Sometimes

There are afternoons when I dream of running away from my house so badly I can taste it. It's the worst on weekends, and I know this is something many moms complain of- there is no relaxation to look forward to at the end of the week, just more of the same, along with the added chaos of extra people and extra plans and messed up schedules and so, most likely, a messier house and even whinier children than during the rest of the week. Sometimes its fine, and its still fun, and I go with the flow...

And sometimes I am very nearly six months pregnant, and I am hungry all the time but then every time I eat I get heartburn. Or I am tired all the time but every time I lay down either the heartburn makes it impossible or my hips start screaming in protest no matter which side I lay on. And often the house is an unthinkable disaster, but either my own inward voice or another person starts scolding me when I try to clean and tidy it because I shouldn't be exerting too much. But the idea of living this way, with dishes and laundry and toys always threatening to overwhelm, is enough to make me sit down at the table and just weep in despair. Literally.

Also, sometimes a certain child is completely potty trained in one regard and not even close to being potty trained in another, more disgusting, regard, but it's too late to switch him back to diapers. And so, one waits, every day, to see when the inevitable mess will happen and just how bad it will be. After two or three weeks of this, including several out of town ventures, it will start to feel like you are just waiting to get BEATEN every day, and you and your husband are just taking turns volunteering for the abuse. Though, let's face it, more often than not it is going to be you. You are here. You are always always here.

You are here when in one single half hour, one kid poops his pants, another needs help on the toilet, poopy kid gets cleaned up and then decided to try to actually use the potty for its intended purpose, toilet kid CLOGS the toilet, poopy kid poops again, this time in proper receptacle, and you, while trying to lavish the appropriate amounts of praise for a Potty Success, realize you need to EMPTY that potty but that you first have to plunge the normal potty, all with a wide eyed and curious audience, and you yourself haven't even eaten breakfast yet and are beginning to want to eat less and less...

Sometimes you feel like if you hear a little voice yelling, or whining, or shrieking in panic "Hey Mommy!" one single more time you are going to cry. Sometimes you do cry, and are in fact crying as you tend to them (the need almost always involving someone needing something WIPED, of course) and the horrifying part is that no one even notices that you're crying. Partly you feel relieved that you haven't upset them, and partly this makes you want to cry even harder because you realize that you spend the bulk of your time with people who are basically oblivious to your needs and feelings. It never occurs to them that YOU might need to eat or sleep or use the bathroom, much less that you might be tired and in pain and overwhelmed.

Then your baby will stir in your belly and you feel so terrible that most of what this kid has heard and felt today from you is negative. You snapping, you sighing, you sniffling. Surely this cannot be a healthy way to gestate your child, but the problem is that it's the gestating itself that is making so much of your day to day life feel so daunting.

AND sometimes you flee to the computer as soon as both the kids are finally otherwise occupied and you hurriedly ramble out your current misery and then you feel the tiniest bit better, though still wobbly and weepy. You look around and still see a house whose every surface needs wiped and picked up. You know there's still a car seat cover that needs dried and reattached after being subjected to a Horrifying Accident last night, along with a multitude of normal laundry loads, and you know there are still plates and cups and random clumps of eggs and cheese and dirty napkins all over the kitchen. You also know that you're exhausted and should really just nap, but that when you tried to lay down with your daughter your cranky cranky hips made it impossible to do so.

And so. You will take a deep breath, and put on some music, and maybe eat a bag of peanut M and M's that were supposed to be your husband's but forget him because you snooze you lose and you will, as Swistle once put it, make that Journey of A Thousand Loads of Laundry that begins with a single paper towel. You will, pathetically, hope that someone somewhere is feeling sorry for you, just a little.

Edit: ...And sometimes you feel kind of bad about eating husband's M and M's, when he brings you home a bag with like TEN candy bars in it because he wasn't sure what you might like to make you feel better.