Nov 08 2007
more than a little blue…
feeling kind of down on myself right about now.. i’m trying to think of the usual reasons i might be feeling depressed, and while the sleep hasn’t been great lately, nothing else is presenting itself.
working full time has done something to me i think. i just don’t have the infinite mommy patience that i used to have. it’s gone so quickly now that tasks i used to perform with little effort have become dreaded and disastrous. i can’t blame myself entirely though, it’s a different family dynamic now (5 year old and 3 year old) than it was when i was at home full time (3 yr old and 1 yr old), but the patience thing is still a factor.
i’ve been screaming lately. to be exact, it happened last night, and last sunday. too often. way too often. it starts with a squabble. ethan power-tripping about some toy that jocelyn wants a turn with. jocelyn not bothering with any sort of niceties and demanding it, her voice rising into whining and temper tantrum. ethan locking down into stubbornness and me trying to talk everyone down in a normal tone until i can’t even hear myself think as it all escalates in emotion, volume and tension until i crack and then i screech something insanely momish, (“that’s it, i’ve had enough!”.. “if you guys can’t work it out, NO ONE will get to play with it..”) these items aren’t yelled. they aren’t even hollered. I scream them at the top of my voice.
why? why can’t i hold it together? i am not even home with them where this is a whole day of thing upon thing piled up to this “last straw” sort of moment.. I only have an hour or two with my kids at the end of each weekday and i can’t have an ounce more patience? what is with me? i used to be able to handle way more than this and keep my cool. is it just the lack of day to day patience trying that’s making me lose it or is there something wrong with me? i think it’s the former, but i’m scared it might be the latter.
i made a real dinner once this week, where we all sat down and ate together. One. Time.
i stopped at fast food on the way home for kids’ meals twice this week.
i made just the kids scrambled eggs once, while james picked up burritos for me and him to eat after the kids were in bed.
walking from the car to the store is such a pain in the ass. ethan runs ahead and my mind is filled ith the fact that someone looking out their rear window as they’re backing out of a parking spot (if they even bother looking) will only see the top of his head and so i’m constantly trying to scan for red tail lights while trying to get jocelyn to stop staring at whatever is in her hands and keep up with me, while hollering at ethan to stay next to me. one runs away and the other straggles behind. both holler and yell if i take up their hands to keep them next to me.
ethan has a habit of hiding and trying to scare us. when he hears daddy’s car drive up, he doesn’t run to the door. he hides.
this is not a good thing when you’re in target.
this evening, i had to pull a “OK I’m leaving! Bye!” and walk away way too many times just to get my kids to tear themselves away from the toys/christmas decorations/ spider man shoes. ethan of course, hiding, trying to scare me with a boo, no matter how many times i tell him “no more trying to scare me. especially when we’re in a store.”
I feel like Jocelyn gets the short end of the stick often, just being the younger child and I’ve been trying to give her some special attention. But now I feel like it has backfiring and I’ve been neglecting Ethan.
this mom stuff sucks sometimes. we can do it all, but don’t anybody try to convince me that it’s supposed to be easy.
especially this week.
3 Responses to “more than a little blue…”
I’ve been down this week too, although I think it had more to do with my birthday reaching an unprecedented level of suck.
But for me, some of it definitely has to do with the time change. There’s something so… limiting… about not having any daylight by the time “free” time rolls around. You can’t really go out to the park or anything and let your kid burn off some energy while you take a moment to de-stress. It’s dark, chilly, and you’re stuck inside. And there’s never enough space inside.
I hope whatever it is, passes soon. Maybe it’s time for another Mom’s Night Out? I’d be up for it next week.
I think this is something we all go through. It’s not just us, but our children are testing boundaries. I wrote about it a while ago. I have also come to the realization that it’s not Allison’s fault that she resorts to yelling. If I am too lazy to go see what she is yelling to me about, and just yell answers to her, it is no wonder she thinks she can just yell to everyone throughout the house. We are trying to work on either getting the kids to come to us when we call or us going to them, with an, “I’ll be right there”, thrown in.
This is why I couldn’t work full time while my children were young. Not that it’s too much easier now…. They argued and whinned all the way to day care, as soon as I picked them up after work they bombarded me with everything from, so and so tattled on me to what’s for dinner?, I’m starving. I had very little time to come up with dinner, we had way too much mac and cheese and hamburger helper, and I was constantly telling them that they needed to stop bothering me. I hardly saw them, and when I did they really just needed to not be near me or I would explode. It was terrible, I felt like the worst mother in the world.
So after one short year of that, I started working part-time in the evenings. Didn’t have to pay for day care so that made up for the part-time income. Now I do allot of planning. Do all my shopping in one trip on my days off, usually with no kids, plan the weeks meals on my days off, I try to use my crockpot at least once a week…
And my son is 10, he still hides in the clothing racks so he can jump out and surprise me. He’s TEN YEARS OLD, and I have to push clothes aside trying not to look like a paranoid mother who lost her ten year old in the store. GRRRRRRR…..
You are not alone.