I realized today, in the middle of a blinding headache, that I’ve been withdrawing gradually from my friends - both real and online.  It was a day of epiphanies for me, which means I should get a headache more often. 

The morning started out with Lily complaining about her stomach. She’s a big hypochondriac, so I generally ignore it so as not to feed into it.  However, she actually did have diarrhea today.  She had a few rounds before we left the house this morning, but I figured it was out of her system.  I was wrong!  While I was sweating and grunting during my On The Ball class, she had a little accident and was mortified.  She was especially mortified when Arden announced, at the top of her lungs and in front of about 15 kids, “Lily pooped in her pants, Mommy!”  I thought Lily was going to deck her right then and there.  Yes, this is how important to my life the Y has become - I take my squirting 5 year old to child care there so I can work out.  I felt really bad on the way home.  Ooops. 

We got home and we all settled down to watch a movie together. It was pouring rain out and no one seemed to want to do anything, so I figured some tv wouldn’t hurt us.  Unfortunately, Arden ended up slugging Lily over not having enough room on the couch, I began to yell, and the television was turned off.  Arden had one of her epic fits - this one lasted 52 minutes. I know because I timed it.  That was even with me checking in on her and trying to calm her down halfway through it.  At one point, I started to cry but at least had the sene to go into the bathroom and get it together.  Lily put her hands over her ears and sung to herself.  She already has her own ways of dealing with Arden, and I must say, they are healthier than mine. 

So I was reflecting, during naptime, on what was so different about working. I had lots of really bad days at work - why was that easier for me to handle?  Then it dawned on me.  When I worked full-time, I knew I was good at my job.  I sometimes even felt smart, and I got a lot of good energy from being able to help other people succeed in their careers.  I’ve been doing marketing, in one form or another, since I was 20.  If I hadn’t been good at it, I probably would have stopped long ago.  The reason my bad days at work were bearable, whereas my bad days a home are not, is because when I worked, I knew that I could rock the marketing world.

Here at home, I don’t seem to be rocking much of anything, other than myself, in fetal position, on the floor.  This job I’ve got now is really freaking hard.  I approached being Lily and Arden’s full time mommy like I would a project at work. I scheduled, I arranged, I planned, I executed.  However, Arden isn’t in a place right now to be “arranged”.  My strictly planned days have fallen apart at the seams since I got back from Vegas.  Why? Because I am becoming more and more afraid to leave the house.  Arden’s temperment, her embarassing behavior in public, has put a serious damper on what I’m willing to do with both of them. With one child, you can manage.  The two of them, though . . . .different story. Yesterday I went to Ashland Berry Farm to figure out why all the fish in my pond had died, and the two of them were like wild animals, running around the pond displays, falling INTO a pond (Arden, thanks), grabbing tadpoles, being kids.  I realized that I had become “that” mother - the one with the out of control kids, the one who interrupts the salesperson to scream “GET DOWN FROM THERE JOEY!!! We don’t SWING from the RAFTERS!”

I’m doing a lot of reading on rages and tantrums.  I bought John Rosenmond’s New Parent Power - and it reinforced to me that at some level, I am doing things right. He had an interesting suggestion for kids that scream (Arden has probably hastened my hearing loss by at least 10 years).  He had a “Scream Room” for his daughter, and every time she went nuts, he put her in the half bath and let her scream it out.  That at least is better than listening to it bounce off the hardwoods and high ceilings.  I know what I shouldn’t be doing:  yelling, spanking, pulling my own hair out.  So I just wake up every morning and breathe deeply and hope that Arden will crack this phase soon.

It also pains me to write this.  I don’t want to hear anyone talk about my “difficult” child.  I want things to be easy and calm and sweet, but right now, they aren’t, and I am not about to start lying on my blog about motherhood. Why start now?  Talking to my sister has helped a bit - she has had plenty of good advice for me and I have a new understanding of some of the things she went through with her own son.  A couple of days ago, someone mentioned to me that another parent I know saw Arden crying, and said, about Arden, “That child is always having some issue or another. What is it this time?” It cut me to the quick.  This same child can be the funniest, kindest, most endearing child.  To have another parent (and one that knows me, and my family, fairly well) say that about her made me want to crawl into a hole.  Other than my sister, I have really pulled away from everyone, including Mike, probably.  I don’t like to greet him every night with, “It was a rough day.” I don’t want to lie to my husband, either. I just want to be good at this mothering thing, dammit!

So that is the first part. I have distanced myself from people right now because I don’t have a lot of nice things to say, and I don’t want to be negative or down.  So I don’t blog as much, and I’m consumed with figuring Arden out while making sure Lily gets enough attention.  I have also gotten used to being lonely, which is not a good thing for me. I am a highly social person.  I have suspended, for now, any hopes of finding other moms to hang out with. I just can’t deal with making new friends right now.  Between the mothering thing, learning how to work the online businesses without killing myself has been another challenege entirely, and something I’ll explore in a different post.  There isn’t much left at the end of the day for anyone.

The second part is that after I returned from Vegas, talking to my online friends became increasingly difficult.  I was so bummed out about none of them living here. I got spoiled with the immediacy of conversation - being in person, being able to read body language, or just sit quietly near one another.  After Vegas, keeping those friendships up felt so entirely difficult.  I didn’t want to just talk to Amanda on the phone - I wanted to have lunch with her, or go to the pool with Ava and my girls.  I didn’t want to send Jess a stupid card when she had surgery - I wanted to take care of her boys for her.  This went on and on.  I used to pick up the phone a lot and call - I don’t now as much.  Jess was going to come out this summer but for a variety of reasons she can’t, and it made me really sad.  I’m still planning on visiting Alicia in June, but I have to get off my butt and make the reservations and get my head around travelling all the way by myself with two girls, one of whom I can barely control at home.  I’m not even going to apologize for how much I miss my online friends, and in some ways, it would have almost been easier had we not met. Or, met, and realized that we all hated each other in real life.  Unfortunately, we got along fabulously.  These are people that, if they lived near me, would become like family to me.  In the meantime, I have to make due with phone conversations and IM. 

That is where I’ve been lately.  I know I have neglected my friends, and I’m sorry.  There has been a lot of change for me over the past 6 months, and it’s finally hitting me.  I am writing all this down in an effort to force myself to stop isolating, and reach out more - get out more.