I believe that there is another dimension, an alternate universe, where I am not a complete baby.
The day starts with me getting Amaya to school, late, the middle goes like a to-do list a mile long which rolls right over my lunch break and my own class prep, and the end of the middle is when I sit down to start actually working on my own class and Mozely wakes up as Jake is walking away to get some time to himself.
That’s when the end-end of the day is me trying to contain my hysterics about small setbacks.
And that’s when the end of the day turns into Taco Bell for the rest of the family.
Once they leave I start feeling really silly but also extremely angry at them for leaving me behind. Even if they’ve promised to bring something back for me.
Then when my family gets home, they try to show love and affection for me, and I just want to cry in misery.
It’s a spiral of self-loathing. I really, really, really hate that my one year old pulls my hair constantly. It makes me want to cry sometimes. He starts crawling all over me and grabbing fistfuls of my hair, even if I have it up in a bun, and I feel like sobbing: “Just please, please, please stop eating my hairrrrr…..”
I would shave it, but since I already do nothing to make myself look like a girl…
I guess I’ll keep the hair for now. Even if it does have spit matting it down and half of it is pulled out of its ponytail.
This week we’ve been really tired because Mozely has been having a hard time sleeping. We’ve had him sleep trained since he was 6 months old and since he started walking there are nights and way-too-early mornings he cries for so long and so loud that I’m sure he’ll have a brain aneurysm. He prances back and forth in his baby pen, pressing his face against the mesh and screaming. That’s why I’ve decided that baby book parenting is CRAP. We put him to bed, we don’t get him, he goes to sleep. Sometimes. The books say that if you answer their cry then they’ll start expecting it. Sometimes he goes to sleep without crying, sometimes he cries for 10 minutes, and sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and cries for way over half an hour.
Since when can babies tell time? And why does he do this for 2 weeks every night in a row and then not at all, even though I got him every night? And why the heck does he absolutely insist on waking up at 5 am even though every book says that he should be sleeping for 10-12 hours?
I’ve tried everything (for many nights in a row) from going in every 10 minutes to reassure him, to the Super Nanny method of sitting in the room with your back to them (just resulted in several nights of little sleep), to ignoring him completely, and the only solution is milk. Hours of crying will become milk, I think. And I don’t think it’s because I’m wimpy.
Mozely is showing symptoms of some strange joint problem that both Amaya and I have. I only figured out when I was an adult that it was my joints and not my muscles, but I get very intense pain that emanates from my knees at night when I don’t drink enough water during the day. Sometimes in my wrists too. I had so many people tell me it was all in my head (including doctors), but then we realized Amaya has it too. Now Mozely, we think. He was wiggling his legs around like crazy and Jake massaged them and then he fell right asleep.
Plus he finally broke his 3rd and 4th tooth. It was an agonizing week.
My mama totally must have picked me up in the middle of the night. I fully expect someone to come rescue me.
The world is much more forgiving of a crying baby than a crybaby.
My only hope is that I am some CIA secret agent bad A with 10 kids, good hair, and a clean house in that other dimension.
Maybe she should come show me how it’s done.
