I snapped at my 17-month-old at four o'clock in the morning, for potentially being in pain. Seriously. I know I'm not the only one who's ever done that but it feels awful, and mostly because it's all my fault. I worked at the office yesterday and with my new hours I am doing ten hours, so I didn't get home until after six, where I met B and H at the playground with a couple of my/our mommy friends and their boys. Then we went out to a fancy restaurant for dinner called Whole Foods. I looked at my watch as we were finishing eating and said, "oh my goodness, it's 10 to seven," but my friend pointed out that it was actually 10 to eight. Oops. By the time we got home we had missed H's bedtime by over an hour and he was feeling it. Also, the whole time at the playground and at the fancy restaurant and even when we were home, he wanted both of us to be there. My analysis is that he wasn't sure which one of us was going to be there when - was one of us going to leave again? And that was making him anxious and me sad.
That's how it's been for the last couple of weeks. A lot of handing off, one of us comes, the other one goes. We added some new fun to the new working arrangement by deciding to move back to New York, which has meant surprise trips to go see open houses, frantically trying to get our house ready to put on the market, and a general heightened level of anxiety. Add to that me going away for a night with my sister (it was divine) and taking on a month long work assignment at about 10 hours a week in addition to the new work arrangement (to be fair I signed up for this other assignment before I decided to go back to work. At any other moment it would be quite enjoyable). B is working hard with less time trying to get clients, get his business set up, and his office arranged, and keeping me from going off the deep end (which takes way more time than it should).
I was feeling guilty about having too much on my non-H plate, which is of course why H was feeling that way and B was feeling bad because he thought it was his fault for not planning their day better to get H to bed sooner, so after a rare unsuccessful attempt to put H in his own bed, we brought him in to ours. We both had planned to do hours of work after putting H to bed but decided against our own wills to go to sleep too. The only problem with that was that we really can't sleep so well with an uncomfortable H in our bed. He was wiggling and spinning and laying on our faces and smacking our ears. And I quickly went from being worried about him to being frustrated that I wasn't getting any sleep. And I snapped. It was brief, just his name, "HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH." And it wasn't the first time and I know it won't be the last, but I feel like I'm watching it happen.
We've made choices, most of them I believe are the right choices for us, but this week, and maybe the next several, we made too many choices to DO things instead of NOT DO things so we once again have to be on top of our individual and collective games in a serious win-the-championship kind of way so that things like that don't happen and ask ourselves, "what are the things that we can NOT do?" "what are the things we can do differently or LESS?" etc. etc.
I apologized to H this morning, but somehow it didn't feel like enough, maybe because he had spent the last fifteen minutes listening to mommy and daddy argue about how crazy mommy was for yelling at everybody because she has too much to do. I missed the, "How to have a happy marriage, brilliant career, not fight, and never take anything out on your kid," chapter in the baby book.
please note: this post was actually written four days ago, but I never got around to posting it. Lots has happened since then, mostly good stuff. And no more snapping.
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