No Time to Think
Things are not going well around here lately. I'll save you the suspense of waiting for the reason: we have a seven-month-old. No one is sleeping enough. Veronika's special demands increase tenfold with each hour of sleep that she loses. Dinka and I barely cross paths during the week and the weekends are marginally better but usually exhausting enough to make up the difference. We wake up resentful for having been up for so much of the night, we go to sleep frustrated with another day lost to frustration. The days pass and not much changes, which reminds me of that old Chris Rock line—(paraphrased approximately) "People tell you life is short... no it's not. Life is LONG." Everyone says kids grow up so fast, but lately it feels like they grow up very slowly, if at all.
And behind all of this, constantly present in our lives and escalating it all to a fever pitch, is Ivan's crying. It is the soundtrack of our lives. I thought about recording a bit of it to really drive the point home but it occurred to me that someone might think it was cruel. Dinka tells me that I have a selective memory about what Veronika was like when she was young, but there is no doubt in my mind that he cries at least fifty percent more than she did at this age (it feels like two hundred percent more, so I'm using the standard exaggeration factor of four). He is no longer content sitting anywhere on his own, like Veronika used to love. Each increase in physical ability compounds his frustration. He wants to be held, but then dives out of your arms. He likes baths but tries to drown himself. And the one thing he was always best at—napping—he has recently given up. Twice a week, I feed the kids and put them to bed while Dinka's at work, and for the last month or so that has meant that by the end of the night I will have thought at least five things about him that I would be ashamed for anyone to ever hear (sneak preview of my confession this Saturday afternoon!). Part of me knows that he is not getting the same treatment that Veronika did because he is the second child and the situation that he's growing up in is more difficult for us to handle, and that just breaks my heart.
A recent trip to my parents, restful as it was, only underscored the fact that we have no one out here to help us. In our wonderful modern world you can live and work wherever you want, and we're all moving around to exciting places and new opportunities and forgetting that there's a reason that people used to stay put, part of which is that things might get tough and you might need help. We can't get anyone to watch the kids once a season for less than it would cost us to go out to the opera (for example), but we have two grandmothers thousands of miles away that could think of nothing better to do with an evening and kids that feel the same.
And my leg hurts from running too much and my elbows hurt from typing too much and I am done for today, my friends.