How low can you go

WARNING: The following post is a long long diatribe on the difficulties of being a parent in the Jones house these days. Let go of guilt and skip reading it if you frankly aren't interested. I'll never know.


It is SO HARD being a parent in our house these days. Although the symptoms are varied the primary disease is one thing: utter, unrelenting, merciless, exhaustion.

As of November I will have been pregnant or nursing, without a day's reprieve, for the past five years. These are years of interrupted sleep at best, head pounding, I haven't slept in weeks exhaustion at the bottom. We are at the bottom these days and not only are Greg and I losing the battle, I think we both feel like we are losing the war.

Dane is obviously the primary culprit. We cannot seem to get him out of our room. He is not a good sleeper and so inconsistent that it makes putting him in with Aubrey and Nathan impractical. Yet, he's big enough that when he is in our room with us he cries and wails, knowing that we are lying inches away, wanting to scream ourselves. So, Greg and I have been sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor of the play room on a semi-permanent basis until Dane sleeps well enough that he can join his siblings. There is no sign of this happening any time soon. To further the indignity of our sleeping arrangement, when Nathan ran downstairs naked tonight to get his blankies he took the liberty of first standing on our bed and peeing all over it. I won't lie, I actually cried.

The other sleep issue relates to us just having three little kids. Imagine if you will one little kid waking up once at night needing a drink of water. No big deal, right? Now imagine that both older kids do that in conjunction with the baby who is rarely up less than twice. We now have four opportunities for mommy and daddy to drag themselves out of bed. It is RARE that we get more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. Can you see why after months (really, years) of this we are close to insanity?

As anyone knows, exhaustion clouds everything. I am impatient. I am short. I am easily frustrated and not able to see past the small things. I am not the mom or wife I want to be. Greg and I spend our evening snuggled together in front of the t.v., too stinking tired to do something more interesting. As a mom who is often motivated by guilt this is a recipe for one big guilt pie. I'm not present and engaged with my kids, I'm not thinking of interesting crafts, I dream of whole days spent with the kids parked in front of movies while I never move from a horizontal position, and I am so frustrated because I know I can be so much better than this. DO you want to know what exhaustion plus guilt equals? Resentment.

It is a bad bad feeling to resent your kids. It doesn't happen very often but it's been happening lately. Both Nathan and Dane have colds that compound the situation. And I feel resentful. I had a long dentist appointment yesterday morning and my teeth pounded all day. Yet, I continued to nurse babies and feed kids, and settle fights (I just spelled fight "fite". That is what tired does to you.), and read books and try to be interesting and supportive and sing songs and remember how many servings of vegetables the kids had and how much exercise they got and deal with Aubrey's UNENDING ARGUING ABOUT EVERYTHING, and clean up all the puke Dane gets on the floor and make dinner and still be patient patient patient. By the end of yesterday and today I wanted to scream. I am so so so so so stinking tired. Oh, and in case you were wondering, resentment just breeds more guilt.

Yep, more guilt because I have pictures of kids who are being treated at St. Jude's Hospital on my fridge and I'm so blessed that my kids are healthy. We got new family pictures and I look at that picture and think that I would DIE if one thing happened to any of them. And my Grandma had eight kids and lived in a house the size of my garage, literally, and brought her wash to a laundry mat and grew and harvested and cooked and canned all their food. My other grandmother lived snowed in half the year with her five small kids and no sanity breaks and no Starbucks. Something tells me that they weren't getting a solid eight hours of sleep a night either. Besides, what do we want from these babies of ours? They are little little children and they just do the things that little children do. They are the most precious, worthwhile, amazing endeavors we have ever taken on. But the unending work of it all tends to take the shine off. And have I mentioned the exhaustion?

This blog is such good therapy for me. I suppose I shouldn't need to vent my frustrations in a public forum but I hope that there are some other parents out there that can relate to this feeling. Parenting is awesome. Kids are a gift from God. I will never have another job that is of greater consequence than the one I am doing now. And is it hard hard hard hard work, the hardest I have ever done.

Oh, and if you're wondering why I'm typing this rather than sleeping, it's because Dane has been up and crying. Crying because his nose is plugged and he's cutting six teeth and because he's a baby. Trust me, in this house, there is no rest for the weary.

Final note. I did not have it in me to spell check this thing. If you have made it to this far I will assume that you overlooked the typos.