Dorky Darkness

In the wee hours of the morning, I write from a dark place, literally and figuratively. With just the nightlight on, I’m in bed typing on my laptop in a position that is sure to make me pay, if not tomorrow, then sometime in the future that I already expect to be pain-riddled for other unrelated reasons. There are many things that I do that are going to turn around and maul my backside, health-wise.

God, I need to take better care of my stupid self, but who has the time and energy for that? Not I, Little Red Hen.

Did I already say that I need to pee? Yeah, I do, but I’m holding it because getting up to go to the bathroom means shaking the bed as I crawl off it and potentially waking up one or both of the boys sandwiching me (yay me and my co-sleeping choice). One would want to nurse and the other would want to stay up and demand to do something unfitting for the ungodly time of 2:30 in the ever-freaking morning, like jump on his trampoline or eat cake. Although eating cake sounds really great right about now.

You see why I’m 20 pounds overweight? My body gets so drained. To make up for it, I shovel food in. Maybe the correct answer for the low energy conundrum is proper diet and exercise, but when you’ve been running around, chasing after kids, doing chores, and typing articles in a huge scatterbrained whirl, it’s just so much easier to plunk myself down on the couch with a carton of ice cream or a bag of chips. The kids can fling themselves around me (because that’s why they do, little balls of pent-up energy, and I just sit there, absorbing the little blows and thinking that’s the closest thing to a massage I’m getting for quite a while) and graze along with me. They don’t sabotage that particular agenda. Know what they’d do if I even tried to work out? They (the little ones anyway) would hug my legs and stop me from moving. That’s what they do every freaking time. I could work with that and turn it into resistance training or something, but I’m not that kind of person. I’m the sort to give up and whine.

I still need to pee but taking a leak now also means losing minutes from the precious, rare, longed-for uninterrupted writing time that is turning out to be a creature of the night. It comes out past the witching hour, when I’m normally dead to the world. It’s becoming clear to me that I have to give up sleep to make time for all the things I need to be on top of.

God, I’m exhausted. My nerves are wrought. I saw a picture of my husband that was taken at a wedding he attended last week. He looked dashing in a suit. His chest stretched his bespoke shirt in a much nicer, manlier way now than it did in his youth. It got me in a bit of a snit, I tell you. It’s not fair. He got to have the kids without his gut stretching to absurd proportions and his body getting all out of whack while I’ve turned into an overweight frump whose shirts all come from the thrift store. Besides that, after he left for that wedding and I got done running around after him, wrapping his present and tying his tie (but first having to retrieve that particular tie because it was so hard to find, hanging there behind the closet door where it usually did), the day just turned into a calamity. Lunch almost burned, the baby was cranky and bawling, and my eldest was calling to me that her other brother’s poop had slid down his pant leg.

It was craptastic. That has been my life of late. It’s been one diaper duty after another after another all the live long day. Maybe I’ll miss it when they’re grown. Right now, I gripe.

So in this cloak of darkness called 4 a.m. (I’ve stopped to nurse a couple of times since beginning this piece), I write my dark thoughts down. Can you blame me? I’m horribly sleep-deprived. I just yearn for some really deep, solid, uninterrupted sleep.

Whoa, that sounds like death.

Rest assured it’s not quite that dark where I’m coming from. I’m really just a drama queen so I whine, moan, and groan a lot. Lucky me, my kids seem to have inherited the trait. Those molehill mountains are exhausting though. Which is why I write from this dark place and binge on cake.