It was a Hard Monday. What do I mean by a Hard Monday? Well, you know how there is lemonade and then there is Mike's Hard Lemonade and neither substance is good for you, but only one is a depressant that can make you sick to your stomach and kill your brain cells? I know all Mondays are hard, but only this Monday is going to leave me with a nasty Tuesday morning parenting hangover and a total fear of getting out of bed.
Maybe that is a wee dramatic. It's not like anything too terrible happened and it's not even all River's doing. My decision of going to bed late Sunday night to catch up with Bear after my trip and then not being able to sleep till 4:00am surely had something to do with it. A vicious pregnancy cramp in my quadriceps that wrenched me from what little sleep I had left at 6:00am was definitely also a factor. Then their was the typical post trip letdown combined with the difficulty of getting my child back in his normal routine. It was pretty much the perfect storm of crankiness on all sides.
River had just had four days of bliss at Bear Lake. We had a house that opened right up to a yard, instead of an apartment that opens up to a staircase. The yard was filled with play toys, slides and a huge lot of sand and dirt to fill tiny wagons with to one's heart's content. Their was no to do list to get done and mom's attention was not divided by laundry or grocery shopping and of course the very best part was the friends that came with us. Suddenly we had playmates all day long. Who needs mom when we have Hutch and Rocky to throw rocks in the lake with, or rake dirt with, or sneak and turn the air hockey table on with? It was party central from sun up till they actually begged to go to bed at sun down... well in River's case he was just asking for a "rester", but that's the closest I've ever gotten to him wanting to go to bed, so I'll take it.
Then comes today and I'm sure it was a shock to his overly tired system to be back in a hot apartment with just mom and dad for entertainment. I had a feeling things were going to be bad when we pulled up to our apartment and River broke down in tears begging for "nother one house". (Translation: He wanted to go back to his other house at the lake.) The heat outside today was unbearable and neither Bear nor I could muster up the energy in our own sleep deprived souls to face the water park for relief, so we hunkered down and battled out meltdown after meltdown, until the night finally ended with River in a pool of wailing tears at my feet. I just stood by and let him work out the energy, thankful I had seen a brief glimpse of a quote in a parenting book this very day that said, "No child has ever cried himself to death." It proved true and when the tidal wave subsided we rocked for a few minutes, said our prayers and then kissed goodnight... so very glad to have this day done.
The one positive I can take from all of this is despite pregnancy hormones, a willful boundary testing toddler and the heat combining to bring back my temper I have worked my whole life to tame, I have a weird serenity that comes from having lived with such severe postpartum anxiety after River was born. When in the depths of those wretched parenting moments, there is this calm place in my mind reminding me that whatever I am dealing with in the moment is nowhere near as bad as that. As long as I get to be myself and not some needy, clingy, anxious, depressed half of a person, I can deal with everything calmly and compassionately. In saying this, I am certainly not asking to have the limits of my theory tested by tragic loss or illness, but am simply acknowledging that maybe some good did come out of the worst two months of my life.
Tonight I will dream of the day my boys are old enough to play together and we don't have to go on vacation to have a yard filled with toys and tomorrow will be better.
