a midnight grouch
in journal
i’ve been fighting sleep for hours – it comes in waves, and when on the ebb, i think oh yay, i have energy so when this baby finally sleeps, i can do things!, but then back comes the wave and i’m rubbing at my eyes like a certain sleepy two year old i know, fighting sleep while absolutely losing the fight.
there’s so much i want to do – today, tomorrow, yesterday, this hour, four hours ago, next year, next month, five years from now, two years ago, but it’s really really hard at times to see that any of that will ever come to be. i’ve had a fear of failure for years now, with the very real risk of not even trying for my dreams (ha, dreams! even dinner at times seems out of reach. stretching ever day for just a few minutes. reading a book once a week. dreams?! that’s like beyond crazy-sounding at times. anyhow.) because i don’t want to screw them up and look and/or feel like a fool —- but at times like these, the fear of failure seems more serious, or cleaner or easier, something like that, than what i’m dealing with: straight out tiredness. a sapping of the energy in my soul. ugh!
thank goodness, it’s nothing like the first year of n’s life when i was pretty much constantly under slept. its not like that horrible no good very bad zombie-like time. seriously i get why sleep deprivation is an often used torture technique. it works, folks, it really does. so anyhow, it’s not that bad – it’s much better in fact, but still not good enough – at least for my lazy butt – to get more than the minimum done each day. the apartment is relatively clean (i.e. not very clean, but not totally embarrassing if we’re surprised with guests), i cook meals fairly regularly (even go on little cooking sprees ever couple weeks or so), we do a bunch of family stuff regularly like movies and outings. all of these things are very important and i do appreciate them a lot. they are what make my day, besides the smiles and hugs and kisses i get from my man and my baby.
but lordy geez, i must be really catching up finally on the sleep deprivation thing, because i want more. greedy me, i want to learn, to study, to make things, to figure things out – to use this brain of mine in more ways that i have been for a long time. but then i think about that, at 11:59 pm, and the baby just went to sleep 14 minutes ago, after over an hour of rolling around the bed, sticking her butt in the air (great downward dog), figuring out how to squeeze her toys just right to activate the little sound box in some of them (oh hooray), then throwing them around, then throwing herself at me while murmuring sweet words “mama, mama” over and over, then off she goes again rolling and rolling around, repeating the cycle, and oh, i just cannot fathom having any energy besides maybe opening facebook for a minute or maybe a bookmarked one-day-i’ll-read-you random web page and then throwing off my glasses and if i’m lucky, change in to pjs and crash into bed myself.
i tell myself – and others tell me too – that it is good she is my, and our, priority right now – she’s only two and you can see already that all this focus on her from her parents has been good for her. this time passes quickly, they say, and i know that logically – but i worry too about time passing quickly for me as well. i’m no spring chicken, and i feel it with every crick and crack my body makes when i get up in the morning. i guess i have to trust that things will work out – but it’s hard to just trust when one day seems to just run into the next, and it feels like i have very little to show for all this time passing.
i have no neat answer or ending to this whiny frustrated but also very grateful and loving post – seriously, i love my little family and wouldn’t trade them for anything anywhere ever – but it feels good to have just gotten it out there, wherever ‘there’ is. mostly, if anyone reading this has felt that way too, oh i feel your pain and frustration. this is one of the hardest parts of being a parent, it really is: i miss my time and my time is passing.
