Do You Ever Have Down Days?

The Question:

Dear Jane,

Do you ever have days where you don't want to be a mom and just veg out?  What do you do?  I have awesome kids, but sometimes I am just tired and I just want to let my hair down, but with three boys 4, 2 and 2 months, it gets too out of control.  Do you ever want to hang out in jammies and do whatever?  I feel I have to always be doing something or something is happening that's not suppose to.

Thanks

The Answer:

Dear Friend,

 

Yes.  Absolutely yes.  Every so often throughout all of my childbearing years, I would wake up too tired to face my life.  It took me a long time to recognize this.  I would try to push myself through it (because what else can you do?) until my mother one day said something like:  "Have you ever noticed how sometimes you just have a very slow, worn out day?"  She lived 800 miles away so I wondered how she knew.  "Yes!"  I replied in utter shock.  She went on to mention some of the symptoms:  a lazy lethargic feeling, not really sick but sometimes kind of hoarse, unmotivated, a little down.  "Yes, yes, yes,"  I replied.  She said, "You know what I used to do on those days?"  "What?!!"  I cried.  "Nothing,"  she said.  "I canceled everything.  I stayed in my pajamas.  I unplugged the phone.  I let the kids stay in their pajamas.  If someone dropped by, I opened the door a crack and told them I wasn't feeling well.   I read or watched tv and let the world fall down around me."    Wow.  This was good news.

 

I started tracking my down days.  They seemed to often follow a very stressful few days--such as the Standards Night I was in charge of or the Road Show I had to direct.  But I came to recognize the day almost before my eyes opened.  And I made it a policy to follow my mom's advice--to just be kind to myself.  "Bring home pizza,"  I'd tell my husband, "we're functioning on low today."

 

And for me, it never really extended into days and days.  Usually the next day, I'd be ready to roll again and actually rejuvenated by my self-imposed break from life. 

 

How (I'm sure you're asking) did I manage to take a day off with a houseful of little children?  I'm not sure.  I'm not a person who normally lays around all day, so maybe they sensed that something was up.  Maybe they didn't question it because after all, they got to eat all the cold cereal they wanted all day.  Maybe they enjoyed the fact that I wasn't running around cleaning and cooking and ordering them to pick things up--but just fixed and immobile on the couch.   I don't remember ever farming them out on those days.  We just all vegged out together.

 

And one other thing--don't read books on child-rearing or self-improvement while you're doing this.  Just read a good clean novel or watch a tear jerker and if at all possible, have a good cry.  The whole thing can be very renewing to the soul.

 

So there you have it--the truth about how I survived 99 months of pregnancy, 11 years of nursing and children 24-7 for 29 years and counting.  We holed up once in a while and went into slow motion.  And it didn't hurt anything.

 

I hope this little confession from my mother to me to you---is helpful.  Be kind to yourself.

 

All my love,

Jane