Runaway October

“Seren­ity is not free­dom from the storm, but peace amid the storm.”

Peace­ful by Joewong038

I’ll be the first per­son to admit that I dreamed about stay­ing home with my kids. Home­school, organic, nature walks, art projects, muse­ums, a spot­less beau­ti­fully dec­o­rated house, orga­nized clos­ets and more all floated through my head. I just knew that if I could work it out to stay home, every­thing would be perfect.

At the time, my hus­band and I were jug­gling our first­born. I worked early early in the morn­ing, and came home to trade off with Matt, who worked late at night. We thought that hav­ing one par­ent with Declan at all times was the best route. Except that nei­ther of us were sleep­ing well and D wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily get­ting the atten­tion he deserved. We were there with him, but not really. Many times I was so tired at work that I’d fall asleep on the phone with people.

Once I was preg­nant with Rowan, we knew that we needed to do some­thing. We got every­thing in line and I never returned to work after giv­ing birth to Rowan.

That should be the end of the story right? But­ter­flies and home­made bread and rainbows.

Not really.

I strug­gle with stay­ing at home.

Call me lazy, most days I don’t care if you do, but this is HARD.

Laun­dry is never done, dishes always pile up, the boys are always destroy­ing some­thing, some­one always has a snide com­ment about peo­ple who don’t “work”, and there’s no mon­e­tary reward for doing it all.

It’s so easy to sit in front of the com­puter, revive those dying brain cells with ran­dom web brows­ing and just put it off for another day.

Or you can spend the day doing laun­dry, only to find out that while you were upstairs hang­ing busi­ness clothes, a 10 pound bag of flour was oh-so-quietly flung across the downstairs.

Or you can set out all the sup­plies for a craft project and be so excited to see what your kids make, just for it to turn into a brawlfest over one orange marker when there’s two oth­ers sit­ting right there.

Or it means try­ing to write a blog post only to hear a proud “I wiped my butt Mama!” come from the bath­room, where an inves­ti­ga­tion reveals that you need to dig half a roll of toi­let paper out of the toi­let. Again.

I’m not alone in this. I know I’m not the only one who has these days, or inci­dents, or chores. But most days and weeks, I am alone.

It’s hard to have friends when you have two lit­tle boys. Other fam­i­lies with kids are busy with their own issues and those with­out kids, well, don’t want to spend adult time deal­ing with some­one else’s. I feel like a fail­ure when I ask other peo­ple to watch my kids so I can run to the store, or have a date night, or just be alone.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s Other Mom Syndrome.

Other Moms have per­fect houses. Well behaved clean chil­dren. A spot­less kitchen. Per­fect outings.

But who are these Other Moms? Are you one? Can you please give me some pointers?

I can’t find moti­va­tion. Why do it now, if I just have to do it again with no thank you, no recog­ni­tion, no reason?

Where can I find the moti­va­tion to do what I need to do with­out sac­ri­fic­ing myself?

My hus­band and I have some­what reg­u­lar date nights, but lit­tle to talk about other than run­ning the house. The things that he gets excited about go over my head. I’ve been out of his indus­try for 3 years now, and who really wants to talk about dec­o­rat­ing and potty train­ing? He, under­stand­ably, has no idea what mitered hems are and what’s the best ratio of borax to Fels Naptha for the next batch of home­made laun­dry soap. We end up wor­ry­ing about money, because there never seems to be enough and I get angry because Matt’s com­pany has owed him a raise for a year now and the miss­ing 10k is unlikely to ever be seen.

I try to find peo­ple to con­nect with on the blog-o-sphere, but am eas­ily intim­i­dated by their seem­ingly per­fect lives, beau­ti­ful pic­tures and well-written, thought pro­vok­ing posts. I can’t find a niche.

Occa­sion­ally, we’ll be invited to a party or event but by the time it rolls around I have so much anx­i­ety about going that we don’t. Which typ­i­cally leads to less and less invites to begin with.

I really want to go back to col­lege, to do some­thing tax­ing with my mind, to grad­u­ate, to have a career, to save lives, to be impor­tant. Finan­cially and time management-wise, it’s impossible.

How will I ever find the patience to home­school? Jee­bus, am I even smart enough to home­school these boys? I really hate math.

Should I just give up on wish­ing for that beau­ti­ful room and buy some ply­wood and cin­der blocks to just get the clut­ter off the ground?

Unlike most mommy blog­gers, I have no solu­tion. I don’t have any encour­ag­ing links or action plans. I just really really need to hear from some­one, any­one, who has the same doubts and issues.

As I get closer to wrap­ping this whine­fest up, I doubt I’ll click that taunt­ing lit­tle ‘Pub­lish’ but­ton up there. It’s just more proof for peo­ple to con­sider me a fail­ure. But, ya know what? What­ever, I can’t hide who I am and the per­ceived issues I face.

So fire away. I know Momma M would just tell me to ‘Get Over It’, but it doesn’t seem to work like that, as far as I can tell.

I read alot of blogs. Alot. I think there’s over 100 in my RSS reader last time I checked. Most of them I just scroll through unless some­thing catches my eye, except for the crafty ones that have to do with fam­ily, kids and such. I’m in love with the ideal that they por­tray — happy lit­tle fam­i­lies who eat organ­i­cally, spend their nights play­ing board games in an immac­u­late and orga­nized house and mom still has time to whip out beau­ti­fully crafted projects every day.

I think it all con­tributes to how shitty I’ve felt about myself lately. I always thought that being a stay at home mom would the the be-all-end-all, but it’s really just a façade for hell. The day I quit my job was the day I turned into everyone’s bitch. All day long peo­ple demand things from me:

• If they’re under 1 year demands are com­mu­ni­cated in ear-shattering, heart-wrenching squalls.
• Between 2 and 18 demands are pro­duced in the form of nerve-grinding whines at the most inop­pur­tune times.
• Over 18 and demands are best dis­guised as guilt or worded in such as way that they make me feel like a total fail­ure for not antic­i­pat­ing the demand sooner. 

I thought every­thing would be per­fect and it’s not even close. There’s a least 10 loads of laun­dry stuffed on the couch that I have no inten­tion of fold­ing. My mom or Declan is more likely to fold it than Matt is. I’ve man­aged two din­ners this week, burnt one and have no plans for any­thing tonight. Mom is want­ing me to start feed­ing Rowan solid food but I know that just trans­lates into more work for me because Matt has never fed Rowan once. I keep get­ting told that I’m not chal­leng­ing Declan enough but I can barely keep the kids in dry pants and full bel­lies. To get time to do some sewing basi­cally means that I put the baby­gate up in the kitchen and ignore every­thing. I’m so so slow that every­thing takes for­ever, If I rush stuff well… the qual­ity goes down.

I have no friends, other than long dis­tance or inter­net ones. I don’t know where I’m even going with this. I need a vaca­tion, but I don’t think I could leave the kids. Nor do I want to, I just want to stop being the 24/7 mom for awhile. But there’s mil­lions of moms in the world and they all seem to be fine. What’s wrong with me? I’m I just super lazy? Do I have to be will­ing to just shut my brain, hopes, wants and per­son­al­ity off for good (because heaven knows the older lit­tle boys get the more they demand)? What hap­pened to Me? When did it become a require­ment that I’m no longer con­sid­ered a per­son, just because I have chil­dren? I feel like a ser­vant and a poorly treated one at that.

Well, I’ve already sent a not so nice email to Matt so I guess I might as well post this too. I’m done wal­low­ing, maybe.

I need to get my thy­roid checked.