Post adrenaline fall out

Is that a syndrome yet? It ought to be. Having run on adrenaline and cortisol for the last three months, wondering if Sick Husband had cancer, worrying about what would happen if he didn't get/couldn't start his new job and dealing with the demands of the house/kids/Florence Nightingale duties, I'm now experiencing the aftermath. Think of all those pictures of Hiroshima after the bomb dropped and you've got a pretty good picture of my mental and physical state.

I decided yesterday that it might do me good to try and get back into 'normal' life - if that is in fact at all possible with Recovering Husband still at home - and headed out to a bit of a mums'n'kids get-together for the Easter hols. Several shocks awaited me. The first was how out of touch with seeing people outside of medical institutions I am. I can do the non-verbal stuff really well now - I could ask anyone in anyone language if they've finished with that copy of 'Hello' - and I'm totally at home having a discussion with a complete stranger about the merits of a scone. I'm even confident these days at twisting my tongue round the names of certain procedures or medications. But put me in a room full of normal women talking about normal things and I'm completely out of my depth. I'd have been better off spending my time communicating with the 6-week old baby. She and I seem to be on pretty much the same level (look at the pretty light, look at the pretty light...).

The second shock was how normal everyone else actually is.
'No medical emergency today then?' asked my friend as she came to pick us all up. (Guardian readers note - although I may be in my car almost as much as I'm in my bed, we country-dwellers do sometimes share our planet-raping behaviour.)
'No, not today,' I smiled, almost breaking Teenage Toddler's foot as I rammed it into his shoe.
This fact hit me more as I listened to what they'd all been up to. I hadn't seen them since November last year and I have to say they're a fairly normal bunch for an NCT group. For the uninitiated, the NCT is an organisation for pregnant women and mothers of small babies to meet each other, get birth info etc in a kind of hessian-weave way (they're very hot on natural birth, 'empowerment', organic food/nappies and breast-feeding). It is supposedly for 'intelligent' women with 'awareness' but what that really means is it's for the middle-classes. I met, and still see, one group of women when I was pregnant with my first son and attended a refresher course when pregnant with the second. I'd love to paint a picture of myself as Earth Mother and say that I only went to learn how to massage my perineum, but the truth is I went to meet women I could moan to/drink wine with post-partum. My other, first NCT group (who I'll talk about another time) are Very NCT. Last time I saw them we had salmon and fine wine for lunch at one of their beautiful Norfolk farmhouses, discussed private schools and talked about skiing and Mark Warner holidays. Well, they did. I sat and got quietly pissed after depressing them all about Sick Husband, how worried about money I was and how knackered I felt.
This lot, however, are far more normal, if less alcholic (there are pros and cons for everything). They're decorating their houses, thinking about moving and not being able to afford it, planning for people to come and stay over Easter, sorting out activities for the kids, shopping at Primark and organising things. The woman who was hosting had even labelled little bags for an Easter egg hunt, labelled beakers for the kids so they wouldn't keep asking where their drinks were (she is admittedly a teacher, but even so!) In a kind of suppressed-hysteric way, I joked about how inadequate she made me feel, how organised she was. The other mums were equally impressed/scared too, so I didn't feel I was talking out of turn.
'Oh, I have to be that way,' she said. 'It's probably the part of me that's such a control freak I can't cope if things don't go according to plan. At least I know if I've planned I can relax and accept that whatever happens happens.'
'But you're so together!' I enthused. 'I'd never think of doing that even if I'd managed to think of doing an Easter egg hunt before Easter Sunday.' (My limit would probably be handing a bowl of eggs around and letting them fight over it like dogs with a fox.)
'It's from years of being a teacher, I think,' she said - modestly, let it be noted. 'Years of having to plan and think ahead.'
I laughed. 'Not like me then. Years of having to lurch-'
'From crisis to crisis?' suggested one of the others.
I was actually going to say 'from one crap freelance job to another', but I guess that made the point quite succinctly.

The third shock was how tired just eating a bit of home-made cake, drinking some tea and chatting made me. By the time I got home I felt like I'd been mugged. Funny how you can do school/nursery/paygroup runs, food shop, keep your house in order, drive to and from hospitals, run Arthritic Son to and from an appointment, do playdough Fruit Bowls with Teenage Toddler, cook, sort laundry, answer the phone, fetch wood, keep a fire going, remember to do homework, bath kids, read stories AND embed some deep worry lines into your face all in the one day, yet two hours relaxing makes you feel like you've been hit by a truck.

I got up this morning and cancelled the playdate for today. Call me the Antimother, but I just couldn't face it. Instead, I decided to use Recovering Husband and went back to bed for a spot of Jeremy Kyle and a doze. It's Good Friday tomorrow. I'll try again then.