Mother Blues

Lovely internet, please, let me whine a little bit. We’re not having a good day at Casa Infertile ID. Mr. H has taken off for a long 10 days to go on a business trip and left behind an exhausted, tired mother and their toddler; the very same toddler who has gone through the hell of infertility with a mother who on her best days only cries about once. Do you know the adds in which kids have breast cancer and lung cancer? Well, my kid suffers from infertility. And you can tell. She is much more fragile and clingy these days, afraid that her mother will fall sick and perish away.

She doesn’t understand what’s going on. She is just scared and copes with the situation as best as she can (which is, I'm afraid, by regressing a bit).

I, on the other hand, understand what’s going on. But it doesn’t make it any easier for me. I feel so beaten, and I so desperately need something to work out. But nothing does, or so it seems. I feel like a failure, as a woman, wife, and mother.

Right now, this very second, I feel like the worst mother around. The kind of mother I don’t want to be. The kind of mother who compares her kids to others and her own kid fails the comparison. I know they are MY problems and not hers, and I should be able to handle them. But, alas, I am not.

And being the only one on call for 24 hours a day for days on end doesn’t help one bit. Not when every plan for desperately needed play dates has fallen through. Not when you are deeply exhausted to begin with. Not when your kid is whiny and clingy and you are cranky. It’s sad, but the whinier she gets, the crankier I get with her, which subsequently makes her even whinier. It’s a classic vicious circle.

But I am her mother and I know it is up to me to break this vicious circle. Or at least soften it.

I need to cut myself some slag, too, though. Because, damn it, failing an IVF cycle, getting sick (bad sinus infection), and being alone with a toddler is no walk in the park. Compared to that, a business trip seems like a vacation. And it probably is.

So, I make myself the promise to try harder to be the kind of mother that my kid deserves while at the same time trying not beat myself up if I don’t always succeed. I should think of some really good rewards for myself for succeeding, don’t you think?