I’m riding another wave it seems.  I was feeling so fantastic last week.  I will admit to poking a little bit at my friend who’s husband hadn’t slept well the previous night because of the little one.  I made a flippant remark, but the truth is, I completely understand feeling horrible when your partner doesn’t sleep well.  In my case, it’s because my husband is currently the sole provider for our family.  He works at a very physically demanding job and he works horribly long hours. And he’s very hot-tempered.  Friday wasn’t a good day for him.  He called me looking for me to cheer him up and remind him why he’s out there doing his job.  I don’t react well under that kind of pressure.  I’m home with two toddlers all day.  Not a lot goes on here.  Certainly nothing too interesting.  I find it all extremely cute and entertaining, but it’s really not for everyone.  A lot of it is probably only mildly entertaining and at not even 10am we hadn’t gotten very far in our day.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to brighten his day.  From there my day took a nosedive.  I was feeling anxious and worried all day.  He called throughout the day railing about how bad his day was going.  I can’t blame him.  The conditions he often has to work under are absolutely ridiculous.  That is the reality of it though.  The only advice I can offer him is to not take it personally, do his job to the best of his ability and always make sure he stays safe.  When I advise him to stay safe, it is not only for his benefit but the safety of everyone around him.  Part of his job involves operating very large trucks.  By about 3:30-4 that afternoon we knew he wouldn’t be coming home from work that day.  He was quite a distance from home and still had one more job to complete.  He was exhausted because he started work at 2:30 that morning and by the time he finally stopped the clock he had worked a fifteen and a half hour day.  That’s a long day of stress and struggle.  He was hungry, wet and tired.  Long story short, he made it through his day without getting hurt, hurting anyone else or quitting his job.  Huge sigh of relief.

I was wiped.  Emotionally I find it much harder these days to deal with the really hot, raging anger.  It burns me out so quickly and I’m not bouncing back from it like I once did.  Anger used to be my primary emotion.  It was my failsafe, my natural first reaction.  It isn’t anymore.  I am finding that after this past year and a half I have very little defense left and when I get torched the recovery process seems to take forever.  It doesn’t have to be my anger either.  I only have to be faced with it and I’m spent.  I’m guessing this must be something close to a bit of depressive behaviour.  I don’t know.  I’m just guessing.  I’ve never really been through something like this  before.  I did have a spell between my pregnancy with my second daughter and my pregnancy with the twins where I realized I must have been in a pretty dark spot, but I wasn’t aware of how dark until I started coming out of it.  It was only after I started to feel better that I understood how down I had been.  Back in the good old days I was a pretty upbeat person.  I was always having a good time, no matter what.  Of course, I would have down days, who doesn’t, but they didn’t last long.  My pity parties usually only lasted a couple of days before I would lose  my patience with myself and shake it off.  Now, I feel down more days than I feel up and I feel like I’m obsessing over it because I can’t stand it!  What’s worse than that though is that I can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

I know the things I can do that make me feel better.  I know that the hard part of doing those things will be a very short period of time.  I know what to do, how to do it, blah, blah, blah.  I just don’t feel it.  I feel like it would require so much effort to talk myself into doing these things that I just don’t have that energy available.  I know that must sound terrible.  How can I bitch about the way I feel if I’m unwilling to do anything to change it?  I’ve just never felt like this before.