Grade F: feeling failure and fatigue

This morning the alarm woke me with a start. I rolled toward the blaring offense with a groan, reaching a weak hand toward the phone and knocking over the remnants of ice-turned-water in a cup I drank sometime in the blur of last night. The light in the room is still on, its yellow cast torturing my bleary eyes. And yet… I’m in a dark place.

Hubs, hearing the alarm, breathes deeply once and raises an arm to switch off the light. It’s his day off. “Guess I’m the one doing the kiddie taxi again,” I think to myself as resentment sours my already stinking mood.

I’m exhausted. Physically, I’m operating on nothing but caffeine and necessity (which, in turn, makes Ri fussy and lessens her likelihood of sleeping for any stretch of time). Mentally, I’m feeling unmotivated. I’m feeling disappointed in myself. I’m feeling insufficient.

I lay there for a few – or 15 – minutes, willing my silent tears to stop falling and conjuring up strength reserves.

As I finally forced myself out of the warmth of my blankets, Ri shifted and grunted. I push my still-warm pillow close to her and draw the covers closer to her while smoothing out her “back is best” sleep sack.

I dress myself, noting without concern that my pink ankle socks aren’t a good match to my above-the-ankle grey stretch pants. They wont match my worn, bulky black shoes I’ve spent much of the last nine months in and swore to retire once I had the baby. I put them on anyway.

I found the kids in the boys’ room, laying on the floor. Chi woke as soon as I cut on the hall’s glaring light and hustled into her bedroom for clothes. Ya, resting deeply in soiled clothing, had once again wet himself in his sleep and did not stir when I called his name.

I broke. I lifted him up and sent him to the restroom to clean himself up. Chi did her best to help him, while I located his spare set of clothes and blanket for school (he’d had an accident at nap time at school the previous day).

The clock sped through the minutes, taunting me with its changing numbers. 6:30. 6:45. Finally, we trudge to the van in the darkness, while misty rain stings our exposed flesh. The kids request to hear their car tunes, drowning out any opportunity for talk as they sing along to each track.

I drop one, then the other at their schools, receiving goodbyes and waves, but no hugs or even air kisses. The tears, still at the surface, start their descent down my cheeks as I drive away.

My mind returns to yesterday:

Chi, according to her teacher, is having a bad week. She no longer talks to me and feels out of place at home. The teacher reports this gem of information given while Chi, shuddering with cries, wipes her tear-stained cheeks and tries in vain to compose herself. She wasn’t crying because of our apparent lack of communication, but because her diorama project was left unsecured in a classroom and she was told to protect its moving figurines. Chi, with project in hand, and I walked down the hall after I whispered a pathetic “thank you” (for what, I don’t know). Her teacher, no doubt, took the “I’m sorry, Mommy” repeatedly whined in between choking gulps during our retreat, as further proof that something isn’t right in the home. In my last look back, I saw it in her accusatory eyes as she rubbed her pregnant belly.

Ya is still struggling in school. If there were any doubt, I’m reminded that I carried out the clear trash bags of his urine-soiled clothes yesterday. And yet he sat happily coloring a picture he drew – in a seat labeled with someone else’s name because he now sits close to the teacher for lessons. He’s pegged as the kid who “won’t focus” – - who is about to move into a reading group, but still doesn’t consistently identify numbers or letters, and isn’t interested in “blends.”

Something has to give. I’m failing. I’m falling…

Back home, it’s eerily quite. Nero is bundled in his blankets. He doesn’t even stir when I wash the dishes from last night’s dinner.

Ri and hubs are still resting comfortably in bed. I’m not surprised she’s quickly heading toward sleep – she was up most of the night and the day preceding. I enter the room quietly, mumble hello.

I flip open the winter issue of Mozi, coincidentally all about newborn photography. I’ve all but given up on capturing the stunning images I see in my social media feeds with my own not-so-newly-born. In her golden days (that first fortnight after birth), I was back in the hospital. Now, she’s alert and determined to make her preferences known. My pictures don’t look like those I swoon over, those I spent months plotting and planning to recreate with Ri. I feel inept.

And yet, as I flip backwards from the last page of the magazine to the first, I read this:

“If our goal is to be authentic, we can definitely accomplish that, because no one does authentic better than ourselves… be better, be happy, be authentic, and most importantly, be you” {Brittni Schroeder, Mozi Magazine, Winter 2013}

I want to find that sunshine – that elation I felt not so long ago. I’m trying to remember me. I miss that her – the woman, the mother, the wife.