Exhausted

I am exhausted. This is the type of tired that reaches into your bones and pulls out the marrow. The type that stays with you day and day out no matter how much sleep you get. This is the tired that will not be quenched, but only multiplied. This is the exhaustion of a mother. Men will never understand, no matter how tired they get, it will never reach the magnitude of a mother. We don't ever stop thinking about our babies. While falling asleep we worry that they might not be in the right position, maybe they are to hot, or cold, maybe we shouldn't have swaddled them so tight. This prompts us to get up from a dead sleep to go check on them, sometimes multiple times a night. Men don't get that. Once they are asleep, they sleep. When we wake up, our first thoughts are 'the baby is awake' and we force our eyes open and walk to the nursery to pick up the baby that is totally awake at 6:30 in the morning. We don't get a restful sleep in because we CAN'T GET ONE! Even if the baby by some miracle sleeps past normal time, we are awake because our bodies have told us, TIME TO GET UP!

Once awake and having fed the baby, we mothers have a new onslaught of worries to occupy our minds throughout the day. Is the baby comfortable? Anything he could chew on that isn't okay, Anything he could choke on? Did he eat enough? He is a little constipated, maybe we should do something about it? What about prunes? Maybe some juice? Then naptime comes and that is a beast unto it'self.

And right now we're working on trying to get him to go down for his nap without being swaddled. Yeah, that's been fun. So here I am sitting at the computer, listening to my baby scream because his arm is out and it's distracting him. I wish I could just convay to him that if he held still, he would fall asleep. But I can't, so I sit and listen to him scream, because there is nothing I can do short of swaddeling in his arm that will help him fall asleep. This puts me on edge and makes me want to claw at the walls.

There are hundreds of thousands of worries/thoughts that go through a mothers head in a day that is not condusive to relaxation. So, the next time you see a mother that looks like shes at the end of her rope, please remember there are a million things she's worrying about. DON'T MAKE YOURSELF ONE OF THEM!