I am Passionate About – Finish the Sentence Friday

30

April 25, 2013 by Katia

Kind of funny to talk about how I’m passionate about my kids. It’s almost equivalent to reporting that I eat, sleep and occasionally bathe. But this is what life revolves around right now, our kids. For me there’s also my writing. Not too crazy about the way they mix sometimes, though, writing and kids. Funny I should use the word crazy because I did THIS today. Twice. While home alone with 8 Month Old:

Well, it wasn’t exactly that, to be honest. It was more of an underwear clad Walt White, rolling on the floor from side to side in a fetal position, kind of laughter, which implies less ambiguously than the example above, that you’re going through something. Since I couldn’t find THAT GIF, you’ll have to do with the visual. In his underwear, got that part??

I may have used some strong words on a call I’ve placed to 36 Year Old today and some more words on an international call to my mom, and I may have seriously contemplated (for the umpteenth time) to start liking to drink.

You see, there’s a guest post I’ve been trying to write for a couple of weeks at least. I was also trying to work on the post you’re reading, but it’s been impossible to get anything done recently. 8 Month Old’s been sick on and off for the last three weeks. First a fever then a cold with a very persistent cough. It’s been snowing or raining. He hardly naps and while he’s awake he won’t spend any time apart from me, unless the activity involves crawling, pulling himself up on something which allows him to shove: 1. chalks 2. catalogue paper 3. kleenex 4. phone wires 5. phone 6. remote control 7. leaves OR 8. Dollar store shit into his mouth. Which is why I’ve tried to interest him in a sock today.

I shudder as I write this.

I feel guilty and scared to complain. Not about the sock part, I actually think that was the safest thing he tried to hold in his mouth all day. It’s something else. It’s an ingrained fear of jinxing. Complaining about something that is essentially good and then suffering the consequences.

When I was going through whatever you want to call it that I was going through in order to conceive 8 Month Old, I once picked up a magazine while waiting in yet another line at the fertility clinic. The magazine featured an article about the guilt that parents who struggled with fertility experience once they’ve successfully carried a baby to term and it’s time to start complaining. The fatigue, the sleep deprivation, the physical exhaustion all take a toll. Add to that the hormonal treatments that fertility patients go through for months, sometimes years and you get the picture. You want to complain just as much as everyone else, maybe more so, but you feel like you shouldn’t – having struggled so hard to get to where you are today. You’d be perceived as an ingrate, it’s not fair to others who haven’t succeeded yet.

I think about this article often and can’t for the life of me remember where I’d read it. I’ve identified with it to some extent reading it back then, but not fully, since most of my struggle with conceiving 3 Year Old was while I was still trying to conceive him naturally. 8 Month Old is a different story.

Do you still love me? 3 Year Old asks a few times a day after he spills another glass of chocolate milk all over the couch or calls me poopy. The answer never changes. I, myself, usually don’t spill chocolate milk and I try not to complain too much in my posts, but if you hear me do that please know that I am not ungrateful, just tired and I still love them. More than anything. Hope you can still like me.

This post is written for FTSF. Please visit our lovely hosts:

Janine at Janine’s Confessions of a Mommyaholic

Stephanie at Mommy, for Real

Kate at Can I get Another Bottle of Whine?

Dawn at Dawn’s Disaster