The Glamorous Life of a (This) Working Mom

I don't know what happened last night. There's a lot running through my head this morning, and rather than send a flood of eleventyfive tweets, I figured I'd write a blog post. It's been a while, anyway.

Sometimes, I feel like I'm Having it All. I'm crushing it at work, my side hustle is churning along smoothly, the baby is sleeping in regular, 4-hour chunks throughout the night, and my jeans fit comfortably.

Most of the time, I look at Having it All Me, and I don't even believe that those things have ever happened independently, much less all at once. I feel barely coherent at work, I go days without responding to side hustle emails (much less working on projects), Margie's awake every hour needing to be nursed or held and rocked back to sleep, and my jeans are too tight. I think you can guess what kind of time it is today. I'm two cups of coffee and a green tea in, and it's only 2:30, and I don't know how I'm going to make it through the rest of the afternoon and evening.

This was *hilarious* to me at 8:45 this morning.

Sleep has eluded us for a few nights now, but the whole sleep training thing is sort of out the window because of The Trifecta: Teething (#4 is large and in charge and right under the gum), Developmental Changes (crawling and pulling herself to standing), and Probable Illness (Will and I both have sore throats). Last night was epically rough, returning to the world of The Thunderdome (aka having a newborn), where she would only sleep if being held. I think there may have been one stretch of 2-3 hours of sleep in a row, but honestly, I can't remember. I barely stumbled to work and stayed awake all day, and now it's almost 4:30 and I'm finally finishing this blog post while pumping.

I made it through the work day, and somehow I'll make it through tonight, because that's what has to happen, and that's how this works. But man. I have two more long work days ahead of me, and we're going camping this weekend, and I am praying to St. Swaddlesnooze that Margie starts sleeping again.

I'm always full of questions and research and trying to Figure Things Out -- trying to find a reason for the behavior change because understanding why might help us turn things around. But lately, I'm trying to lean into the chaos. To throw my arms in the air and just ride the wave, because what else can I do? Babies are gonna baby. And there might be different or better ways to do things, but all I can do is take it one day at a time and hope that I don't look back in years and think I was an idiot. Or even I do, I hope I can be kind to my sleep-deprived past self and realize that I was just doing my best to survive Thunderdome.