Insanity Thy Name Is Motherhood

So you feel a lot of things when you're sleep deprived...anxious, angry, sad, weary, hopeless. Last night was particularly hard. I got my daughter Hannah who's two to bed without a tantrum and I got my three month old Jayden to bed an hour early but then it starts..the mental clicking clock in my head. The insomnia of motherhood blows all my teenage and early adulthood days of insomnia out of the water.

My head starts going on and on it's time to sleep. Gotta hurry now cause the kids are sleeping and I've got maybe three or four hours before Jady wakes me to be fed and then god knows Hannah will be up by 6 am. My being on maternity leave and her entering the facinating new world of two year olds means that sleeping is sooo not her priority right now. So tick tick tick goes the clock...Hannah's sleeping..tick tock...Jayden's sleeping....tick tock and I've got to hurry before my vital sleep time is over. It's enough to drive any person insane. That's why motherhood is total insanity. We asked for this craziness. All the cute coos and smiles come with the price of a little lunacy.

I love motherhood don't get me wrong. I love my children. But forgoing sleep for a good six months before you can actually sleep 6 or 7 hours in a row is akin to torture. The seams of my mind seem frayed into a thousand pieces and I can no longer maintain connections that make it ok to feel like complete crap 90% of the time. Thank goodness for my husband shouldering a little of the craziness last night or I'd really go off the deep end. It makes me feel at least a little better knowing he feels as totally helpless and completely crazy as me.

I think that before we have kids we have these romantic notions of parenthood...just as newly engaged people have about married life. As if all your every days are going to be filled with the same bliss of one perfectly planned day. People who think that are quickly awakened to the commonplace nature of real life. Even though I'm more relaxed in my expectations of parenthood the second time around that old familar guilt creeps up and reminds me in my moments of bleery-eyed insomnia that there is no perfect parent. I can't help that I want to scream sometimes. That I'd pay good money just for one night of Xanex sleep with overnight babysitting. That sometimes even though I'll be glad later my kids won't have to be weened off bottles and pacifiers that I would give anything for one night where my breasts aren't the pacifiers he uses to soothe himself to sleep. The only joy I take in these moments is to know I'm an totally normal and that this is what parenthood truly is. All the joy comes with all the craziness and everyone who dares down this path goes through the same things. We love our kids that's why we do this at all and putting ourselves through torture for our infants only to hear them one day tell us they hate us...that my friend is insanity.