Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Tired

I am tired today. One of the things we talked about in therapy on Tuesday was giving myself permission to have bad days. This is hard for me. I feel like recovery means that you only have good days. But this is unrealistic because even when I didn't have PPD I didn't have good days every day.
Days like today where the sound of my son saying "Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama," non-stop is like a knife being repeatedly jammed in my cornea make me feel like a total ass. I feel like I should love being a mother every minute of every day. I DO love my son very much. But some days I just don't like being around him very much. Especially days like today where all I want to do is curl up in a ball and stare off into space.
I get discouraged when I read these posts by people I know who worship their children. They find beauty and perfection in everything their children do. Today, as my son used his fingernails to gouge scratches in my arm while I was strapping him into his car seat the last thing I was feeling was admiration for his perfection and beauty. I wanted to beat the snot out of him.
Steve doesn't help things very much. He sits on his stupid computer writing posts on facebook about women he thinks are hot and how people are scared of him while I sit here slowly going insane. His narcissism astounds me sometimes. Newsflash...maybe people are scared of you because you are a total asshole to people you think are beneath you intellectually (which is everyone according to you). I told someone yesterday that I really don't get how someone who is so smart can be so stupid sometimes.
My biggest piece of advice to people who don't have children (Julia) is to make sure before you have them that you are on the same page as your partner about discipline and child rearing. If you aren't, make sure you find some common ground and get the ground rules hammered out before you get pregnant. Otherwise, you are in for a rocky road when your children are born and you feel like your partner doesn't support the things you feel are important in raising your child.
I am off to go drown my sorrows in a bowl of ice cream.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"make sure before you have them that you are on the same page as your partner about discipline and child rearing"

Oh yeah ;-). You know though, I remember having conversations about it (not before I was pregnant but certainly during) and feeling like we were on the same page. You never really know though, until you're faced with the situation and then you realize... "Oh, THAT'S what you meant". It's funny; differences in "approaches" in how my husband and I deal with our daughter's behaviour is what I ended up talking about with my therapist today :-)

Amanda said...

That is really frustrating when you don't agree with the other parent... it is even more frustrating when one refuses to try and understand your logic and thinks you're just being stupid or too lenient.

This post comes at such an interesting time for me- yesterday I had a really rough evening with Deacon... and I'm not even around him all day. He was having tons of meltdowns (probably all the formula I fed him when he was a baby) and I finally screamed at him to shut up... yeah, not my best parenting moment. I felt like an ass.

Anonymous said...

You are awesome! Love the call out and I will most certainly make note of that as I consider things.

Karen said...

Women who worship their children scare me just a little bit. I love my children. If I think about losing them for too long, I go a little crazy. But I can't be around them all the time or I start to like them less and less. There's only so much time you can spend with a person, no matter who it is! And I was me before I was Mommy, so taking some time to stare off into space is necessary for me. I needed it then and I need it now (maybe more now).

All this babbling about myself is to hopefully show you that you're not weird. And you're not a bad mother. Your children know you love them, but worshiping them isn't necessary. At least in my opinion.

Adrianne said...

Well you can add me to the list of women to love their children but not like them all the time. I certainly don't worship the ground they walk on all the time...

Jenn said...

My husband and Steve sound exactly the same!

As for women who only say good things about their children...they lie. I'm sorry but nobody could be that perfect. They are hiding serious skeletons or something in the closet...nobody is that perfect...EVER. Not even Steve or Zach. :)