I am a recovering chaos junkie. Being raised in the back of a station wagon with 10 other siblings in a traveling, over-sexed freak show pretty much made chaos addiction a coping mechanism for me. Prison cells were the most stable environments available. Stability was a frightening proposition. Fast forward a few decades and stability means being trapped in the Toxic Mom role by abusive expectations.

Over the course of the 2 years of my current transition into my second parenting career, stability has come to mean simply knowing what to expect when the 3 young orphans (currently 2-8 years old) wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. The long hours between waking and bedtime are beginning to feel predictable enough that I can actually plan activities and carry through on the plans. Sometimes. Works in progress. Even the Corona politics are feeling a bit less menacing to our stability. A little. Sometimes. Adding hypodermics full of untested vaccines to their arsenal has made the maskites scarier than ever, but at least there has been a partial return of indecently exposed smiles. Where there are smiles, there is hope.

More and more I believe I am at the stage of the transition where, herstorically, my fear of entrapment has begun its self-sabotage antics. Am I building myself another Toxic Mom throne? Am I creating community contacts which will eventually morph into mean, inflexible stereotypes and expectations?

Am I making sense? Anybody else dealing with self-sabotage in their recovery, up close and personal? There is a plethora of detached expert advice on the subject. I can and do research those on my own. Any strictly personal stories from fellow patients who have worked the phenom from the inside? Personal experience is much harder to come by than expertly detached theory.