Three weeks

Until they go back to school.

We are nearing the proverbial wall of togetherness. The point where you have had all you can take of your loved ones, those people you wanted to spend time with at the start of this vacation, those people you now wish would go somewhere ANYWHERE for a few hours & leave you the eff alone in the glorious silence.

DH took the boys into town Saturday for lunch & then met up with some friends who have a membership at the Rec Club for swimming. They were gone about 3 hours & I think that was the first time I have been childless in all of July.

Usually he takes them into town most Saturdays but between our two long weekend vacations and his working 16 hour days there have not been many Saturdays available.

I expect this feeling to hit towards the end of summer, the last 10 days of summer vacation usually find us all over spending time with one another & eagerly looking forward to being with other people for a change. It’s early this year and that is probably due to all the single parenting I have been doing since mid June. DH has been home by 7 maybe 3 times in 5 weeks, normally he is home by 6:30. This summer he has been home around 10pm and it’s been slowly wearing me down. I’ve lost almost all desire to cook dinner. I’m short tempered about little things with the boys.  I find that ‘yelling’ is my default response to everything these days. When DH is home while the kids are awake I find myself hiding in my bedroom to have some alone time.

I need my normality back.

Not so much the kids being in school, though I like that normality, but mostly I need my partner back. I need to share the discipline. I need adult conversation when my brain is still alert, not at 10pm when I am half asleep. I need someone to say “Thanks for dinner, it was delicious”. I need at least an hour a day where someone else can get the juice or mediate the quarrels. I need to fax employment related documents only he can provide from his office where he never is these days. I need some else to be here, to lean on, to talk to.

His job at this site has 2.5 more weeks to go. He stayed there overnight last night & might stay again tonight. I don’t know if he will be staying in town the rest of the week or driving back & forth. He’ll be staying on site Sunday & Monday nights next week as well & I have no idea after that.

I let the boys camp in the living room last night just for variety. I knew they would be up all evening anyway. Mom being alone in the house every night has triggered an avalanche of sleep putting off behavior the past few weeks. First someone needed to go to the bathroom, then they wanted the good dreams spray, then a glass of water, then the lighting was all wrong, then there was some life changing question that just *had* to be answered, then a complaint about how the sibling was keeping them awake, then missing stuffed animals, etc. They don’t do this when DH is home. I get so fed up with all this that one night I bribed them each $1 to stay in bed all night but I can’t afford to keep that up.

So since DH wasn’t going to be home at all I decided I’d watch TV in bed & let them have the living room, warning them that if I had to come in and tell them to be quiet twice, they would be moved back to their own room.

Naturally I was in there within 15 minutes. When I came in the second time there was much wailing & gnashing of teeth and finally, between sobs Mayhem says “I can’t help talking Mom. It’s what kids do” and I had to leave before I started laughing.

It hasn’t all be miserable but it’s wearying & I worry I am going to be so worn down that getting back to our regularly scheduled lives is going to be very hard.