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2006-07-07 - 1.59pm previous entry next entry
3 weeks in, and struggling...
Okay, TOTALLY not coping at all with having two children under two. I warn you now, this entry will have no photos and it won't be the kind of entry that you want to read with your cup of coffee to enjoy catching up with how I'm doing or something. So please feel free to read no further! It's 12.30pm, the boys are finally asleep at the same time and I have finally emptied my bladder for the first time since yesterday. So now I have a window to either fall over and go unconscious till somebody wakes me up, or unload a little in my diary. I am so tired I just want to curl up and die, but that just tells you how much I need to de-stress, that I am here writing instead.
I sooooooo can't do this. I am seriously not managing at all - SERIOUSLY. Even just a week ago, I had no concept of how hard it could be to have to manage the two little ones on my own with their own little set of complicating factors. I don't know how much time I have to write, and I really don't want to start this, write 2 paragraphs, and then have to suddenly stop and come back 4 hours later and try to get back in touch with how I was feeling when I was writing the first 2 paragraphs, etc, to finish it off.
So I will try to summarize.
Matthew cries all the time. ALL the time. ALL. THE. TIME. He isn't acting in awful pain since I cut out milk, but he is ultra fussy. He cries any time he is not on the breast, or in my arms. Sometimes he cries in my arms all the same. I can't wear him in any slings because my back. Is. Killing. Me. I don't know if that's from crappy sleep, bad posture while breastfeeding, lifting Arthur, walking Matthew for millions of miles across my carpet, etc. Or even the times I have TRIED him in the slings I have. My back hurt a lot on all those occasions, so that may have made it worse. Or just tension? But anyway, he goes in my arms or not in contact with me at all, those seem to be the only two options. So obviously, you know my heart about parenting my babies - I want them attached to me more than not. So I hold him. This would be fine if he was my only child. But he's not.
Damnit, he's waking up.
Okay, still here for now. So if I give Matthew the comfort he needs, Arthur gets about half an hour out of 24 of my full attention - I kid you not, and the poor child has nobody else around but me all day. Arthur is playing up a lot lately. I don't know if it's his age or his understandable difficulty with the situation, but it's driving me crazy. He tries to climb out of the window, turns the CD player up to full volume, all those kinds of things. He bangs his head on EVERYTHING and has a permanent shiner (raised and blue) in the centre of his forehead.
He's definitely awake (Matthew). Will try holding him and typing with the other hand maybe...
Back, Matthew in one arm.
Matthew can't suck at the breast like he needs to (he wants to suck ALL the the time) because of my darn milk. Now, don't get me wrong, I know how blessed I am to have such plentiful milk and I promise you I am so grateful for it. But certain aspects are getting me down and adding to certain complications. My milk supply appears to be the same as with Arthur - oversupply with very forceful letdown reflex, only possibly a little more so. Matthew takes down crazy amounts of wind and brings up equally crazy amounts of milk. I'm having to work hard on getting his balance of foremilk and hindmilk right because he gets so much milk so fast that he doesn't feed for long, and that means he gets a lot of foremilk but not so much hindmilk. Which gives him tummy ache and green poo if I don't control it a bit.
The leaking is also an annoyance. I don't make little damp patches on my clothes, I SOAK my clothes, top AND trousers, as though someone has poured a cup of milk down my front. My breasts are bigger this time so my nursing bras aren't generous enough to fit any brand of breastpads in them - even the larger ones that I bought new for this time round. Some of them are too tight to wear at all. When my milk lets down, it sprays like a fire hose, whether there's somebody attached at the time or not, and forces right through my bra so that my bra drips from the outside. It's so frustrating.
Arthur might wake shortly. Matthew wasn't happy in my arms so I lay in bed with him, nursed him, burped him, nursed him, mopped up sick, burped him, and then he cried so now I have resorted to nursing him again in one arm while I type this with the other.
I swear I barely ever put my breasts away at the moment! I know Matthew is at a growth spurt age (3 weeks) and anyway he has been feeding like crazy for the last few days so I'm sure that's part of it. But it's still hard with him feeding 1-2 hourly (sometimes more) around the clock. He is a little better at night at the moment, 2-3 hourly for most of it and then back to cluster feeding again in the early morning. Arthur wants milk ALL the time. He is refusing meals, but some days he eats pretty normally - usually with lots of encouragement from us. He wants to feed when Matthew does, which I usually accommodate for him, and also basically whenever he sees me! Or when he's hurt, or hungry, or tantrumy, or tired, etc, etc.
Matthew is off the breast on my lap and hopefully asleep! No sounds from Arthur yet, so I hope I get some more stuff off my chest for a bit longer.
I'm losing my train of thought.... where was I? Oh feeding. Yeah, I am just not enjoying my boys like I should be.
Under pressure, it turns out that I am actually total crap at this motherhood thing. Oh crap, Arthur is awake. See? My sweet little love has graced me with his lovely presence and all I want to say is, "Oh crap, can't you sleep for a bit longer?!" With Matthew's crying, I constantly find myself saying or thinking now, "Oh for God's sake, what's the matter NOW?!" in an angry way. Sometimes I just want to slam him down and leave him to cry, but my heart won't let me leave him for long, as I know a newborn baby can't understand or cope with being left alone. I just want him to shut up more often than not, and fewer and fewer are the times that I respond to him with mushy love hoping to meet his needs and help him stop crying in that kind of way. I just plain want him to shut up and give me a moment's peace or a moment to get my own needs or Arthur's needs met.
And as far as Arthur is concerned, he is having a crappy time of it too, the poor love. I seem to just have no control over my temper all of a sudden, and the slightest thing makes me snap. I get worried for my kids because I am not sure if I will hurt them or not, honestly. I have been behaving WAY too roughly with Arthur when he persists in doing something unsafe or to wind me up for the millionth time when I have been asking him not to or trying my best to distract him while my arms are busy with a crying baby. I finally just snap and yank him hard away from whatever he's doing. Sometimes hard enough so that he falls or something.
Yesterday we attempted a walk around the corner to try and stop Matthew crying, and I wore Matthew in the Hotsling. He slept while we walked so that was something. It was okay except that my back hurt a LOT and I got totally exhausted, and on the way home Arthur stopped being such a totally good boy as he was being beforehand. Once we got to our road, which thankfully is a quiet cul-de-sac, he broke away from my hand and stood in the middle of the road so I had to go and retrieve him. Once I tried to, he went weak at the knees and sank onto the road. Everytime I picked him up by the hand, he laughed and flopped down at the knees. I tried leaving him to it, but he just crawled around the road having lots of fun! I couldn't bend over and use both hands because I had to keep one hand on the sling when bending over. Plus my back. Ow. So in the end I had to pick Arthur up by the wrist and literally carry him to our driveway like that. Today he has friction marks on his wrist in the shape of two of my fingers. I feel so ashamed, but much more so because I know I am generally being too rough with him, and he could well have plenty of marks on him from stuff I'm doing to him. When I am stretched to absolute breaking point and Matthew is screaming and has been for hours, and Arthur is just laughingly doing something that he KNOWS really gets on my nerves and plain ISN'T SAFE and won't listen to me at all when I ask him to stop, I honestly just want to HURT him, such is my anger towards him. I just feel like I am snapping inside, and I want to dig my fingernails into him when I grab him to stop him, or just crush some part of him with my hands when I try to hold him still to listen to what I'm saying so he'll understand the urgency of it.
How shit am I?
I cry every day but not because I'm "bluesy", rather just because I am completely overwhelmed and unable to cope with the situation. I phone Neil in tears at work saying I can't look after the boys. I just suck at it so much.
I do love them, but you really wouldn't know it from watching me if you were a fly on the wall, so what does it matter to say that I love them?
I feel like I am doing two people's jobs. I am constantly running and I do mean RUNNING between the two of them. If I have to be out of the room that they're both in for a few seconds, say to get a drink for Arthur or something, I am constantly shouting over my shoulder to Arthur not to touch Matthew and to be gentle with him, etc. I don't feel safe leaving them alone together.
Matthew is left alone to cry and cry and cry MANY times a day, not because I would ever want him to have to go through that in a million years, but because after a couple of hours I simply HAVE to attend to Arthur for something or other. Naps are a total nightmare. Today it took two hours to get Arthur down for his nap, as Matthew kept waking and crying and crying and CRYING before Arthur was able to fall asleep. So I'd stop with Arthur and run to Matthew and settle him a bit, and then run back to Arthur and nurse him and then Matthew would wake and cry and cry and CRY till I just couldn't bear it any longer and had to stop with Arthur again to go back to Matthew. Arthur eventually started getting to things that weren't safe or that he really shouldn't be doing as he knew it was something we have always told him NOT to do, while I was trying to breastfeed Matthew to sleep (the only chance that we'd get to have long enough to nurse ARTHUR to sleep), and in the end I had to put Arthur in time-out in the travel cot while I nursed Matthew to sleep. This worked okay but it took 10 minutes to nurse him to sleep so Arthur got longer in time-out than he should be getting at his age. But Matthew woke AGAIN and cried before Arthur could nurse to sleep. And then pooed. So I had to take him downstairs and change him while Arthur went back in time-out for going back to the same things he had been put there for doing in the first place. I did warn him but he did them anyway. This time Arthur was HYSTERICAL in time-out and Matthew was in a state so that I couldn't leave him to comfort Arthur. I didn't expect Arthur to be so upset, but I suppose we did leave him alone this time. Anyway he had to wait way too long in the travel cot again, and I can't remember what happened next but finally Matthew stayed asleep for 5 minutes straight and Arthur was able to nurse to sleep. When I came back in here after that, Matthew woke up and the rest is written here. THAT kind of thing makes me cry.
Every day is the same. I am not coping, or "doing really well" as so many people keep telling me. I am literally NOT coping. I know it's meant to be hard, but I am absolutely not up to the challenge, I assure you. The reason I am still here when Neil gets home from work is not because I have coped with the day and got through it, it is because time has continued to pass and somehow I haven't imploded, and thus I am still in existance by the end of the day. Surprisingly, to me, but there we go. I feel like I am just hanging on by a thread to my sanity, and to my role as a mother to my little boys. I am hanging on with no control over how long my thread might last before it breaks, and all I can think about is getting time where I am not demanded of ALL the time. I can only think about Neil getting home from work to help me, and even then that is not a stress-free time of relief. It's usually a time where Neil tries to soothe Matthew, Arthur runs about shrieking, and I cry on the sofa.
We are using dummies for Matthew because of his intense need to suck and my absolute inadequacy to meet his needs while also being able to do anything for myself or Arthur. I hate dummies. But I never loved them as much as I love them right now! Matthew seems so comforted by sucking them, though at first he rejected them like Arthur did the one time we tried him with them - he needed to suck like this too but we had no other children to look after so it was fine for us to spend 3 hours with our little finger in Arthur's mouth or for me to lie on the sofa all day nursing him on and off.
It is absolutely unfathomable, how I can possibly manage to cope with the way things are at the moment. There need to be at least two of me to even come close to meeting both the boys' needs, and to give me enough relief so that I'm unstressed enough to stop snapping at and being rough with Arthur. I just feel more resentment towards both of them with each day that passes and that just breaks my heart. But it's like a slippery slope that I can't stop my progress on, because unless something changes to make it easier to cope, I am going to go insane and my children are not going to be safe with me. But nothing is going to change because it can't. So I am afraid of the next few weeks.
I am utterly ashamed of the way I have become as a parent. I haven't wanted to write about it here even, but now I am too far gone to care.
Matthew has a horrible nappy rash that Arthur never suffered from as a newborn. And yesterday he had really mucousy green poo again. I am still off milk so I don't know why it has suddenly started up again. He isn't acting in awful pain like before I gave up milk, but he DOES seem uncomfortable a lot. Though that could just be the awful rash, it looks really sore. We've tried creams galore, frequent changes, air-time, and camomile-tea-soaked liners in his nappies. But it persists, and now the green mucousy poo. So I guess it's another food allergy that I can't figure. I guess I will have to cut out all dairy and see if it improves, but that pretty much means I don't get to EAT, since dairy is a huge part of my diet, and the mainstay of the "easy" foods that I am sometimes able to get for myself in a few seconds at lunchtime. I don't know. I haven't cut it out yet, because it's just another thing to have to "organise" that seems too much right now, but I know Matthew won't get comfier or happier until I do SOMETHING and find out what is bothering his tummy.
Well, Arthur has been up for 30 minutes now, and he is being such a good boy sitting on the bed "reading" my books (ironically he is thumbing through "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems", haha!) while Matthew is sleeping on a pillow on my lap. My back is killing me and it's nearly 2pm and none of us have had lunch. So I should go. Thank GOD it's Friday. But weirdly I am not basking much in the relief. I am already panicking about how in 2 days it will be nearly the end of Sunday and I will be faced with the insurmountable task of another full week with Neil at work again.
I don't know what to do. But there's nothing to be done so I will try to put Matthew in his cot without him waking, and take Arthur downstairs and attempt to get him to eat some solid food. And maybe if I'm lucky I'll get something to eat myself. I know I need to keep up my fluids and a good diet with all the breastfeeding I'm doing - believe me I know! I'm doing my best, and mostly succeeding, but sometimes it is literally impossible.
If you've got this far and you don't want to kick my head in, you have a heart of gold. Matthew wakes. Bugger.
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