What the heck do I call this?

I'm sorry I haven't been around much lately. My heart just hasn't been in it, and there hasn't been much newsworthy stuff going on. Each day is more of the same and while some days have definite pick-me-up qualities, I generally just feel more bogged down.

Nice Guy and I talk a lot and we both feel this way. We think it's just that we're itching for change but change is hard to come by. Shaking up our living situation would help a lot but that takes money. We've talked about the possibility of having another baby but that would bring up a million issues, not the least of which being that of actually getting pregnant. I've got PCOS which means, in short, that fertility could be a teensy little problem. There's always home improvements and redecorating, but that can also get pricey and it's a little pointless if we're just going to move anyway.

Some days it feels like everything is passing us by. We're trying to do more for Sweet'ums than our parents were able to do for us but at the end of the day, we have even less--at least we had yards to play in and siblings to harass growing up. I see people younger than us working half as hard and accomplishing twice as much, and it's frustrating--my husband works long hours doing physically exhausting work, yet I see my peers getting financing for houses they can't afford because their boyfriends have military experience. Never mind that the military rejected my husband because of his feet after promising to take him if he lost fifty pounds (which he did). Never mind that we're not even looking in the beyond-our-means price range.

We're already walking the path of our parents--work hard for an entire lifetime and at the end of it all, have nothing to show for it.

I whine and cry a lot on here, but I think the one thing nobody in my Real Life understands is just how emotionally exhausted I am. I wake up every day to get a kid dressed for school who refuses to cooperate four out of five mornings. I get to sleep half my useable day away because I couldn't sleep the night before, because said kid wouldn't go to sleep or maybe wouldn't stay asleep or, on some nights, because my body refused to sleep since it just knew she was going to wake up the moment I dozed off. Just like tonight. She's not even home, but I can't sleep because my body is used to not sleeping. So after I sleep my morning away I get to go get her off the bus and fight with her just to get her through the front door. She hates being here. Then I get to try to get her fed, bathed, and at least tucked into bed at a decent hour, all while being fussed at and fought with and sometimes screamed at. I never get to hear an "I love you, Mommy!" even though once in a while she'll say it for her daddy. Half of the time (literally) I do all of this on my own and then get to crawl into bed either alone or next to an already-sleeping husband. He's got his own stress to deal with so in the midst of it all I'm lucky some days if we remember to give each other a kiss in passing. He says that he loves me all the time, and that helps, but I think my biggest wish in this household is to get more emotional feedback from them both. Sweet'ums will show affection but usually it's buried deep in all of the screaming and fussing. It feels more like a slap in the face, most of the time, sort of like how it felt as a kid to get a spanking and then have Mommy or Daddy want to hug on you. It's the most screwed up feeling to have her scream half the afternoon, give me a hug, and then go straight back to screaming. It's like the eye of a hurricane, having that moment of calm and knowing that what's on the other side is even worse. And when it comes to her daddy... Well, in a nutshell, he's convinced that he's no good at romance and sweetness and he shuts himself down before he even gets started.

I'm thankful for my family. That's what stings the most. I love them so much. They're my whole world. I wouldn't trade them for anything. Whenever I'm happy, they're the reason I feel that way. But there's so many other emotions swirling around all the time that are anything but happy, anything but thankful. I feel like the world's worst mother for it. There are women in worse situations than mine, women parenting alone or women with kids with serious disabilities or women with no resources whatsoever, who still manage to do it all with a smile. How do they do it? How do you get up in the morning knowing what's ahead and not just die a little inside? I should be so thankful that my life isn't like theirs, that somewhere down the line things will get better, but I can't get past everything that feels like my life is lacking.

I guess I'm overly dramatic. I guess I let things get to me too much, or maybe I exaggerate them in my own mind. I tell myself that a lot, that this is all in my head. I've started a half-dozen posts just like this one and just deleted them, telling myself that nobody wants to read it and that this isn't really what my blog is for. But you know, this stuff is the truth about how I feel. Why hide it? I feel like a wreck about 80% of the time. To hear my husband tell it I look like a wreck most of the time. So I guess in at least some measure, this is real. My reality.

Everyone goes through this, I'm sure. How do you get past it? What am I doing wrong?

Tomorrow I'm going to paint on a smile and try to post something happy, maybe with a few pictures of how big Sweet'ums is getting. I'll go over and update the Froggy Blog since it has been a while and her progress is really what everyone would rather see. But for now, for this moment, please think of me. Say a little prayer for me. Pray that Nice Guy and I find some little spare moment full of something to sustain and renew us. Pray that I can dig deep and find whatever it is that gets parents through the dry spells.