darkmother

The feeling is ubiquitous – or is it perennial?  Does it matter?  I am not coping.  I don’t know how to cope.  And it brings me grief.

I wake up late because I do not sleep at night.  Not really.  Nursing a baby at night is not sleeping.  It’s the option I have chosen as an alternative to back pain, screaming and other nocturnal discomforts.  I am lazy.

If I don’t take the opportunity on the weekend to “catch-up” on the sleep, my sanity deteriorates.  This does not mean that I get cranky or sub-optimal – this means that little green gremlins of paranoia and dark imaginings take over my mind and the OCD starts to interfere with everything.  But now I feel dejected by the time of day and things not yet done.  And that I’ve traded “my time” (time I may have had away from the kids) for sleep.

I love my family and both my children.  But without that “time” I get to feeling trapped.  The observations of unsafe playthings that are either ignored or challenged for validity make me feel like giving up.  As do the piles of dirty dishes, laundry, toys, shoes, papers and the delightful romping of dust-bunnies – composed partly of the hair that no longer lives on my head – amongst the chaos.  It is a wheel, I remind myself, it has no end, doing it yesterday does not mean it will not need to be done today…. some days it feels more like a steamroller crushing my soul.

Fighting through the wall of gnarly feng-shui to get to the coffee press amidst the quipping of a video-game-disguised-as-a-digital-camera and other household psychic flotsam is too much.  I am not coping.  Not now.  I’m not.

Well, now I am – with a corporate latte firmly planted beside the keyboard and my family duly off to the greener pastures of the supermarket to avoid my cantankerous lack of grace.

This feels shitty.  Unsatisfying.  Not what I had hoped for – although I must admit, none of this was in a “master plan” at any time.  And here comes the guilt.  I have so much more than I ever expected I could hope for.  And this is how I act.

It’s time – time to sing the shitty feeling song.