Both ends of the candle.

Just when you think you have a handle on things, you realise you don't. 

Evenings are the hardest time. Once DS is asleep, I can breathe a little but getting SS to sleep is another can of worms. The result being that I am so tired all of the time and mostly have to go to bed at the same time as they do, to get any amount of sleep that I can work with. And on the evenings that DH is home and we might otherwise have an opportunity to speak to each other or watch a film or be together in a non co-parenting capacity - I am too tired and go to sleep instead. 

But hey, at least I feel like a rubbish wife as well as a rubbish mum with the constant guilt - not doing this right - never give enough to everyone vibe, so there's consistency. 

There's that. 

Even to write this now I am in the dark. On my phone. Hoping that SS will drift off to sleep after enough hand sucking, at the same time as listening to DS breathing deeply and contentedly in his sleep. 

In my head I know that we will somehow turn a corner, in the same way that we did when we became a family of 3 and suddenly at some point it all made sense. This will make sense too. 

I hope it's soon. 

The New Normal?

I'm listening to my baby coo happily in the other room. He should be asleep, but he's happy, so I'm not bothered.

I've been thinking about how I vastly underestimated how hard it would be to go from having one kid to two. I anticipated being constantly stressed out and overwhelmed. What I didn't realise was how emotionally tough it would be, or that I would be in a near constant state of guilt and anxiety thinking how I was failing one or both of my sons - loving and missing my eldest intensely while simultaneously feeling completely unable and somewhat unwilling to cope with being around him. And of course feeling like a monster and an unfit mother for feeling the previous.

It's a near perfect storm of love, loss, growth, change, fear, excitement and dread.

This I feel is much more tiring than the actual physical output needed for the care and upkeep of two miniature humans.

It is a mental struggle, and for someone like me who is already mentally struggling with lots of plates in the air all the time anyways, it has brought me to the point of almost no return a few times. I have said aloud, "I cannot do this! I am an unfit mother! They'd be better off without me!"

And yet, here I am, trying to do this, trying to be fit, knowing that for my children, there is no 'without' me and for me there is no 'without' them.

I don't read The Books, so I can't be sure if no one really warns you about this part of coping with two, but I am fairly certain they don't. Who even has time to worry about sleep strategies and shared bathing when slowly losing their grip of all possible reason and sanity?

A few times I have had to ask, "Am I depressed, or am I just tired?" I was always under the impression that if one had to ask then one, in fact, was categorically Not Depressed. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe it's not your standard meat and potatoes PND, maybe it's just a little sneaky sadness that creeps into your day - along with the realisation that your first born, your special little one is getting less little each day. He cuddles less, demands less, needs less from you - and him slipping away from you and his toddlerhood is an almost palpable, very painful feeling. It takes your breath away. Suddenly, I don't care if he wants to sleep in our bed, I don't care if he wants me to stop what I am doing and COME RIGHT NOW MUMMY AND LOOK AT THIS IMPORTANT THING. I know that one of these days it will be the last time he does, it will be a sweet memory and not my reality - and I assure you, I desperately want those memories.