I’m exhausted, so is my husband. At the moment my daughter is going through a phase of getting up before 6am. She then won’t settle to do anything and will insist that I follow her from room to room around the house until my husband will get up and make her breakfast at around 8am. Keeping awake whilst driving her to school is an exercise in stubbornness. I have to stop before going driving back. Caffeine has becoming an necessity that I can no longer function without.
The problem is that none of this is my daughter’s problem and so when she comes home from school she will expect to be entertained in her way regardless of how shit I feel. I want to cry, I want to rage it’s not fair. I want a holiday. Only a holiday isn’t a holiday it’s a nightmare of being off routine with none of our resources or tools to fall back on. So we haven’t be on holiday in years. I resent it, but I’m trying not to resent my daughter – some days are easier than others. I have to remind myself that every time she tells my husband or I to ‘shoo’ or that home is ‘yucky’ that she doesn’t mean it. That she does love us and 90% of the time she is a loving and adorable little girl. It doesn’t make the other 10% of time any easier though, when you’re already down and hating everything and your internal monologue is muttering that you didn’t sign up for this and every social media post from friends and family of happy family times of children playing, talking and exciting holidays that you will never have feels like a knife in your heart. Those are the times when you need to dig deep and remember that she didn’t sign up for any it. She didn’t ask to be born at all and it was our choice to have a child and that means what I feel is irrelevant. What you are feeling is irrelevant. Harsh I know but true.
When your child is with you, what you need has to come second sorry not sorry. So dig deep, find that last spoon, that last gram of patience and paste a smile over the grimace and through gritted teeth ask “what do you need darling?”
And when you can’t really can’t do that, remember that there is rum in the fridge and they go to bed before you do.
Raising the Modern Fae 