I have said this before: I need to go back in time and punch myself in the face. Before I was joking; now I am serious. Where did I ever get off complaining about not having any time? When I had the opportunity to grocery shop, do laundry, cook meals, clean the house, do yardwork, spend time with friends, see my family AND THEN SIT DOWN AND BLOG ABOUT IT?
My company acquired another one and is expanding faster than any of us can handle. I used to whine about having to work 70 hours a week, late hours, weekends, 24-hour call on salary. But now I have to do that and be a mother to a toddler at the same time. It's damn near impossible.
You guys have been reading this for awhile (ten years, some of you). You know how many times I was laid off and ended up having to start a new career from the bottom. Working that much was okay the first few years because I was so afraid of being downsized again. But at this point I feel like I traded my freedom, my ability to enjoy life and my sanity for that job security.
My kid is THE BEST. She is everything I ever hoped for in a child, and then some extra good stuff I didn't realize I could have wanted. She's kind to others, loves music, accepts only food that has flavor, watches/processes/applies, and at 17 months, she has been speaking in full sentences for several weeks. So many moments with her (except for when it's the middle of the night and she will not sleep), I want to sear into my memory because it's a beautiful flash in the pan that I will desperately try to re-create in my mind later when she doesn't want anything to do with me. And on that day, I will likely want to come back in time to today and punch myself in the face.
My house is a disaster. There are piles of clean laundry in various states of folded all around the house that often don't make it into the drawers before being worn and laundered again. Last fall, the retirees who live next door put up a tiny wire fence along our property line to keep the unraked leaves from our yard from blowing into theirs.
The grandparents pick the baby up from daycare and get to watch her discover she can walk up the stairs like a big kid, say things like her BFF Aubrey "is AMAAAAAZING," and do somersaults for the first time. We would be sunk without my parents.
We haven't put the trash out early enough for a few weeks in a row (can't the night before: raccoons), so next week the garbage collectors will find a month's worth of trash at the curb, plus two caved-in pumpkins that have been sitting around uncarved since October.
Jon and I are taking a week off of work at the end of April to send Ro to daycare (we have to pay for it anyway) and work on our yard, which never recovered from the guess-what-you-have-to-dig-up-the-entire-yard-for-new-pipes surprise a month after we moved in three years ago. What an abysmal staycation. We aren't even going to spend much extra time with our kid, and I will likely have to log in during the evenings.
I don't even really watch tv. We canceled the cable. I'll just let that sink in.
I started an interval training class at the gym six weeks ago. The 90 minutes a week I'm doing something for me are so great until I start feeling guilty about what I've *should* have been doing instead. The only other opportunity I have for me is staying up after everyone is (finally) sleeping, and lately I've been using it to work. That solution was great when I could find other time to catch up on rest, but when your toddler has yet to sleep through the night, those chances cease to exist.
When I do have the opportunity to sleep, I CAN'T sleep because that is the optimal time to worry. About my child and husband. About my brother. About my parents. About the sociopolitical state of this country. About work. About Global Warming. So I don't sleep. I don't want to get another job, where I'd have to learn something new in this condition as well as abandon all that I have been slaving away at for the last several years. I don't want to quit and make my child live in a box on the street because I couldn't cut it. I realize how tremendously lucky I am that I have so much help and support. I am grateful for all the blessings that I have. But I don't know what to do.
As I write this all out, it just sounds insane. It is insane.