I had my daughter and I got my ass back to work when she was 3 weeks old (stunningly difficult) and balanced a full-time, high-stress job and being a mother with ease. Ok, not with any sort of ease but I got it done, I made it through each day. I even got the occassional run in (I was an avid run prior to and through my pregnancy). I lost all my baby weight asap and while my husband and housework definitely gets a bit neglected I thought I was doing ok. I skipped out on postpartum, I accepted that I had to work, and just made it through each day spending every minute I did have with my daughter filling it with quality reading and snuggles. I also told myself on days that were unbearably hard that things would just get easier as each day passed.
Now fastfoward a few months. She's 5 months old now. Still the utter joy and all good things in my life. No one prepared me for how absolutely transcending being a mother was. No one prepared me to also feel like I was failing at it miserably every minute of the day. I have always prided myself at being the best in everything. I was always the best student, hardest working employee, terrific wife, talented athelete, yada yada yada (do you hate me yet?). But being a mother, there are not enough hours in the day or energy in my body to be good or feel successful at anything. We're up too many times in the night to ever feel well-rested. My high-stress job is now too high stress and I barely manage to meet my deadlines and fake it through the work I need to get done. I cry everyday when I drop my daughter off at daycare (which I fondly call baby prison) because I know that she deserves a mom who would stay home with her and make sure she got the attention she needs and deserves, and don't even bring up my husband. The poor man (who is the most amazing husband and father ever, really) is lucky if he gets a hug or a hello each day as I frantically race around trying to snuggle little one before I drop her at her prison and make it to my job in time to take on my boss and the ever-mounting work...and its the same at the end of the day. I have essentially given up running. Besides being so bone numbingly exhausted. I just can't find the time and the stress of finding the time and then wasting precious physical energy to run and waste precious time that I could be with my daughter...well it just doesn't happen. So in the end, things don't seem better. They feel haungtingly terrible. I feel like a failure in every aspect of my life. I feel out-of-shape, dumpy, and unnattractive. I feel like it's lucky everyone at my job has low standards because most of the employees slide by so my "sliding by" is good enough to keep me from being fired but not good enough for me to not feel guilty everyday that I'm not putting a lot of effort into my job. I feel like I am ruining my daughter's life by dropping her at baby prison everyday. I feel like my husband is tired of a wife who is chronically tired and depressed because she feels like a failure and just wants a good wife snuggle and has to instead listen to me sob about baby prison every night.
I know I know. I need to cut myself a break. I need to accept that I'm doing the best I can. I need to focus on the positives. But sometimes knowing that and actually feeling it are so very very very different.
