Extra Terrestrial Life Forms

There are times in this step-parenting journey when I think to myself, "OH MY GOD WILL THIS NIGHTMARE EVER END!" I know that's all kinds of dramatic and over the top, but so am I, so it's really what goes on in my head. I find myself feeling like I have an alien life form wandering the halls of my house and I can't quite figure out what to do with the strange little beings who look at me so expectantly that I feel guilty that I don't seem to quite get it. I don't seem to quite speak their language, and then suddenly it's not them that's the outsider, it's me. I'm an alien in my own home. There are two people who share a bond so definitive and so deep that the best I can do is to recognize that it's there because I don't feel it. It's not that I don't love my family, I love them all and yet sometimes it just seems so completely inadequate that I find myself feeling guilty for my inadequacies. And then I'm angry. I don't know why I'm angry but I am because I am home and somehow I still feel like the puzzle piece that got put into the wrong box. And then I feel guilty again, I mean, I chose this life and these aliens. I walked into the family with my arms, eyes and heart wide open and yet there are so many days when it just doesn't feel like enough.

Sometimes I feel like I have lost a sense of me and the things that used to ground me. Those are probably the hardest days because I have placed so much value on my individuality when I can't find it in the chaos of our family I just want to sit down and bury my head into my hands and cry. But then I am angry again, and then guilty and round and round it goes until I am so dizzy with conflicting and antagonizing emotions that it's not just my mental state that feels nauseated it's my whole being. Sometimes I try to analyze how I let it all consume me so quickly but that only makes me feel worse and I know the only thing to do is to stop fighting it all, to just let it be what it is. I finally let things go, stop trying to control every aspect of the world around me and suddenly the connections reappear, the aliens become the family that I love and I realize that maybe just maybe the only alien in the house was me.