I’m writing this on a Thursday night, and I swear it feels like Friday. Or maybe I just wish it was.
My body aches, and my brain has turned to mush. This week actually kicked off this past weekend, when I had to rush my daughter to the ER for an asthma attack that wouldn’t respond to her inhaler or nebulizer. Spent the rest of the weekend nursing her back to health and getting her lungs to act right.
Then I had class and all that entails. Which apparently makes me so scatterbrained that I locked my keys in the car. At 9 p.m. So I had to call my husband (who was at home and had just put the kids to bed – oops!) and ask him to bring my spare keys.
Then my daughter had a follow-up doctor’s appointment. I had to bring her brother along and trying to wrangle a boisterous three-year-old (who didn’t get a nap) while setting up an action plan for my daughter’s asthma, just wasn’t my idea of a good time.
After weeks like this, all I can do is pray for Saturday morning which I can usually wring an additional 30 minutes in bed. And maybe Sunday morning too if I’m lucky.
I love my kids with all my heart but some weeks, the constant race of motherhood weighs me down and gets me feeling like I will permanently tired. Like, forever.
In my Parent-Child Relationships class last semester, my professor had two little ones of her own and she tried telling the class (mostly single and childless) how demanding it was.
But then she said, “That’s the thing, though: the days are long but the years are short.”
And that pretty much sums it up. The days will wear you down. Cleaning up the messes, making the meals, bathing the kids, breaking up fights, washing clothes, sorting clothes, putting clothes away, sweeping crumbs off the table, paying bills, scheduling doctor’s appointments””it’s an exhausting dance.
But then your kid’s birthday rolls around and you’re like, “How the heck are you (insert age here) already?” My daughter will be 5 in two months and my son just turned 3. I no longer have babies in the house.
Soon I will no longer have a toddler in the house. Or an elementary school student. They just keep growing. That’s what kids do.
This messy, exhausting, trying period might wear me down and have me in permanent “I could use a nap” mode, but these are my kids. And I love them to pieces.
Do you struggle to keep focus on the “big picture” when the daily grind wears you down?