Work. Work.  Work.  Work.  You want to do this fun thing?  I assign you 100 hours of work first!  You want to do this other fun thing?  I will assign you 1,000 hours of work first!

Being the mom means I have to be the one who gets up and works when no one else wants to or there is a huge mess… and I have to clean it.  I don’t want to make it sound like Noah isn’t involved or that he doesn’t help.  He does.  But he’s gone 50 hours a week doing other work.  I’m here.  All.  The.  Time.  So I work all the time.  I don’t have space for me in my life right now.  I haven’t really written in weeks. I don’t have time or mental energy.  I’m not even writing emails because I am so exhausted and brain dead.

I have really mixed feelings about my upcoming birthday party.  I’m not going to have the energy to put together the kind of event I was imagining.  And that sucks.  I am scaling down a lot.  I have to.  That’s life.  But the party was a big scale down from the trip I wanted to take.  So I am scaling down again.  That’s just kind of how my birthdays go.  Historically speaking my birthdays pretty much suck and I spend most of them crying because I feel like it is reinforced that I just don’t matter much to anyone.  Having to do this much work before I can even begin to think about doing any work towards making the party fun means that it is going to be a very generic party.  People will come and pat me on the head and eat a bunch of food (they better or I will have too many leftovers) and leave.  And then I won’t see people again for a few years.  I’m feeling conflicted about how this is supposed to “fill up my cup” so to speak.

I feel ungrateful and whiny.  My friends have supported me in the best ways they’ve been able.  My family is not deliberately making work for me.  No one is oppressing me.  But I feel like *I* am not in my life any more.  I could be replaced easily by a robot with a better temper and more patience.  I feel like me being present means very little.  But dear god I better get off my ass and start working again.  I want to have people come over, right?  That means there has to be somewhere for them to go.  That means a whole shitload of work right now.  It also doesn’t help that I have a lot of internal baggage about my house being shitty.  I feel like it proves that I am shitty and lazy and too stupid to care for a house properly.  Inviting people over to see it just twists that knife.

Right now I want out of my life.  But there is no where to go.  This is part of the “for worse”.  I really need a break from worse one of these years.  I would like to feel like I exist in my life some decade soon.