Preparation

Near the end of my pregnancy everyone always told me that I should get as much sleep as I could. That I should store it up for the time after the baby came, as I would experience sleepless nights more horrible than even my giddy, first-time-mom brain could imagine. As if we can create a sleep store for ourselves and draw on it whenever we need it. I’d like forty-five minutes of REM during my afternoon nap, please. As if.

But that’s what I seem to be doing these days. Only, I’m not storing sleep, I’m storing weekends. I recently found out that I’ll be able to do a weekend option at work, which is wonderful in that it includes a premium pay rate but also slightly concerning because I’ll be working seven out of eight weekends in a row and my family time, my me time, heck, even my nap time will all but disappear.

I don’t know if it’s because it’s how the rest of the world works or because I worked in an office for years but weekends have always seemed like a gift to me. A two-day period with no work obligations where you could plan anything from a weekend getaway to an all-night movie marathon and nothing would get in your way. Even now that I work every other weekend I still look forward to Fridays as a night I can truly relax with Chris, watch Fringe, and veg out on the couch.

But lately I’ve been grieving the loss of my weekends. I know that sounds stupid, but how else can I say it? I’ve been savoring each minute of each weekend day, knowing that in less than two weeks my schedule will change and I’ll be giving up my weekends almost completely. I even cried a little over it Sunday night when I realized we won’t get to make a big Sunday dinner together again for eight weeks. I won’t get to take a Saturday-morning nap while Chris does kid-duty for EIGHT WEEKS. Eight weeks suddenly seems like A Very Long Time.

We had a good run, weekends and me. Sleeping in when I was single, going to church on the odd Sunday, visiting Chicago for major holidays. Then later, sleeping in with Chris, going to the gym on Saturday mornings, and running mundane errands together, like to Home Depot or the grocery store. And now, pancake breakfasts with CJ, spur-of-the-moment trips to McDonald’s to play in their PlayPlace, and all of us snuggling in bed together for afternoon nap.

I have, of course, being both a planner and a little bit OCD about my ever-evolving schedule, mapped out the weekends I’ll have off for the next year. We’re already planning big things for my first one, in mid-June. And Chris said we could try our best to make my weekends off special, maybe do some day-trips or even an overnight somewhere. But what I really want to do on those rare weekends off is nothing. I want to spend time with my family, in our house, together. We can sleep in til 11 and watch HGTV and eat our pancake breakfast and cook our big Sunday dinner and sit on the couch and just be. To me, a weekend with no plans would be the best plan of all.

Indignation

Indignation, a photo by pammiecakes on Flickr.

Honestly

Lately I’ve been feeling so unsure of myself, of who I am. I feel...not like I’m at a crossroads, but like I’m not even on the road to begin with. Like I have no choices, only dreams. I think I have that new Facebook Depression. I hear things about people and I’m immediately jealous: he’s going back to school, she has an amazing job as a travel writer, he lives in Seattle. At times I wonder if I will ever truly be happy, but mostly I just wonder if I would be happier doing something else. Anything else. Anything else besides working full time and raising my kid part time and living in the Midwest in a house we can barely afford.

It feels like I have three choices for my fantasy future: (1) be a stay at home mom, (2) go back to school and get my PhD in Nursing, or (3) be a writer. I can’t do any of these things with a small child, it seems (well OK, I could be a stay at home mom, but we depend on my income to buy said small child such frivolous items as food and clothing). So I feel like what I have to do is just wait.

I have an amazing opportunity at work to make a little more money, which will be absolutely wonderful, since we’re up to our ears in debt. We’ve started thinking recently about adding to our family, and again, wonderful. But I still can’t let myself be happy. Never mind happy, I can’t let myself just be. I can’t be happy for someone’s acceptance into a master’s program, their new job, or their big move cross country “just because,” without being a little bit jealous. Because I wish wish WISH it were me.

I was complaining to my best friend about the ugliness of our kitchen cabinets over lunch one day and she told me how important it is to appreciate what we have. I think I said something like, “I know, but if we could just paint them white my life would be about 1000% better.” Since then, though, I’ve thought about our conversation and wished even harder that my life could be different.

Just kidding!

Really, I’ve tried harder to appreciate our house and the fact that though it actually does look like it was built 15 years ago, it’s a spacious house we’re comfortable living in. I’ve tried harder to appreciate my time at home with CJ, and there are days when I feel really good about my abilities as a mother. I’ve always loved my work, and I’ve had more and more shifts recently where I’ve thought, “Hey, I’m actually good at this.” (As someone with the lowest self-esteem on record, this is a Big Deal.)

But then I have a week like this one, where nothing seems to be getting better and all I want is for the next chapter of my life to come, maybe the New Baby chapter, or the CJ Goes to School and I Finally have Some Time for Myself chapter, or even the Our Debt is Paid Off and We Can Go on Vacation chapter. But the reality is, all I’m headed for tonight is the I Need to Up my Dosage chapter and while that may do the trick, it just isn’t one I want to read.