this woman’s work

Note to self

Jan 4, 2005 Parenting

I need to remember to check the calendar before posting a whiny entry because — oops — it was all PMS. Besides which I have since found two people willing to go with me. One of my L friends called last night and then Becca said she would enjoy going, too. But first I’m going to ask my mom.

The other thing is that I’m suffering from a severe lack of sleep. I’m a terrible sleeper anyway. Night arrives, the children are tucked under the covers (after a chaos of story reading, tooth brushing, and bottlefeeding), and Brett is snoring softly or not-so-softly on his side of the bed and I sink my head into the pillow and think, “Alone! I’m all alone! No one needs me! No one wants me!” And then I’m awake for two hours thinking my very own thoughts. Or sometimes I get up and come out here and read or write until the words are swimming on the page/screen in front of me.

It’s hard to give up that alone time even though I know that chances are good that I’ll need to get up at least twice since Madison is still nightwaking. We meant to deal with that after the holidays. I have the No Cry Sleep Solution (we aren’t “let the baby cry” people) sitting next to the rocking chair but then when Madison rumbles awake, I’m too darn tired to do anything but stick a bottle in her mouth.

Noah got up last night, too, with a bad dream. So he cried and cried before agreeing to climb into our bed so everyone could go back to sleep. Then his alarm clock went off for no known reason (the sun hadn’t come up yet) and the sound wriggled its way into my dream before I finally woke up and stumbled across the hall to turn it off. (It didn’t seem to disturb anyone else.) Then Brett’s alarm went off and he didn’t wake up either so I had to wake him up. Both kids were up by 8am, which sounds like sleeping in except that I didn’t come to bed unti well after midnight and then all that night-time parenting.

I’m not complaining exactly — more like explaining.

Noah woke to nurse until I night-weaned him at a little over 3-years old and when I say woke to nurse, I mean nursed every couple of hours round the clock. (Edited to add: I keep meaning to write a post on this but even with a very demanding nurser, I still think it was worlds easier than bottlefeeding.) Sometimes I would get a four hour stretch to sleep and that made all the difference. I would have weaned him sooner if I’d been in agony about it but I got good at getting by with very little sleep. Problem now is that so much more is required of me than it was when Noah was small. Back then, he and I just hung out. Maybe we would take very slow walks but I didn’t have a social life (I didn’t have a car) and I didn’t have a job. Now I’m much busier so being this tired is really hard.

The reason Brett got me those tickets, by the way, was to cheer me up after an argument. It was a stupid argument. It was an argument that was actually all about how tired we both are. Our trip to Cleveland was great but neither of us slept when we were there and then it was raining so hard when we left that the trip home took us twice as long as it usually does. And then Madison cried for the last 45 minutes and by the time we pulled into our driveway, our nerves were shot. So we ended the day by putting the kids to bed and then fighting about how tired we are.

Now I’m exhausted but cheerier. I should have known it was PMS. My old boss used to be able to tell me when my period was coming because of how my attitude would change in the days before. She would call about some work-related thing and then ask me how I was and right after I answered she’d say, “Go check your calendar.” Sure enough.

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