Just When Things Get Hard

:::Glances at blog title:::

How hard can this be? The question that started it all. 

Turns out it can actually be pretty damn hard.

Nearly five months in to this two-kid thing, and I must admit that in the ebb and flow of life, we're mired in an ebb. A trough rather than a peak. A low.

Life with two kids is hectic. It's sort of a constant go-go-go of taking care of both of their momentary needs coupled with trying (usually unsuccessfully) to keep our house in livable order.

Take mornings. On the surface, they're pretty straight forward. I shower and get ready while TH gets up and makes my lunch and packs up the pump parts for me. Then I feed little man and get him dressed and ready and wake up baby girl and get her started with milk and breakfast while TH showers and dresses. Then I'm out the door and TH finishes up feeding and dressing baby girl and gets both kids to school on his way to work.

Look a little closer, though, and it's more like this: After hitting snooze three times, I shower and decide (once again) that I only have time to wash my hair and shave my arm pits, so the legs will have to go another day unshaved. I throw my wet hair into a bun and dig through dirty laundry to find my least-wrinkled pair of slacks and try to pick a shirt that will actually button over my bodacious breastfeeding boobs while TH makes my lunch, packs up the pump parts, and tries to keep a very happy morning baby from squealing so loud that he wakes his sister. Then I feed little man and attempt for five minutes to get a burp out of him. He cries because he'd rather be eating than getting burped, and I pray that his crying doesn't wake his sister. He finally burps and douses me with a healthy stream of spit up in the process. I wipe said spit up off my pants and shrug because, who are we kidding, I already had fished them out of the dirty clothes. I finish feeding him, get him dressed, and deposit him in the living room. He can't be on his play mat because he'll roll over and spit up, so I pick the jumperoo. Whilst he is happily playing with the toys on the jumperoo, I go and wake his sister, who is really not ready to wake up yet and is a sleepy landmine waiting to explode when I unwittingly misstep. We go to brush her teeth and she shrieks that she doesn't want toothpaste (misstep. KaBOOM). I try to gather her amazing bed head into a tamed pony tail and she tells me, "I don't want you to do my hair quite yet, mommy!" Well alrighty then. I get her some milk and a muffin for breakfast, and she wanders over, leaving a trail of muffin crumbs in her wake, to say good morning to little man, who has exhausted his interest in the jumperoo toys and is starting to work on his jumping skills, while I search through her closet, and then her clean clothes basket, for some pants to wear in this new colder weather. She yells, "Mommy! WHERE ARE YOU!?!?" from the other side of the house, and no amount of "I'm in your room!" "I'm picking out your clothes!" "I'm right here!" convinces her that I haven't disappeared into nothingness, so I jog back to the living room, where she flashes me a bright smile and asks for yogurt for breakfast. I hear the shower stop as I pour some yogurt into a bowl and baby girl wails "No Mommy help with yogurt! Only Ali do yogurt! ALI DO YOGURT!!!!" (misstep. KaBOOM) and I try to get her to help scrape out the yogurt remnants into the bowl but she wanted to peel off the top and I RUINED IT FOR HER. TH emerges from our room half dressed and baby girl proceeds to beg for a new yogurt just so that she can peel off the top and then asks if she can watch a video and then says she has no poop in her diaper, just pee. I leave them to their conversation and go back to our room to put on my shirt and jewelry and shoes, and TH joins me, baby girl trailing behind, saying, "Daddy's naked. Where's Daddy's shirt? Daddy needs a work shirt from the closet. Which shirt are you going to wear today, Daddy?" I load my bags into the car and come back to kiss the little man good bye and realize his jumping has prompted explode-a-poo up his back and spit up out his front. I leave him sitting there but at least do give TH a heads up rather than letting him discover it for himself 'cause I'm nice like that. I also tell TH that he has to do baby girl's hair. Good luck with that. I kiss baby girl goodbye and she tells me to have a "very good, nice day" and I swoon. I kiss TH goodbye and I'm out.

Evenings are much the same except they involve more crying from the little man because he's hungry and tired. That plus two bath times. And two bed times. And then, THEN we get to look around the house and triage the needs that will make the biggest impact. Dinner and dishes have to be cleaned up, milk has to be readied for the next day, pump parts have to be washed, laundry has to be done (except a lot of time it isn't because it's right next to the baby's room), thank-you notes have to be written, pictures have to be uploaded off my camera, grocery store runs have to be made, bills have to be paid, litter has to be cleaned, trash has to be taken out. Then I pump one more time and collapse into bed until whatever point in the night the little man decides to wake. Which could be absolutely any time between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Because routine? Predictability? That would be too easy. When he wakes, TH goes in first to try and rock him back to sleep, but I don't know why we keep doing that because he can never rock him back to sleep any more, so inevitably he gets frustrated and then comes to wake me up to feed the little guy. And I do. And those 20ish minutes nursing my baby in the middle of the night are the only calm, quiet, slow moments in my life. And then I climb back into bed for anywhere from 6 hours to 30 minutes more of sleep and then my alarm goes off and I hit snooze and it starts all over again.


Like I said. Hectic.

And the thing is, I kind of love it. I love my life. I feel like I've hit my stride parenting two kids, like it's just the right amount of hard.

But TH . . . well . . . not so much. It's too much crazy for him. Too much hectic. Too much chaos. He wants to be able to control things too closely, and he can't, and it drives him crazy. And then his culture kicks in, his upbringing, and all the training he had as a child to focus on the negative and lament the difficulties in life. He constantly asks me when little man will be sleeping through the night, when our lives will be easier. And I get weighed down because I don't notice the bad until he points it out. And it makes me feel like he is unhappy with our crazy, wonderful lives.

So I get frustrated with his frustration. We bicker. We start to feel isolated from each other, which only makes dealing with our lives more difficult because now we feel like less a team and more like trying to take it all on by ourselves. And now that little man is getting older, TH is starting to become more involved in work outside of work hours. He had a golf thing on Sunday. He had a dinner last night. I've been watching the kids more and more on my own. So in addition to feeling emotionally isolated, I feel literally more alone as well.

So it's been a long haul of that. Of constant crazies, of frustrations breeding frustrations, of bickering, of interrupted sleep, of go-go-going. And I've been feeling more and more down. More and more unhappy. And last night, while he was out at his business dinner, little man was crying out of tiredness (he slept all of 75 minutes TOTAL ALL DAY at school), I was trying to make dinner and keep him happy and keep baby girl entertained. I ended up nursing him at the dinner table while trying to read baby girl a book at the same time andplusalso trying to feed myself and I thought how much easier it would all be if I were an octopus mom because surely they have enough hands to do these three things at once with ease and thought, well, even if we are bickering when he's home, at least when TH is here he can help hold the baby. Dinner ended and I was trying my best to incorporate cleaning up the kitchen into our post-dinner dance party (which baby girl quickly caught onto and wanted nothing of) and my god I just needed to pee for just a second. So I put the baby in his jumperoo (cue meltdown) and went to the rest room and realized baby girl wasn't with me, trying to see the pee come out of my body, trying to help me wipe, trying to talk my ear off. In fact, she was strangely quiet. So I hurry out of the rest room and she's there, next to her crying brother, trying to hand him one of his toys with one hand and stroking his head with her other hand.

And my heart exploded.

She saw me and told me with a troubled expression, "Baby brother is crying." I told her "I know, we'll fix it." And I picked him up and he stopped crying and she smiled and said "I helped him not be sad," and I realized that as crazy as my life is, the opportunity to have another child, to see my first born grow into such an amazing, caring, sweet big sister is worth every moment when I look around shell shocked and wonder which task out of the 50 staring me in the face I should tackle next. That one moment is worth it all.

And then last night, after little man woke up at 11 p.m. and TH tried for 30 minutes to rock him back to sleep before coming in to wake me and tell me with a whimper that he just didn't know what to do anymore and me telling him that I would fix it, after little man and I got situated in the nursing chair and settled in, after he ate and ate and pulled at my nose with his hands and tried to look around his dark room while still latched on, just as he was finally, finally drifting off to sleep, he laughed. He laughed in his sleep, and I have no idea what he found so funny. Maybe he was thinking about all the ways he runs his parents ragged. But there, in the dark of his room, he laughed and it was awesome. And that one moment made up for the fact that three out of the four members of our family were awake when we all should have been sleeping.

And then this morning, after another tense morning between me and TH, after more complaining about little man's sleep habits on his part and more shutting down and frustrated good byes on my part, TH called me on his way to work, after he'd dropped off the kids. "I love you," he said. "There's nothing else. No trying to get sex, no complaining, nothing I need from you. I just wanted to tell you that I love you." And I smiled. That one simple phrase is sometimes all I need to hear, especially when I'm not expecting it, to make me get past all the other crap we have going on between us.

Just when I feel so weighed down that the hard starts to be bigger than the wonderful, life has a way of keeping me going. Of reminding me why. Of making it all worth it.

How hard can this be? Really fucking hard.

But really fucking wonderful, too.