waving my white flag

It's a well known fact that I'm stubborn. This means that sometimes I refuse to ask for help and get myself so overwhelmed that I can't do anything but sit and cry. For hours. You can imagine how much fun that is for jparks.

Since Truman's birth I've been struggling over how to balance taking care of him, taking care of the house, taking care of my marriage, and taking care of myself. I wish I could say I've figured out the balance, but I haven't and things like my sanity and marriage have been suffering for it. Jparks is fond of saying that it takes a village to raise a child and while I don't disagree, I'm wondering what do you do when you don't have a village to help you?

I often think about my grandmothers, who raised children while maintaining their homes and I can not wrap my mind around how they did it. All I can focus on is that I must be doing something wrong to feel this lost in motherhood. Jparks likes to point out that Truman is healthy and generally happy and that's what matters most, but it somehow feels like not enough. I want him healthy and happy in a clean house with a mother who is not exhausted and a set of parents that lovingly sit down to dinner every night. Unobtainable goals? Perhaps, but for some reason it's how I've decided life should be. I have friends that seem able to achieve this so why couldn't I? What part of the equation was I missing that kept leading me to feel like such a failure?

I spent a few days really thinking about how I was feeling towards being a mother and decided that something had to give because the road I was headed down was not healthy. I decided that while I admire my grandmothers and friends that could do it all, I'm not one of them. The first step was to get the cleaners to tackle the pile of clean laundry and the second was to hire a babysitter. While I always knew I would use babysitters to watch Truman for date nights, the one I found will also be paying me visits during the week. It took awhile for me to admit that I need someone to come once a week or so, for a few hours so I can do what I feel needs to be done; wash some dishes, take a nap, write a blog post, get a pedicure, whatever. I figured that if it takes a village to raise a child and I have no village around me, then I would buy myself one.

So there you have it, I've been missing partially out of a lack of time for posting, partially because I've been so embarrassed by what I viewed as a failure at motherhood that I couldn't bring myself to say anything, and partially because the lack of sleep has sucked the creativity right out of me. But I'm slowly coming back and from here out I refuse to see what I'm doing a failed attempt at raising my son. I'm doing the best I can and I won't feel bad about needing help. I may not be super mom but I am being the best mom I can be and that's good enough.