Being a parent is officially hard.
What? It's not all going to be easy? It's not going to be baby book, Picture People perfect? But that's what I want. That's what I signed up for. I didn't sign up for the hard stuff. No, correction. I signed up for it. I just didn't realize what I signed up for. And now I don't know if I can do it. I mean, I CAN do some things. I can do midnight feedings and colic that ends in 4.5 months and broken legs and tantrums and even back-to-back episodes on Cartoon Network. I can DO those things.
What I can't do is this other stuff. This pleading, begging, praying to GOD every day for my son to come out of this thing he's in. This thing that makes him not let himself poop. WHY won't he do it? WHY?? This is certainly a form of hell and I just have to figure out how we got here. Maybe then I can figure out how we can get out. The pediatric psychiatrist says "Don't catastrophize the future." Yeah. Easy for you to say. Have you read the message boards? The places were desperate parents are hanging out trying to figure it out like we are? Their children are 6, 8, 12, and older. They are STILL trying to figure it out. They're still going crazy, living in their own hell. But who knows, maybe it will get better right? Maybe. Or maybe in 100, 200, 400 days I will still be pleading, begging, bribing, praying to GOD every night for my son to poop....please it's been 3, 5, 7, 8, 9 days, please just poop. And then, as usual, prayers don't do the trick and it's a slow, horrible process to get it out by other means. And after a year, it's not gotten better. It's only getting worse.
Self-pity is a horrible thing. It makes you feel even more awful about yourself for pitying yourself and you end up in this weird paradoxical box that you can't get out of. That is where I am.
I think the definition of a horrible mother must be the one that pities herself when her own child is suffering. Yep, that's me. Mother's Day be damned. That's for mothers who get it right. I thought I was getting it right. Just read through the archives of my blog. I was happy. We were happy. Now our family is hanging on by a thread. Precarious. Scared. UNhappy. How did we get here? Delving into that would take too much energy today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe.
