the year of digging

Remember the intervention I was part of on my birthday? Well it seems that I have now added some new discoveries to that awkward confrontation. But this time it came from me. Today I had a tantrum and it was a public one. I don't remember the last time that I had one, apart from when I was married. This was caused by overextending myself on the one hand. I walked into a conversation between two people, my daughter and a colleague/friend of many years. He and my daughter kid each other all the time. So the conversation that they were having involved a third party and my daughter was saying that she can't rely on her friends all the time. You see we were all volanteering at a place where getting others to help had proven to not work out. in fact as I write this, many people who are also involved in our ngo didn't show up or help either coming to think about it. Anyway,they were talking and I intervened because I had something to add. At first I was generalizing and then I was empathizing and then I was justifying. My friend said something about the person, my daughter's friend who had offered to show up, a number of statements, like...what kind of firneds do you have? My friends would never say that they are coming and not show up or call...to maybe she's left her house and is on her way and had some calamity happen to her. This is where things turned strange. I was suddenly called into the conversation by being told that I need to call her parents to find out if she is ok. My daughter had already made it very clear that her friend was being dropped by her father and was not coming on her own. But my friend kept insisting that I do something about it! He was so insistant that I began to feel pressured by it. He was not listening to my saying that her father was bringing her. Somehow I found myself stamping my feet and getting very irritated by the conversation. I ended up relenting, calling the parents....the friend of my daughter's had overslept, was absolutely safe at home and her mom agreed to have her come down and volanteer. I then decided to 'fix' the whole discourse by apologizing, stating that in the future I would handle the whole thing differently and still could not catch a break. This whole scenario sounds kind of silly, but in the moment it was furthest from silly and closest to a traumatic encounter for me. I had to take many steps back about what the hell is going on with me? My first thought was to defend my daughter's friend's absence. Then, I felt that my professionalism was being called into question! Then I felt sleep deprived and just weather worn...I had started the last two mornings getting up very early and doing two loads of laundry by hand because the washing machine isn't working and getting the repairman to fix it is turning into some sort of Kafkaesque drama! I realised that I am also very stressed and have no time to process all that is happening. But, I was not satisfied with thinking that that was all. I don't normally behave like that. Why was I feeling so peeved? So triggered? PART 1