This is not just an apt illustration of what a frazzled mom looks like. I’m not playing with metaphor here, I’m playing with reality. This is my actual hair people, after a long day of boys, wrestling, corralling and wrangling.
Seriously. These kids have destroyed my hair. Not only is it a mangled, frizzy mess at the end of the day, but I now constantly fight a halo of smaller, newly-grown hairs to replace the ones I’ve lost. Lost because my very long, ungroomed, undyed hair is completely unkempt in not a clip, not a ponytail, but a bun. Every day it ends up this way.
I need help.
And I’ve not even started in on my eyebrows. Or the bags under my eyes. Or the fact that my eyes have experience two brand-new, out-of-the box sets of contacts this week, because I am too tired to remember to put them IN THE SOLUTION at night after I pluck them out of my eyes, and I wake up to dry, shriveled little contact shells.
I digress. It’s a mom thing. And here I am. I have become the mom I swore I wouldn’t become. You know the mom: The one that wears yoga pants outside at least once a day (bus, trash, mail, whatevs). The mom that is featured on makeover shows because she let herself go. The mom who wears the same two pairs of shorts and four shirts every single week because she just cannot bear to go out and buy more fat clothes and keeps ignoring the ones her pre-baby body fit in to. The mom who is trying to keep up with a one-year-old, a four-year-old with a disability, and work and house and no family and no friends nearby to help, and if the baby wakes up at 6:00 a.m. every freaking morning, what time is said mom supposed to get up to work out?
Some days I wish they could do that thing in sci fi shows, where they take away your sleep. And then you can have 24 hours every day in which to get things done. Because you don’t need to sleep. You just keep going and going … but then, the world of magic kicks in and you realize you’ve created an evil twin version of yourself, but hulkier, and possibly with greenish skin, who’s gonna break some glass and bust some heads and … wait. That was totally an episode of Angel.
Again, digression. Lack of sleep. Sleep! I love sleep. Lately, when Andrew is napping and Max and I are in the playroom, I find sleep just throws a sack over my head and carries me away for ten minutes. Or an hour. It’s blissful. Until I wake up. And find that Max has done something horrible. Like throw an entire bin full of dried beans under the couch.
I don’t know what to do to break this cycle. It’s a sun up, sun down kind of job, motherhood. And I don’t know if any good solutions exist to help me out of this, short of hiring a nanny. Or a maybe a house cleaner. (Let’s face it, I’m too embarrassed by the state of my house when it IS dirty to have a stranger come over and clean up my mess and make it not dirty.)
I think we just have to ride the wave. And not forget to call the salon ….
The Fourth Trimester Blog 