And breathe ...

At the moment I am waking up before I need to wake to remind myself that I have two more hours to go before I need to wake up. Then I wake up nearly exactly an hour before I need to get up to remind myself that I need to be out of bed in one hour. Sometimes, I give myself some time out and sleep straight through the following hour until I actually need to get up. At other times, I lie impatiently still, neither fully awake and definitely not asleep and check my phone intermittently. I don't like that this is taking place. It is emotionally exhausting and psychologically unhelpful. I don't like. Not one bit. Although I get it. We've had a lot going on and my mind is fussing with all of this information, my sub conscience poking its nose into places when it has no right to do so.

I am working full time for the first time in eleven years, since September. The first few months were adrenaline filled and since there was just so much change going on, somehow we all rode the wave. One child starting secondary school, the younger one entering the world of childcare for the first time with two different childminders, myself working in a new role and my husband taking on new plus additional domestic and childcare duties really for the first time. Now some months in, I think we're all feeling it in our different ways. My eldest shared with me a couple of nights ago during a strained exchange that he misses not having as much time to just relax with me. Whilst I know that he is extremely privileged to have had a stay at home mum for his entire life and I also know that our evenings and week-ends are spent together and very little time outside of school is spent apart, and that, like me he can be a little dramatic but nonetheless of course mother guilt entered my heart and pierced it a little. 

Normally when I experience a little overwhelm, it either has me scribbling words and thoughts uncontrollably or it's quite the opposite. The last few months I have scribbled away and tucked words in different places, some places almost already forgotten and other in other places, the words just sit waiting, waiting for me to remember them. Time slips away and things are forgotten and just like my ten year old self did, I worry. I worry that I won't remember it all correctly, perhaps that I won't remember it at all. I worry that the days and months and years will roll into a mass of half truths and fractured memories and worst of all, I worry that I won't remember the good days, the happy times, the funny things. So perhaps in the early hours of this morning which technically will be tomorrow, perhaps I'll have a slight reprieve from the list of to do's that knock on my door. Perhaps I'll feel like at least one box is ticked and not in a work kind of way but in a surviving kind of way, a breathing kind of way. Breathe. And breathe. And breathe.