Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Daily Life, Daily Strife


Even though we love each other very, very much, there are times between Martin and me which are not exactly at top harmony level. Yesterday evening was one of them. He really annoyed me.



Before I go further, I'd like to just stop and point out that I am always, every day, grateful for being able to stay home and homeschool my girls. If I had the choice every day to stay home or go to an office, I would chose this route every single morning. But as we all know, loving something doesn't automatically mean it is EASY.

Yesterday Martin got home at about twenty after five, just like every day. I was in the back room where Ingrid was having her ballet class via Zoom. Baby Sylvi was with me, and I was also monitoring Elka and Greta who were playing in the backyard. Sylvi had barely napped all day, and she wasn't grumpy, but I was way behind on my work and hadn't even gotten the meat out to thaw for dinner yet. (So we didn't have meat, in the end.)

Now, Martin has a bad habit of not eating lunch. He will graze on little things all day long, but it's like one cookie, or a handful of raisins he found on the sidewalk. It's never real food. So I wasn't surprised when I came into the kitchen and found him making himself a snack of crackers left on the table from lunch (likely licked by the dog or children) and cutting up some Colby Jack cheese that he had liberated from the darkest recesses of the refrigerator. Not surprised, but thoroughly grossed out. That cheese was OLD. It wasn't moldy, but that doesn't matter. It was yucky.

After he'd eaten and we had chatted, I handed him the baby and asked him to monitor the ballet class a little bit so I could get dinner started. I got to work, and he sat down at the table with the baby. He did that thing where he sighs a lot. Just sits in a chair staring. Like he's "tired." I asked him if he'd like me to make him coffee. "If you want some, I'd drink some. But don't make it for me." (That sentence is best read in an Eeyore voice.) What the heck. If it was the cheese, that was his own poor choice. If it was something else, he wasn't saying, so I was feeling zero sympathy.

I know Martin's job is taxing. And like I said at the beginning, I would never want it. I mean, his co-workers are great, I really like all of them, and he works at a church where currently no one else is allowed to visit, so complete and utter peace is mere footsteps away at all times. But he works hard all day long, and has dozens of irons in the fire all at once, constantly.

THAT DOESN'T MEAN I FELT SYMPATHETIC.

Because here's the thing that bugged me: He was tired after his long day at work, so he got to sit at the table and sigh mournfully and tell me in his Eeyore voice that he was "just tired." This is while I'm scrambling to get dinner for the family, clean up the disaster of a kitchen, make sure the kids aren't getting nabbed from the backyard, making sure they also don't kill each other, etc. My day doesn't stop at 5:00. Actually, my job never stops because I've got the mammary glands. And the Zoom ballet class was going way over the scheduled end-time, and you can't just leave someone who puts her leotard on backwards and dances with a perpetual wedgie without noticing to manage a virtual dance class alone.

So I got annoyed. And then--AND THEN!--he started BURPING. It was the cheese. He was making these repulsive ancient-cheese burps and telling me he was tired. Then he shuffled off to our bedroom to lie down.

Oh, GIVE ME A BREAK.

Every day I'm dealing with about 900 tasks per hour. (This is less than when I had four tiny children at once--then it was more like 2,900 things at once, but 900 is still a lot.) These tasks are usually Things I Need to Do for The Good of the Family, and don't include things like "breathing," or "using the facilities." It's things like feeding the children, feeding the children, feeding the children, and feeding the children, sprinkled with running baths for the children, changing diapers, changing clothes when tags are itchy, Finding Lost Things, and staying in the bathroom with Ingrid while she washes her hands because she is afraid of the noise of running water.

And because I'm a Mom, I've learned to multitask at every possible moment. Bath-running is also a scary sound for Ingrid, so while I am held captive in the bathroom waiting for the tub to fill, I wipe down the counters or clean the mirror or toilet. I sweep floors while helping with fractions, I make food while discussing art or vocabulary. I am skilled at using as few limbs as possible for any given task, so that I can also hold the baby. If the girls are playing outside and there is a wasp, I can be outside protecting them from stings while also sweeping the sidewalk or doing some light yard cleanup. Then there's a whole area of my job that is purely "listening." I listen to ideas that don't make a lot of sense. Jokes that aren't at all funny. Stories that never end. Dreams. (SO MANY DREAMS.) Likewise, there's a lot of "watching" in my job. "MAMA! Watch me do this cool thing!... wait, that wasn't right, WATCH AGAIN!" And this doesn't even include another enormous part of my job: Combat Control. (I took that term from my friend who is a #boymom, she's got serious skill in that area.)

And five kids might sound like a lot to juggle, but we also have four beloved pets. So added to caring for the children is taking action when Elka is worried that her pet mouse is dead. (She worries about this at least once a day and so I have to wake up the mouse, who has never yet been dead.) There's the turtle in the bathtub who needs feeding and housecleaning, the cat who is everyone's favorite that we have to go searching the closets for when we haven't seen her in awhile, and the dog who is hands down the most stressful living thing in my charge.

And then we can talk about my anxieties that are streaming through the rivers of my brain every day. We can just start with the pet mouse: One of these times that thing IS going to be dead when I try to wake it up. And do you realize what a disaster that's going to be? Elka loves that mouse more than she loves ME. She tells me every night: "I love Sunflower the most, then you the next most." It's going to be awful. AWFUL! This fear sits more heavily on my mind with every passing day because that mouse is more than a year old. Elka rescued her for $2 from the feeder box at the local pet supply store on Feburary 28, 2019. We're now nearing the end of April, 2020, and that mouse is fit as a fiddle. BUT IT WON'T LIVE FOREVER, WILL IT. And then it's going to be bad.

You know what, I'm not going to list any more of my anxieties because just discussing that one has me worn out.

Let's get back to Tired Martin. Sometimes he'll call me during one of his little few minute breaks in his day. Admittedly, there aren't many, and he usually has to let me go abruptly when something comes up. But still, I can tell he gets kind of irritated when he's trying to tell me something and I am obviously distracted. He'll be talking and I'm listening hard with one ear, but I'm also doing any number of the things mentioned a few paragraphs back, and so sometimes he doesn't know if I'm answering him or talking to someone else. Heck, sometimes I don't know either. My life can be confusing.

But let's focus on Right Now for a minute as a perfect example. Right now, while I'm typing this (which I started yesterday and wasn't able to finish, so anywhere it says "yesterday," it was actually two days ago) I am still in my pajamas at 10:30 in the morning because I haven't been able to take a shower and get dressed yet. Ingrid is in the bathtub and I'm monitoring her while also listening for the baby to wake up. Ingrid has lots of questions and she gets easily freaked out by weird sounds, so every so often I have to go into the bathroom (it's just right next to me, so I can answer her questions from where I am, but if there's a sound I need to go investigate) and listen to some nonexistent noise, then make up some believable reason for it to set her mind at ease. Some questions that have come from the bathroom in the last few minutes have been: "What makes people faint?" "What is a cone?" (like for a dog.) "Is today a ballet day for Anja?" "When will Coronavirus be over?" "Are you still sitting in your chair?" "Are you still there?" "Are you still in the kitchen?" "Do you think these drips of water are really mouse pee-pee?" And just now, "Mama? ….(exceptionally long silence)…. I forget."

HE CAN'T POSSIBLY BE AS COMPLETELY EXHAUSTED AS I AM AT FIVE O'CLOCK. HE CAN'T. HE CAN'T!!!

For awhile I got pretty grouchy with him. Since his stomach was upset and he was burping so much, I didn't serve him any dinner. (Isn't that childish of me?!) And I insisted on doing all the cleanup, while holding the baby. I might have even started sighing loudly myself a little bit. I said things like, "No, no! I'll get it! It's fine!" (But then later he was holding the baby and washing a mug for tea with one hand, real struggly-like. Do you know how many mugs we own? Dozens! The one he was washing was the ONLY dirty mug! It was just for show!)

Well, in the end I apologized for not being nicer, and explained that I'd been feeling a little overwhelmed that day. He apologized for eating sketchy cheese and for not helping out more. It all ended well. We had a nice evening. We still love each other lots and lots.

And now I just got Ingrid out of the bathtub, and I hear Sylvi making snuffly awake noises in the next room, so I'll get to the point: It's okay to be Eeyore. It's okay to be grouchy. It's okay to be overwhelmed. The important thing is to get back to harmonious love as soon as you can!

P.S. He really is as tired as I am at 5 o'clock. And that's okay too.

1 comment:

  1. I know you wrote this forever ago, but it really sums up how I feel on overwhelmed days (and I have just the one child!) The privilege of being at home combined with the jealousy of the other person having a life outside the home! Where they can talk with adults!

    And wtf is up with skipping lunch?! Mine does it, too. It's all I can do some days not to lash out, "When you do that, *we all* pay for it later."

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