Overwhelmed

I feel like I am chasing my tail and that I don’t ever get anything accomplished…or when I take something off my plate, something bigger and greasier gets piled on top. I feel like I need to do a better job balancing my responsibilities of being a mom and a wife and an employee, or I might spontaneously combust. M said it best, “I feel like I am doing a lot, just nothing particularly well”. Yes, exactly. A said she felt like the “you can do it all; you can be a perfect wife, and mother, and career professional” mantra for our generation was a big fat lie, and she is angry that she was fed this load of B.S. from the minute she was born. She feels like the feminist movement (which she considers herself partial to) is responsible for that warped image, and she’s resentful. We talked about the fact that while we never would want to be reliant on our husbands and appreciate the opportunities we have in the workplace and with education, there was something luxuriously simple and secure about the distinct roles family members had before women joined the workforce. Women had a job-run the household, raise the children. Men-bring home the bacon. Straightforward. For the record, M and A are both full time working Mamas with two kids (each has a baby and a toddler). Let’s face it, mothers are in greater demand from everyone, all.the.time. When Sean walked in from work last week and I was trying to finish dinner, pot in hand with Addie whining and clinging to my leg because she wants to be held every waking second right now (only by me though) and Gillian was throwing a fit on the floor, I thought to myself “now THIS picture is so representative of a working mother’s reality that it’s worthy of a modern day Rockwell Painting”. And I would title it “Domestic Bliss” or “Is this what we really wanted?”

So, I’m forever deprived of sleep. I get up every night lately with Addie at least twice. I get up for the day before 5 am, pump, make my latte and go to work. I commute 45 minutes. I work 10 hours, and commute 45 more minutes. I get home, sit for 15 minutes with the girls, then go in the kitchen and make dinner. Addie pulls everything out of the cabinets (mental note: need child-proof thingies for the cabinets) and Gillian whines for TV or for me to play with her (“in a little while” is my usual response). Addie clings to my legs and wants love and attention. I walk around stiffed legged finishing dinner and put away everything from the cabinets she has pulled out. I ask Gillian to set the table. I serve dinner. Sean comes home. I sit down for the prayer, then get up to finish making my own plate (I do mine last). After dinner I bathe the children (Amber does this if we are on our own and Sean can’t clean the kitchen). I dry them, slather them both with lotion, and put on their pajamas. I straighten up their room, put in a load of laundry, feed the fish, and clean up the living room while they play a few minutes before bed. I make a bottle for Addie and a cup of cold water for Gillian. We read books. We brush teeth. We snuggle. I tuck them in. It’s somewhere between 8:15 and 8:30 by this time, in spite of my effort to get them in bed earlier every single day. Then I go in the kitchen and make Gillian’s lunch for the next day, make my expresso shot for my morning latte, wash the bottles from the day, and get my own food made for lunch. Now it’s 9:15. Time to pump (ahh…I can sit down for 15 minutes), then to wash the pump parts and make bottle for the next waking. If I take a few more minutes to talk to anyone or if I get a phone call, it’s 10:30 or 11 pm in a blink. I still have to wake up at 4:45 am no matter when I go to bed…and Addie is waking up twice a night. So, you get the picture. I am not attentive enough to my children because I am too busy keeping the house together. I don’t have enough time with my husband because of the time it takes to care for the children. I am exhausted from all of it and not on top of my game at work. See-Not doing anything particularly well. Survival mode, really. This is why I have to literally schedule calls with my friends out of town to catch up.

I don’t think I ever felt quite this bad when it was just Gillian. Somehow with Addie, and adding Amber to this mix (my 18 year old niece who now lives with us) life has gotten beyond complicated. Amber is a gigantic help, so I don’t think anything but good things about her being here, but logistics are complicated. All this past weekend, I feel like I was cleaning, or cooking, or organizing, or grocery shopping, and helping Amber with homework after the kids were in bed until I passed out into a deep, black sleep. I don’t feel like I did much of anything valuable with the girls, which is heartbreaking. Gillian threw one of her biggest tantrums ever last night because she didn’t want to go to bed. I did not sit down yesterday even once to relax…when I finally got her (and Addie) calmed down she, hyperventilating, said “I…just..want…to have…a..date…with…you. Without Papa or Amber or Addie”. Needless to say, when Sean got home, I cried and cried and cried. Because it is HARD. I feel like I neglect everyone, especially myself. How can I cultivate a rich garden when I can’t even begin to verbalize my needs, much less meet them? What piece of this pie is mine? When can I carve out an hour just to do something I want to do (that is not for one of the children or for the household)? My two hour nap time on Wednesday is spent cooking for the kids or taking care of medical bills or blogging or uploading pictures to share. Even the amazing walk I took with my girlfriend last Wednesday (theorectically for me) made me feel guilty because I wasn’t interacting directly with Addie (though we did stop off at the playground). And now Gillian’s school expects parents to contribute time to the classroom (10 hours a year, but still). In my free time, I guess.

I am committed to changing this, I just have to figure out how. Sean has offered to go to the grocery store. That’s a good start. I am all ears if anyone has advice on how to manage a household when you cut out 50 hours a week from between the hours of 5 am and 5:30 pm on weekdays. It feels like this became overwhelming about a month and a half ago when Addie stopped sleeping through the night again, which coincided with Amber moving in and the kids starting to share a bedroom. So, just in case you thought I had it all, effortlessly, this is my not-so-secret secret. And I think many of us feel this way. Three full time jobs is too many, particularly when they are so emotionally demanding. And I do believe that motherhood, being a wife, and having a paying full time job are each equally demanding JOBS. At the end of the day, I think we all feel like we are the only ones struggling to keep our heads above water because everyone else seems to have it together. I think it’s more common than we realize. I realize in myself, it’s time to stop being a martyr and start letting the house be a mess if that means playing with Gillian while Addie naps, just us two. Or to let Sean do the grocery shopping, even if it means not all the coupons get used and he forgets to get the ORGANIC strawberries. Or to leave the kids at home and go get a pedicure because I deserve an hour to myself. Or asking for help and not expecting other people to intuit what I need for them to do to lessen my load. Otherwise I’ll blink and my precious babies will be grown and everything getting done around the house won’t matter at all, because I won’t get these moments back.