Becoming Bipolar/ OCD/ Scizophrenic and Other Conditions
We are going on week 13 of staying at home with a baby. I'm starting to crack a little around the edges. Each day is the same. We wake, we eat something and maybe sneak in a shower, he goes to work and I am left with the little lady. I try to clean up and tidy up but sometimes the most I can do when she falls asleep is simply sit on the couch and stare out at a TV or Facebook (it's a verb). Her naps are so irregular and so hard to achieve that at times I become a raving lunatic obsessing and scouring the interwebs for things like "can child get sick from no sleep" "how to put child down without screaming fits" "how long should 3 month old stay up between naps" "how to fight 45 minute naps" and so on. Each and every search at this point results in purple links... meaning I've been there before and read this before and now I'm desperately clinging to answers in a world where there are no answers... and I just need to let go.
But here's the thing. I've never put my mind to something and not achieved my goal. It's just not something that happens. And motherhood is really rough that way. It's not like I haven't unlocked some magic achievement and only then will things fall into place... I just have to accept her for what she is. And acceptance of a situation upon which I have little to no input is probably the most unlikely and difficult thing I've ever had to do.
I have two weeks left at home. I go back to work then. I'm not going to lie and say that a very large part of me is SUPER excited about this. I don't have to obsess over naps. I can talk to adults. I can have meaningful conversations about things that are also completely trivial (school improvement plans and the like) but don't have to do with bowel movements. My entire day won't be looking at the clock and subtracting the hours until 5:30 when my husband walks in through the door. It will inevitably become me subtracting the hours until 3:30 arrives and I can take her home and hang out with her. And herein lies the schizophrenia. I won't be able to have it balanced ever again. My little girl and my own personal life will always be a teeter-totter that is tipping a little more to one direction than the other. But at the end of the day I do really like her. And I do really like our new life. And her little hands and little chubby legs are completely fabulous and the perfect medication to all of my new conditions.
But here's the thing. I've never put my mind to something and not achieved my goal. It's just not something that happens. And motherhood is really rough that way. It's not like I haven't unlocked some magic achievement and only then will things fall into place... I just have to accept her for what she is. And acceptance of a situation upon which I have little to no input is probably the most unlikely and difficult thing I've ever had to do.
I have two weeks left at home. I go back to work then. I'm not going to lie and say that a very large part of me is SUPER excited about this. I don't have to obsess over naps. I can talk to adults. I can have meaningful conversations about things that are also completely trivial (school improvement plans and the like) but don't have to do with bowel movements. My entire day won't be looking at the clock and subtracting the hours until 5:30 when my husband walks in through the door. It will inevitably become me subtracting the hours until 3:30 arrives and I can take her home and hang out with her. And herein lies the schizophrenia. I won't be able to have it balanced ever again. My little girl and my own personal life will always be a teeter-totter that is tipping a little more to one direction than the other. But at the end of the day I do really like her. And I do really like our new life. And her little hands and little chubby legs are completely fabulous and the perfect medication to all of my new conditions.
Jessica,
ReplyDeleteYou've probably heard this before... maybe even so many times that the words have no meaning anymore... but it does get better. If it didn't, people would only ever have one-child families. Just as your body knows how to forget the pain of childbirth, your mind will forget the agony of child-rearing. Trust me. We had twins first, then a singleton a few years later. The twins were easy, the singleton... not so much. She screamed almost constantly for the first three months. Day. Night. Inbetween. Turned out she couldn't handle either mother's milk or regular formula... after resorting to a specialist, we wound up on $43-a-can special powdered formula, and the screaming (mostly) subsided. She's now a pretty normal 17-month-old and sweet, cute, playful, and smart as you could ever want in a baby. She still gets uber-fussy, but (aside from writing about it all like this) those first few months are but a distant memory, almost never revisited.
Just as when I got married, I pretty much forgot what single life was like (and never really did miss it), and having our twins left us amnesiatic about life-before-two-kids, having a third kid left us with no real recollection of life-with-only-two-kids. And no longing for those days, either.
Every step forward puts the past that much further behind you. You'll adapt quickly and, when you look back on all these posts (which I love reading, BTW), you'll wonder "was it really so bad that I had to write about it, for all to see?" It will seem like much ado about nothing... just give it some time.
Enjoy your last couple of weeks at home. Once the novelty of being back to work wears off, it will be... just... back to work.
- Mike
Thanks Mike. Twins being easy is something I'm having trouble believing! :) I appreciate it.
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