Not the mother I want to be

If there is one thing that lies at the center of who I want to be as a mother it is this: I want to enjoy and appreciate my children. Since having Phook, I think I have been largely successful in doing this. This blog basically serves as a testament to that mission statement.

Until now.

This is a problem. A very big problem.

I am in a bad place. It's weird, because I feel simultaneously like I am trapped in this place but also like I am the one who puts myself here. Like I should be able to control it but I just can't get it under control.

I'm a mess.

You know how in the movies, there are scenes meant to illustrate the insanity of a household with children, and it's over-the-top stuff like they show two adults talking and in the background you hear glass breaking and kids screaming and unidentified cacophony and then the dog runs through the shot and he's been painted blue or something and a pot is boiling over on the stove and then a window breaks? I feel like that is every minute of my day. And not in a funny funny ha ha sort of way. More like I am crawling up the wall and wishing someone would walk in and rescue me from my own life.

I have never felt like this before. I feel like since I had kids I have run into about 10 billion moms who feel this way, and I've never been able to relate. In all honesty, I've been horrified. I think to myself, "Why did you even have kids if all you're going to do is complain about them?" And things that are way bitchier than that.

But for the first time since becoming a mother, I am not enjoying my day-to-day life. Oh sure, I certainly had bad days and untimely stomach flus and big emotions and rough patches and all that noise since the beginning. But the bottom line was that on the whole I was still happy as a clam. The past couple months though, I am not happy as a clam. I'm rotten shellfish.

I've been stewing around for some time now, making morose comments and feeling shitty, and the other night I finally had a long drawn-out talk with Big K about this, and he helped me find a little bit of clarity in it all. He's rational. He's kind. He's supportive. So he dissects the situation and helps me realize that there are real, definite reasons that things are hard right now, and there is an end-point for all of them in sight. So, of course, things will get better. And they will. But right now, well, rotten shellfish.

Here's the thing. Phook and Bigs are sincerely engaged in an unending battle with each other. When I wrote this tear-jerker about poor Bigs, I was operating under the assumption that he was struggling because I went and threw the Park Rat up in his grill. But I'm pretty sure I was wrong there. Of course having me distracted with the baby couldn't have helped matters any, but in my highly unscientific experiments involving different combinations of children in the care of different combinations of parents it became astoundingly clear to me that his root issues are not with the baby, but with Phook. When Phook is out of the picture for some obscure reason (exceedingly rare, but it occasionally happens), Bigs turns into a different kid. The crazy behavior, the random yelling, the wild/violent tendencies are instantly gone. He morphs into the sweetest child the world has ever seen, even when Parkie is still there. My new theory is that he is pissed off that he (in his perception) is a second class citizen to Princess Phook. As the oldest child, she directs their play, and after spending the blissful time of the first two years of his life being a good sport, he has had it and now chooses to sabotage their play. He wrecks games she has set up. He aborts whatever was going well and randomly starts chasing her with a toy chainsaw. Then she screams. He screams. Someone hits. Everyone wails. And I've been upstairs trying to get the baby to sleep for half an hour when they come bulldozing up the stairs both crying and wailing and freaking out about what one of them did to the other one. Which wakes up the baby who has just fallen asleep. Which, at this point when my baseline frustration level is chronically on red-alert, generally throws me into an embarrassingly obscene rage and I scream at my kids. And then I want to puke and die because I am a horrible mother.

Which is why I am no longer enjoying my day-to-day life. I don't feel like I am parenting. I feel like I am juggling grenades. The fact that I am still regularly taking these children to parks and zoos and libraries and museums and restaurants and swimming pools and on playdates and to the grocery store is a testament to some kind of superhuman drive that I didn't know I had. Because, really, I want to lock them in a safe room and just take a damned nap.

I can't believe I just admitted that. I can't. This is not my style. I am not this person. I am not this fucking person.

But right now, I am.

So bad.

The variables are many. The first is that Bigs is in that volatile age range that is just friggen' hard. I have some amnesia going with how Phook was at that 2-turning-3 time, but my therapist Dr. Big K reminded me that she used to refuse to talk to anyone she didn't know really well, and I was horrified about that and sure there was something wrong with her. She used to randomly lash out and smack Bigs when he was a baby, and I was horrified about that and sure there was something wrong with her. She used to come upstairs and march in on me trying to get Bigs down for a nap regardless of my earnest warnings and I'd go insane. Her behavior and wacko emotions turned out to be age-appropriate and not a harbinger of a personality disorder. Bigs is just so capable that I have a hard time remembering his calendar age and letting him be that age. Instead, I expect him to behave like he's Phook's twin just because he can hit a ball farther than she can and because his vocabulary is bigger than that of 90% of the adults that live in The Woods. I can't expect him to be going on 5 when he's not even 3. But still, he randomly makes a weird roaring sound at a restaurant and my parents both yell at him in simultaneous horror and I go home and want to cry because my son must certainly have something diagnosable going on for everyone to be so horrified by him. I tell this to Big K and he informs me that he didn't stop roaring inappropriately in public until he was 25, and boys are just different. Since we were dating when Big K was 25, I know he's not kidding. But still. Bigs is challenging right now. He may turn out to be challenging forever or he may turn out to be a two-year-old boy who sometimes roars inappropriately in public when he's been sick and sleep-deprived and has energy to vent but no good way to vent it.

Then there's the baby. God bless that beautiful sweet child because I love her with my everything and she is the sweetest bird that ever landed in this nest. She really is sweet. She really is easy-going. But her contribution to this bedlam is that she has been a pain in the rear on the matter of sleep. I haven't bothered to say a whole hell of a lot about it because it's my third kid, I've read all the books, it's temporary, blah, blah, blah what more is there to say? But the child is not a great sleeper. She's by no means a nightmare, but over time even relatively unremarkable sleep disturbances can start to turn a mother into a worthless bag of hair. I could write 40 posts about this alone if I really wanted to, but the short version is that the child has resisted naps her whole life and, once finally asleep, rarely naps for over 20 minutes. Which means I have spent a huge amount of time the last 9 months trying to get her to sleep and very little time with her actually sleeping. It is not horrific but it wears on you. It's like having something screwed up with your car so your tires wear funny. At first you don't notice but after awhile you can't drive straight. And at night, well, she has gotten up at least twice to nurse--if not more--for her whole life. She's 9 months old today. So I fall asleep and then an hour later I'm up and then I sleep for a couple hours during which time my other kids shuffle in and out of my room having peed the bed or seeing a monster or whatever it is and then I just get back to sleep and then the Rat is up again and then I just fall back to sleep in those blue-light early morning hours and then Bigs is bouncing off my forehead because it's morning. I sleep 4 hours a night, not in a row, and they all suck. Given that I don't sleep when I'm pregnant, I'm now at 18 months straight of utter bullshitfest non-sleep, and, well, I was pregnant or nursing someone else for 4 years before that even started. So I'm a crazed animal prowling around with zombie eyes and I think I'm technically insane from sleep deprivation.

And the hormones. My God. This is where we get into too much information and you should probably tune out if you're not into that. Parkie is still nursing really well and I have yet to return to regularly scheduled programming of the menstrual variety. But for the last couple months I have felt certain I'm just about to get my period because I feel pre-menstrual. Like, I'm positive that I must be about to finally get a period and sometimes I get a day or an hour of spotting but no actual period has occurred. So I feel like I'm in some weird hormonal purgatory and my teenager skin confirms it. Due to the intensity of my personal breeding program I have only had about 5 periods since the end of 2005 (not a typo), so it is gonna be a winner when it happens but I seriously wish it would just friggen' show itself so I can get on with resuming some hormonal equilibrium. As of right now I feel like I'm a really temperamental volcano and I'm sending out a lot of signals to indicate that an eruption is pending, but I just sit here simmering away and never blow. So while the last thing on earth I want to experience is the return of menses and the likely blood transfusion I will require when it finally does happen, I'd really rather be done with premenstrual syndrome in perpetuity. I also have yet to shed my pregnancy hair. I fear for our local sewer and water utility when I finally do begin to shed because the offerings of my drain will likely have an impact on local ecosystems, such will be the quantity of hair when I finally do shed. My crazy childless hairstylist keeps commenting with shock and horror at the thickness of my hair before she busts out her crazy razor thing and starts screaming, "We have to GET RID OF SOME OF THIS BULK!" and I try to explain that you don't shed your hair when you're pregnant and I am still not shedding but it is all noise to her and she just grabs chunks with abject horror and attacks me with her little razor machine. And I want to ram her face through the mirror. Thereby confirming the diagnosis discussed in this paragraph.

And there is one other thing, which is its own topic and deserves better treatment than I can give it here, but there is something happening in my person that is another new feeling for me and a contributing factor in all this. In short, it is a longing for myself. Me. The person. The person who existed before I became a mother. The person underneath the person who has essentially been pregnant or breastfeeding a baby for almost 6 consecutive years. I mean, I still have the same hobbies and personality traits as I did before, but there is the fact that my children don't know my name and they are the people I spend all day talking to. When I ask them what my real name is, they say, "Mommy K---." There is something beautiful in that but there is also something painful there. The people I spend all day with do not know my name and do not even consider that I have one, because I am just the creature that gets them a bowl of grapes. It turns out that the grape-fetcher might be wearing a very stained uniform but when she takes it off there is a vibrant person underneath that many people used to enjoy for her own merit. I miss her a little bit. For the first time, I miss her. I reveled in casting off all the corporate pressures of my pre-kid existence and when motherhood came to me it was like I jumped into a golden pool and became beautiful for the first time in my life. I found peace. Happiness. Joy. My true self.

I found myself here. And now I feel like I may have lost myself here.

I yell at my kids. I lose my patience with my kids. I wish for their bedtimes. I complain about my kids. And then I feel guilty about all of it.

I am not the mother I want to be.

I love them more than anything. I feel like I don't deserve them. I feel like I am actively failing in the most important job on earth. I feel like it is indulgent, pathetic, petty, weak, and possibly even morally bankrupt to be this big of an asshole.

I've been thinking all this for months now but just sat down at the computer on my way to bed and blurted it all out like a drunken teenager sobbing over her diary. It is a gross error in judgment to publish it. But I have very clearly just made it very clear that good judgment escapes me these days, so here goes...