How did this happen to us?

Dear reader, I am back. I’m writing to you, surrounded by boxes in my new house in North County Dublin after a successful move. The sound of sea waves are lapping gently nearby and my kid is finally ready and genuinely excited to start the school we’ve been prepping him for for well over a year. The school we’ve moved for. The basket we put all of our eggs in. The stars are aligning, our hard work finally paying off. It all feels right.

LOL, just kidding. In reality, that whole life changing plan fell apart in spectacular fashion. And of course it all went to shit at the eleventh hour, torpedoing us into a stress my body (my body, the one that’s intimately familiar with stress to begin with) had yet to experience. That’s saying something. I can kind of laugh about it now. Kind of. We had one particularly intense week, in the midst of it all, where our nightly question of ‘what will we have for dinner?’ became ‘and will you be having a Xanax or a whiskey this evening? Or both?’ My poor husband — otherwise a pretty chill guy — zombied his way around the house with one hand permanently glued to his chest as though he could rub out the worry right at the site. He appeared suspended in a state of chronic hyperventilation, like he was just stuck, making the kinds of facial expressions you make when your body first hits the ice cold water on a January sea swim. Constantly braced, hoping a breath deep enough would allow the body to adapt. My way of coping was to just cry and drink and cry.

So let’s rewind. What happened?