HALT

Image credit: Photo by David A G Wilson on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

It didn’t take long in recovery before I became familiar with the acronym “HALT”: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. When we’re feeling any of these too acutely, we’re heading for trouble. I sometimes wonder if I can abbreviate it for myself to HT, because anger and loneliness don’t seem to exist so much for me independent of tiredness and hunger. I know being hungry and tired puts me in a bad place and yet...

It’s after 10pm. I’ve had a long day. I haven’t eaten dinner yet. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Why didn’t I eat three or four hours ago? I fed the kids, not myself. Why didn’t I (won’t I) go to bed earlier, like, ever?

I’ve already snapped at the kids tonight for, um, being kids: excited at the end of a long and eventful day, and not ready to lie down and fall asleep NOW. (Don’t they know Mama needs to eat?) I couldn’t find some damned stuffed animal for my daughter (which I now see right here on the floor, where I would have seen it with patience, and dare I say it, a body fueled with food and rest) and then my son needed a string (stray strings are the bane of his existence) cut off his pajama bottoms and then they were giggling and poking each other. And I was nothing but impatient with all of it. Go to sleep already!

My husband is out late at a meeting (thus the putting-two-kids-to-bed-solo gig I’m doing). “Out at a meeting, or so he says,” my irritable brain chimes in… But the kids have finally drifted off to sleep, and I’m off to (belatedly) go feed myself, sit down and relax before he comes in and I start itchy with temptation to check his wallet or cell phone for evidence of misdeeds: a temptation born of tiredness and hunger.

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This post originally published at The Second Road on August 22, 2008.