When my boy/girl twins were born, I experienced the same mixture of joy, dread, and anticipation that most other women feel when they realize, for the first time, that they are actual mothers with all the weight of responsibility that the title entails. Just as I was forewarned, the first year was a blur. "Baby brain" made me forget almost everything besides my name. And despite following the admonishments to "sleep when the babies sleep", I could not shake the fatigue that seems to have permanently lodged deep within my bones.
A bevy of well-intentioned mothers encouraged me over and over telling me, "Don't worry, it gets better as they get older." Of this population, there was a subset who egged me on with, "Wait until they are walking; it will get much easier then." My mother was quick to correct this piece of misinformation. I regretfully concur with my pessimistic but sadly correct mother. Once my children could walk, they could suddenly run -- away from me and in opposite directions. It wasn't any easier than carrying and breast feeding them in tandem and now my fears of injury weren't based simply on insecurities about my own abilities; I now had a whole wide world of uncontrollable variables into which my stumbling toddlers many MANY times waddled headlong into.
Once they had learned to follow instruction (somewhat) and they had finally developed sturdy "sea legs" (the kind that don't cause me anxiety watching them climb down a steep uneven bank into a rocky stream unassisted), then I started to see the proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel." They began to play more harmoniously together. I heard less crying and screaming and more conspiratorial giggling and secret conversations. They started spending hours (okay, maybe ONE hour) together in a bedroom playing make believe, constructing fantastical stories of imagination that would make J.K. Rowling proud. Their physical coordination rapidly developed and I no longer had to hover over each of them fearful of unintentional physical mishaps. (Intentional mishaps were another issue altogether, as in, "Mommy! He hit me on the head!" or "Mommy! She pushed me!") There were still bumps and bruises and, my all-time favorite, when my son somehow broke his nose on the play structure at preschool, an event that was oddly unwitnessed by ANYONE. Still, they could pee in the toilet, dress themselves (with cajoling), and eat unassisted (when motivated). I thought I had finally entered the penumbra of the sweet spot in parenting. They were still young and adorable yet I was no longer their only hope for survival in this world.
And then my husband left me.
We had been struggling along financially for a while so when the opportunity came for me to increase my work days and since the children's dependence on me was rapidly dwindling, it seemed like a viable option. My unemployed husband was frustrated by an unfriendly job market and expressed his willingness to be a SAHD until he could find suitable employment. Unfortunately, the nature of MY profession follows the motto "In for a penny, in for a pound." My work hours steadily increased as my husband's job prospects became more and more grim. Just as I was coming out from under the fatigue and pressure of "perfectly parenting" (HA!) my young helpless progeny and grooming them into self sufficiency and resilience, I shouldered an equally heavy burden of a stressful job and maternal guilt as I watched my children shift their previous "Mommy" loyalties to my husband. It seems I couldn't win for trying.
Then, lo and behold, my husband DID finally get a job. In Wichita, Kansas. He received the official offer on a Tuesday. By Friday, he had packed up his essentials into our SUV and he was gone. I was suddenly faced with an unchangeable work schedule (under contract until July), new childcare challenges, and all the tasks of household management that are more easily handled with two people rather than one. This ranges from who does the dishes at the end of a meal (me), who makes the meals (me), who shuttles the kids to activities (me), who takes out the garbage (me), who does the laundry (me), who bathes the kids and fights the good fight at bedtime (me) ... You get the picture. While my husband is languishing in a temporary residence 1600 miles away from us wishing we were with him, it is difficult for me to muster up an ounce of sympathy. That would require my exhausted brain to actually form a coherent thought.
There is only so long a person can endure repetitive stress and extreme fatigue. I believe this is why one of the most effective methods of interrogating prisoners of war is sleep deprivation. I was burning out. I vaguely recall an old Bill Cosby skit that I had once heard. It is a hilarious monologue about his father's car. In his typical exaggerated self deprecating manner, he describes how one day his father came to him very irate because he (Bill Jr.) had used his (Bill Sr.'s) car the night before and then returned it with an empty gas tank. Bill Sr. sticks his son's nose by the open gas tank and asks him to smell for fumes. That's pretty much how I feel. My gas tank is empty. I've been running on fumes. Most days I am in survival mode, mechanically shuffling from one task to another. I would probably notice how stiff my back and neck are from the constant pressure except my entire body aches all the time. My back and my neck are a drop in a sea of pain. And my mind feels like it is constantly swaddled in cotton; my life is a fog right now, the proverbial "new baby blur" -- only my children are not new babies. They are four and a half years old. It is a cruel twist of fate that has landed me here, just as worn out and overwhelmed as when my children were first born. There is a horrible resentment brewing inside me somewhere I am sure; I am just too tired to find it.
In a fit of nostalgia and curiosity I searched for the old Bill Cosby skit on YouTube. I had not heard it since I was a teenager. Here's the funny thing: I had remembered it wrong. When Bill Sr. sticks Bill Jr.'s nose by the open gas tank and asks him what he smells, it isn't fumes. He smells nothing, NOT EVEN fumes.
Considering what I've been going through, yeah, that feels about right.
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