Every once in a while I have a day where I feel like I’m so completely alone that it’s almost unbearable. Days when I look at my life and I think “I can’t keep doing this the way that I’m doing it”. On any given day I wake up at 4:30am; I take an hour and half to have my coffee, make lunches, get showered and dressed and get uniforms ready for the day. Most days I also do a load of laundry in that time; there never seems to be enough uniforms to make sure everyone is clean. I wake the boys, get them dressed and drop them off at my parents’ house and arrive at the office at 7:30am. I work (most days without so much as taking a 15 minute break to eat a sandwich) and leave the office around 5:00pm. I go straight to my parents’ house to pick up the little boys and normally am walking back through the doors at home at 6:00pm. Gives me two hours to prepare a healthy meal, feed the kids, do homework, clean the kitchen, have showers, read stories and get everyone into bed. If everything falls into place just right everyone is fast asleep by 8:30pm. Leaving me with additional time to do whatever chores it is that I need to do (with whatever energy it is that I have left) and often times get back on my iPhone and reply to the emails that have come in since I left the office at 5:00pm.
I’m not sure that I’m complaining – but I am burned out. I love so many elements of my life; you all know that those boys are my universe, and I have a job that I actually like (I know we can’t all say that). But today is one of those days where I wish there was more support. I’m tired of feeling like I go tirelessly from one thing to the next without any breaks. And although my parents watch the boys before and after school I’m so hyper sensitive of their needs that I would never imagine to call and say “I’m going to take a breather and will pick them up an hour later”. When I don’t have the boys because they are with their father I’m still focused on the fact that I have to deliver lunches and uniforms to my parents in the morning because otherwise they aren’t prepared for their day and I refuse to let the boys suffer because of something completely out of their control.
Today I feel like I’ve hit a wall. I feel like in my personal life that unless I do something that there isn’t anyone else who is going to do it for me and there is always too much to be done. And I’m tired, the kind of tired where you could just sit in a room and cry for no reason other than exhaustion and frustration. My hats off to every single mother who ever did this; the toughest job in the whole world.
When I go home tonight I’m going to sit down with my boys and try to get as many extra hugs as I possibly can, they are the reward for the hard work. They aren’t perfect and they sure do complicate my world, but they are worth every single minute of exhaustion that comes with those hugs.
