The Leen

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I’m tired these days. Between daylight saving time (and Elanor’s crappy sleep as a result), Brett working very long hours, me trying to fit my at-home work in around the rest of our lives (which means I’m usually doing it from 9 or 10 p.m. until midnight or even 1 a.m.), and Elanor having become a big old tantrum-prone grumpypants lately, I feel worn out.

Being alone with a baby for, sometimes, 18+ hours in a day is not easy. Of course, it’s what I want to be doing, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Well, maybe it makes it easier but it doesn’t remove the difficulty entirely. 

I don’t like being so worn out. For one, it makes me nervous health-wise. I do not want to get myself to the brink again, like I felt before my heart thing happened. It’s scary. And for another, being tired makes my emotional fuse very, very short. I find myself getting weepy over the dumbest stuff these days, and I find myself snapping at Brett a lot more, which is not cool.

I’m learning, though, what I need to do to get out of this tired, short-fused place. I have been trying to think through what would help me, and here’s what I’ve come up with. (I always feel better when I have a plan in place!)

1. I need to get Elanor to the place where I can leave her with someone else for even an hour so that I can do some of my at-home work, or do the laundry, or blog, or even just sleep. Right now, if I leave her anywhere or with anyone other than Brett or his sister Rachel, she flips out. Not cool. I need to change that. We’re working on it, but it’s not easy.

2. I need to relax my standards for my house and not be so focused on getting my to-do list completed every week. Part of what’s hard is that I make myself a list to finish every week, and it never, ever gets done. Ever. And then I feel frustrated that I haven’t finished it and that isn’t good. I am trying to, at the bare minimum, pick up the toys in the evenings, do the dishes every day, and keep the living room/kitchen/dining room swept. Oh, and keep up with laundry. And do my work. And blog. And, you know, be Elanor’s mama. (No wonder I’m tired. I just re-read that sentence and realized that it sounds like a lot. Perhaps I need to further refine the “bare minimum”.)

3. I absolutely need time to connect with Brett when he’s home. I hate feeling like we’re two ships passing in the night. It’s not good. So I am trying to make an effort to shut my laptop and put the cleaning/laundry/etc aside until later, and when he’s home, hang out with him. That said, I’m very excited for the next few weeks. We are going to get massages together this weekend and then are going out to dinner. (Rachel will be visiting and she’ll watch Elanor, so I won’t even have to worry about whether Elanor is okay or not.) And next weekend, the three of us are going on a family vacation to the Oregon Coast. It will be wonderful to just be together, the three of us, with no distractions, in a beautiful and significant place.

4. Instead of just snapping and flying off the handle when something is upsetting to me, I’m taking time to think it through and pray and find the root causes of my frustration or anger. I’ve been working on writing a few things, processing through some big issues, and it feels really good to be getting at the heart of things and not just be slapping another band-aid on an old wound.

Anyway, that’s me these days. Tired. Sleep-deprived. Sometimes overwhelmed. But trying, in the midst of it all, to maintain a calm, loving, Christ-like demeanor and trying to be the best mama and wife I can be.

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I’ll leave you with something lighter. Brett came home from work and told me this joke today.

What do they call pallbearers in Oklahoma?

…

wait for it…

…

Karaokes.

Get it? Carry-okies?

Badum-bum.

Yeah, okay, sorry, that was pretty bad terrible. Sorry about that…