Last week was very, very strange. It was one of those periods in life that have a shape that you can see quite clearly in retrospect but seemed totally dark and nebulous going through...if I'm digging for a metaphor I think maybe we'll call it being hit with a surprise tornado. Oh, yeah. Tornado. That's why my couch is up a tree 30 miles over.
I suppose I have the snow to thank. I'm not sure things would have come to a head in quite the way that they did without it.
Things haven't been right for months. I guess I knew that. I mean...now I know that I knew that. I didn't know that I knew back then. But it was one thing after another...moving, Halloween, a quicker than quick shift into the holiday blitzkrieg, pulling life back together after the holiday blitzkrieg...the normal stuff. I figured it was just stress. Normal stress. Mr. Terrible made plans to attend a two-day meditation retreat. I'd have the kids by myself for the weekend, he'd be home for the Martin Luther King holiday. That was fine.
But things really hadn't been fine for a while, and we got snow. Lots of it. That Sunday was a Snow Day, the super fun kind when everything is really fresh and lovely, and the kids were in and out of the house all day. Wonderful and exhausting. The house was crazy. Mr. T came home from his two days away after we'd all gone to bed. I was asleep in the big bed with both of the kids and remember vaguely telling him there wasn't any room and to go sleep somewhere else.
I suppose I was expecting him to come back to us all fresh and Zen-ful, seeing as how he'd been hanging out in a zendo for two days, but his transition home was really rough. Then he went back to work, and then we got some serious snow and work was cancelled and he was home with us. Except...he wasn't.
Not to put too fine a point on it, because he deserves his privacy even if his wife doesn't seem to need much of her own, but things just weren't working. I found myself in a string of tasks with both kids hanging off of me, literally hanging off of me in a couple of instances. I was helping the toddler soap and rinse her hands while I was sitting on the toilet. I was finding the Play-Doh for the screaming toddler while I was on the phone with my sister. I was opening the oven door to check on the dinner with the fussy toddler on my hip.
And he was reading a book.
I will admit, I lost. my. shit. with him that night. Totally f-ing lost it.
Which turned out to be good, because he managed to mentally check himself back in to the Happiness Hotel that is the life of our family the next day, and because it made me understand what had been going on the past few months:
Burnout.
My job is taking care of my kids and my home. And for months, I have been a working person getting absolutely no reprieve from work. Literally the only time I haven't been responsible for watching at least one of my children is after they go to bed. That's a minimum 14 hour work day, 7 days a week, for months on end.
For a while now I have had very little interest or desire to do...well, my job. All of it. I love my kids, but it had become painful to be around them so unceasingly. I had no motivation to take care of my home. I deeply resented my husband. I was just done.
Things were laid bare, though, and now it's on the table unequivocally that I need time off every week, measured in continuous daytime hours, not five minute stints at the sewing machine constantly interrupted with demands to wipe a butt or pour a cup of milk.
He needs time off, too. He should get his cup of coffee and NPR by himself, in peace, on Saturday morning, and his weekend meditation retreat every now and again. But I need it too. Even if it's really super hard for him to adjust to being the on-call guy, to flying solo with a high-strung six year-old and a three year-old that wants nothing but, in equal parts: her mother, opportunities to communicate to her father that he's one of God's Unchosen, and the complete destruction of all order in the universe, it has to happen.
The alternative is that I kind of hate everyone.
And I don't. I don't hate them. I love them to bits. I even love homeschooling, even though tossing the big kid on a bus would halve my workload for much of the day.
Mercifully, just having that little breakdown, that moment when the machine that hasn't been oiled in far too long up and bricks, eased everything for me really quickly. It gave me much needed perspective, an ability to name the problem, which is so very much of almost any battle.
Poof, like magic, I'm enthused about learning science with my science-loving again. About helping her earn Girl Scouts badges. About reading stories to the goofy, frustrating Mama junky about dogs who really, really love chasing balls.
I wasn't depressed. I wasn't lazy. I didn't need a divorce. I don't care if my job isn't taken seriously or if everyone who has ever raised small children has also been spread really, really thin and just sucked it up, I got burned out. It's a thing. I'm dealing with it. It's going to be fine.
The snow came, it stayed, and then it thawed.
