Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be 33 years old.
This is the first time I’ve had absolutely no enthusiasm for my own birthday; normally I’m pretty keen on the celebrating and the cake and the “do something fun!” and I suck up ever drop of birthday joy that I can possibly uncover.
For the first time ever, I just don’t feel like there’s anything to look forward to or anything to celebrate about my birthday.
In fact, I’m kind of dreading it.
Coffee will be working, as always on a weekday, and not getting home until around 7:30. Then we start the bedtime routine for the kids, at 8pm. The last kid gets into bed at 10pm.
And then we go to sleep, ourselves, since the alarm goes off early the next morning again.
The kids will be home all day – fighting and arguing and crying and demanding food and entertainment. They, like all kids, don’t really care about things that don’t have anything to do with themselves.
It may be my birthday tomorrow, but they’re more concerned about whether I’ll take them somewhere or whose side I’ll take in their latest disagreement.
(I don’t say this with any judgment – it’s just the way kids are.. mine and others’.)
Coffee and I had planned to go out on the weekend – for sushi, in fact, nothing extravagant or wild – but our babysitter will be away for a week. So that’s not happening.
The budget doesn’t have room for any fancy gifts and, even if it did, when would I have time to enjoy them?
The things I’d likely enjoy most would require me to be home, alone, for the day. Some time to read a book and leisurely eat a sandwich and gather my sanity… Or maybe a day spent with Coffee so I can remember what I’m like as a non-mother. So he can remind me of myself, as a human being, and not the source of all life’s solutions for 3 small people.
And where, exactly, would the children go for this? I can barely get them to stay outside for more than 5 minutes without someone coming into the house to complain that someone hit someone else or it’s too hot or they’re bored. Not happening.
See, now this sounds like some sort of a complaints list. It’s not. It’s perhaps that, at times, the whole deal of parenting makes me feel completely lost.
I am no longer me – I’m someone’s mother. Constantly responsible. Constantly cleaning and organizing and wrangling and unable to go somewhere for even a few minutes without having to tell someone to stop that, quit that, PUT THAT DOWN.
In the library, I have to grab things as quickly as I possibly can before the meltdowns happen. Before one kid goes running, screaming, across the library. Before another kid starts to cry. Before another has a temper tantrum.
In the store, I have to will myself to ignore them – literally – if I hope to get even the simplest of things accomplished. And even then they ask for candy and gum and why are we taking so long and can we go home now and why do we need to buy this thing and what’s that over there and mom, he’s over there and he didn’t ask if he could go over there and why can’t we go home now?
Let me say this: I have really good kids. They have their own quirks, of course, but they are not terrors. They are not terrible children or badly behaved. I recognize this and I recognize how much harder this could all be and I recognize how good I have it.
They’re just kids.
If I am not hanging out with them, and if I send them outside, I feel guilty.
If I let them watch a movie or play with the DS’ for any length of time, I feel guilty.
If I am irritable from hours of kid-ness, I feel guilty.
If I tell Coffee that I’m overwhelmed, I feel guilty.
If I seek time to myself to read or sew or lie still, I feel guilty.
And more and more of me leaks away with each passing moment.
I joke about the fact that my hair needs dye and my eyebrows need waxing and that I feel frumpy and maternal and that I wish I could fix it. But I don’t know what that something is or if it even exists. It’s beyond my roots and eyebrows. It’s beyond my t-shirts and jeans.
We can’t afford to send the kids to camp at $300/each per week. We can’t afford a babysitter so I can take a weekday afternoon to myself. We’re not broke, by any means, but we are careful with our money.
And Coffee is already complaining that after working all day, all week, he doesn’t get any time for himself either. He’s working overtime lately as a result of some changes at work.
Part of me is jealous. As much as he reminds me that, at work, he’s not exactly whiling away the time with a cup of coffee and a stack of books, I imagine the heaven of having a break from the ultimate neediness of the kids. The idea of 10 hours a day in which no one cries, screams, hits someone, clings, makes weird demands, wets their pants, throws a hissy fit in the middle of the floor.. well, it sounds good.
I tell him that it’s not the job that I envy – it’s the fact that, for those 10 hours, his mind belongs to him. He can go the bathroom and not have someone asking, “What you DOING in there? WHAT bathroom things? Are you PEEING?!” and he can eat lunch without someone weeping that they don’t “liiiiiiiiiiiiiiike this lunch” as he eats.
I mean, he leaves before they’re awake most mornings. He returns in time to help tuck the youngest one into bed.
And yet if we were to change places – me working and him at home – we’d be living on about half the income we currently have. That, I suspect, would lead to a whole new kind of stress.
It’s dangerous, I know, to romanticize his side of things. It’s even more dangerous to make any comparisons.
He returns home, in fact, to a wife who has a crazed look in her eyes. One who cannot wait to make an escape to the bedroom – and who he has to drag out, minutes later, so she can say goodnight to the kids. He returns home to my litany of the day’s crappy moments. He comes home, sometimes, to my tears.
He spends his weekends trying to catch up on chores. Spend time with the kids. And trying to repeatedly drag me out of the bedroom where I’m desperately trying to save my own sanity by taking time for myself.
I knew to expect this feeling – best known as the “post-adoption blues”. The part where you mourn a bit for your previous life and wonder how to make yourself fit into the new one in a way that makes you feel like you’re doing your best, being your best.
I read about it and I researched it. I knew it would happen eventually and that, honestly, the only thing to consider was how long it would last and how I’d cope with it.
For the most part, people talk about the “post-adoption blues” as something that comes from the realization that parenting the child(ren) isn’t always fun. It’s not a storybook or a movie or some glamorous event. That’s not what I’m feeling. I knew it wasn’t always fun and I knew kids were demanding and I knew, too, that adopting three kids at once from the foster care system might be, shall we say, a bit of a challenge.
What I’m feeling is trapped in this weird alternate universe where I can’t seem to balance the things that are important. And that’s what’s making me twitchy and weepy and irritable. Because I don’t know HOW to fix this – and yet, out there in the world, there are thousands of women doing pretty much what I’m doing and they’re doing it better than I am.
I want to be a good mother. I want to raise kids who are strong, confident, independent and self-assured and, too, who know they are loved and cherished and cared for and adored.
I want to be a human being who has time to read, to sew, to create things.
I want to be a person who doesn’t feel, constantly, like she’s been run over by a truck. Someone who sleeps soundly on occasion.
I want to be the sort of person who enjoys her kids but who also gets to spend time away from them.
I want to not feel bad or guilty when I assert that this stay-at-home mother thing is hard, sometimes, and that I need help.
But I don’t know where that help is going to come from, honestly, because my friends have jobs and they have lives and some of them don’t like kids. There are no local extended family members on whom I could pawn the kids for a weekend. The kids have no interest in getting together with friends and, honestly, I can’t fathom how I’d handle them having all of their friends over here.
I can’t afford a babysitter, a daycare, a camp..
My husband is at work all day and part of the evening and wants to spend time doing thing that he, be all rights, should be able to do. And things that I want him to be able to do, too.
I’m feeling down enough that my birthday is meaningless to me – which is a sign that all is not ideal or even close to it. And writing all of this, for as long as it has taken me (with endless trips to answer the phone, open the door, close the door, let the dogs out and back in, answer questions about television…) hasn’t made me see any solutions. No end in sight.
So what do I do, oh wise internets? How do I pull my shit together again?
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