Sunday night anxieties

I don’t want the weekend to end, I don’t want my role as the (only) caretaker, as shit taker, as nurse, as mom, as therapist…to begin again.

On the weekends, I can stop. If even just for a few hours…my husband willingly takes them for just a little while. On a run in the stroller, to the store real quick, anything. (And I’ll always be grateful to him for that.)

I’m lucky enough to be able to get a break on the weekends.

“Take the kids…get out!!!. Don’t forget to sanitize their hands. Please keep them safe…call me!!!”

I worry, I hate them not being here.

But I am spent.

This week has been an actual shit show, and I’m feeling everything big about it.

Tomorrow will challenge and test me. My son will challenge and test me…and oooooh boy, lately he has my number.

Things are rough. I’m praying it’s a phase, it’s a bad week, he’s having a lot of physical pain….

I’m looking for any and every excuse to give him.

I don’t want to step back into my life. Not that on the weekends I truly ever get to step out…but on the weekdays…it’s only me. It’s me alone from the moment they get up to the moment they go to sleep.

I’m starting to wake up feeling angry…or maybe anxious? That the cycle must begin again. That I’m alone in it, that I’ll have no one but me to lean on during the worst moments of the worst days.

I’m struggling as an individual, I’m struggling as a parent…I’m struggling as a birth parent.

Everywhere I turn, I feel like a failure. I feel like I’m letting everyone down.

All I want to to is stop. Is rest.

I want to lay in bed all day, for days and days, with the covers pulled over my head and the blankets smelling like fresh laundry.

That’s all I want. Good smells and peaceful silence.

Can we have that? Can that happen on a Monday?

Of course not.

But I’ll show up anyway.

I always do….