesis to everything I had cultivated within myself over several decades of healing and self reflection.  Gratitude. Self love. Compassion.  It all went straight into the compost in the face of a whining, ten pound ball of flesh.  I felt enormous despair and a fierce inability to keep waking up everyday and be assaulted by the barrage of emotional triggers my son was unleashing within me. 

Rock bottom seems to be a place people visit on their way to suicide. My wife tells me that active suicide is when someone has an actual plan for how they are going to end it.  I wouldn’t go so far as saying that I became actively suicidal, but I definitely had fantasies about how it would be easier to be dead than to continue facing the emotional battering I was experiencing every day. 

Thanks to many years of self reflection, I still had some shred of understanding of who I am and why I’m here. I knew that I am more than my ego and the ways it has been wounded. I knew that what I was experiencing was an enormous opportunity for me to heal and evolve. I knew that my goal in a human body is to liberate myself from the illusion that I am a separate, individual being. My rock bottom was just an incredibly sobering, humbling reality check that I am much further from the goal than I imagined.  With that awareness I looked within and vowed to emerge from this hell hole and be reborn. I fully surrendered any illusion that my ego had control over anything, and I opened myself up to receive assistance from a source greater than myself; the universe, nature, god, angels, ancestors, unseen benevolent forces, the stars, whatever you want to call it. The benefit of my collision with rock bottom is that I had been fully cracked open and ready to receive all the gifts that were coming my way.

~

For a musical adaptation of this story, check out the song “Work to Do” by clicking the image below.

I trained so hard to run that 4 minute mile.

Then I sat back on my laurels I guess it’s been a while

Since I explored all my edges looked at my inner child

Floating by the pyramids, I’m swimming in denial.

Time to get back in the race, dressed in a disguise

Of a guy whose middle aged and raising a child.

A job with little pay, it’s breaking me down.

I surrender my ego and lay it to the ground.