Okay, now the purpose of this endeavour is not to present some utopian view of parenthood, as anyone with kids would see through that noise in about two seconds, so I do want to maintain that I am still in touch with reality, and specifically the difficult reality of being a parent. So yes, I have moments of intense love and adoration for this child and this new role, and I also have commensurately dark days as well - and certainly yesterday was one of those days.
First of all, it seems that we have a few days of good sleeps and then we have a few really ugly ones, and this weekend, while I was alone, we had some of the ugliest. Now I suspect that they were a direct result of a little girl getting her first tooth, as I noticed on Tuesday that sharp white points had begun to poke their way through her little pink gums, so I have been indulgent with respect to that discomfort, especially considering she's been remarkably happy considering. But Friday and Saturday nights she went down well as per usual but was up every hour from 11:00 pm onwards and every effort at leaving her to find her way back to sleep that has been working of late only served to increase her agitation - and mine. By Sunday morning I was a zombie, I couldn't even really manage to play with her, I just set her up on the couch beside me with every toy in the arsenal and tried not to fall unconscious. I was embarassingly impatient with her and I can admit that some insane thoughts passed through my head while she was fussing and screaming and not napping for the entire day. Every time that I put her down and thought I might get a moment to clean up, or better yet, pay off some sleep debt--up she was again, it was almost uncanny, like she knew. Once, I put her down (for the umpteenth time) at around three in the afternoon, asleep in her crib and crawled into bed, desperate for a few minutes of sleep and I swear, the second I fell into sleep she awoke, it was positively maddening. I thought I might go crazy, I was so out of it, so exhausted, so at the end of my tether. It was one of those days when you call your mother and say 'come get this kid before I strangle her'. Now I know it's not very PC to say that you've had thoughts of gouging out your child's eyes (or your own for that matter)[obviously not literally] but I'm trying to illustrate a state of mind - how you can waiver between cloying adoration and incomprehensible frustration within hours. And though you may be tempted to call the PPD police on me, I know every mother has felt like this at some point--if not they're either lying or not really present in their parenting. Naturally I am able to separate the crazy feelings from the sane ones, I obviously would never dream of hurting my child, but it was shocking to me to see how easy it is to become a bad parent, how easily I was short with her yesterday. I feel awful about it, and I really had to concentrate yesterday to keep level about it, to speak calmly to myself and remember that she is a baby and doesn't mean to scratch me in the eyeball with her sharp little fingernails or yank my hair like a pro-wrestler. To remember that she only knows what she wants and needs and hasn't yet learned patience or how to communicate pain or fear. I had to breathe deeply on many occasions and more than once had to put her in her crib and walk away, get some air. It goes to show you what a challenge it is - but thank god the rewards are so grand. To see her smile her wide, wet still toothless smile and babble 'mumma!' over and over again wins me over very easily. That and when she sleeps like last night from 8:00 pm to 4:00 am without waking up, that's very helpful too. Now the only problem is that lately I'm having terrible insomnia too - I couldn't sleep until almost 1:30 am last night, I was feeling even more crazy. I'm wading through it though, we'll make it.
On a lighter note, we spent some time on the Sunshine Coast last week (loved it) and had a wonderful family time with her - she was as good as gold and happy as a clam, even with the tooth coming in.
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