Oh, Humanity

I have come to the realization that I am not super human. This fact is extremely annoying. It really cramps my style to have to take time out to eat and sleep every single day. Take Tuesday, for example. I had a small list of things to do while the girls napped: order flea medicine for the dog, address and stamp some Father’s Day cards, and do a prayer meditation to finally get to the root of the debilitating anxiety that has plagued me for a decade. Do you think I managed to do any of these things? Noooo. After I wasted 20 perfectly good minutes eating lunch, I found myself exhausted. “Oh yeah,” I thought to myself, “we had a really busy weekend and I didn’t sleep that much, so it’s catching up with me.” So I got into bed to rest for just a minute, and immediately fell into a deep sleep, waking well over an hour later to the sound of Turtle calling “mama, mama” into the monitor.

When I decided to stay home full time, I thought I would finally have time to get every nook and cranny of my house in perfect order, cook gourmet meals every evening, post daily to my heavily visited, income producing blog, write a book, and get my post-baby body into wedding-day shape. It has been quite a shock to learn that not only am I not physically capable of accomplishing these perfectly reasonable goals in the tiny windows of free time that I have, but that I need a mother’s helper three mornings a week just to maintain basic order and sanity.

Don’t tell me I’m being too hard on myself because I already know that. But I’ve lived my entire life measuring myself against an apparently impossible set of standards, and I can’t seem to find my “off” button. So I berate my body for stubbornly refusing to function on less than 8 hours of sleep when I clearly need at least 20 hours a day to meet my minimum goals. And I shake my fists in frustration when I am compelled to sit down and eat 3 or 4 times a day when there are filing cabinets to be organized, blog posts to be written, and psychoses to be healed.

Oh, and don’t worry that living this way is both unhealthy for me and a bad example for my daughters. I worry about that enough for the both of us. Now, please excuse me while I go make my list of all the things I won’t be getting done this weekend.