"Mom, why are you so tired?"

On Sunday afternoon, as I was trying to snooze a bit between Carter's soccer game and some family time in the pool, Jacob said to me, "Mom, why are you so tired all the time?"  I'll be honest--I had attempted the same kind of cat nap on Saturday as well, once again in between soccer and pool time, and it does tend to happen quite a bit on the weekends.  I'll get through morning stuff and making lunch, and finally get a chance to sit down and relax, only to realize I'm falling asleep while looking at my phone.  So, I'll try to rest.  It would probably be far more productive to go to my bed, but then I'm afraid I'll sleep too long and end up groggy, so I nod off on the chair because I don't have enough will to move myself anywhere else.  It's not a great habit but I'm not sure how to break it either.

When he asked that question, I instantly had about a dozen answers go through my head.  "If you only knew," was probably the thing I most wanted to say, as I figured an endless laundry list might be overkill.  I responded that I always have a lot on my mind and a lot of decisions to make throughout the week, and usually in the case of those weekend snoozes, I often haven't sat down in a couple hours and I'm just plain tired.  When my brain gets a minute to shut off, apparently it does so with little hesitation.

To his credit, he asked if there was anything he could do to help me out.  It's a nice offer, but considering he did his two assigned chores this week for the first time in at least a couple weeks, I can't say I have faith that adding to that would really help.  I'm generally torn between wanting things to get done and needing them to get done right, and ultimately wanting them done without nagging.  Could I have him set the table or wash dishes or hardcore clean his room?  Sure, but I also don't want the stress of having to convince him to do it when the novelty wears off, or be a dictator about how it's done.  In some cases, sure, I can ease off and just be happy he's doing it (hello, vacuuming the kitchen floor), but I'd rather not have to rearrange the dishwasher or the cabinets, or glue yet another knickknack, or growl constantly about getting off his phone or away from the video games to do it.  If an allowance isn't enough of a motivator, what will be?  I can't even get him to willingly do his mandatory summer reading right now, and despite periods of losing his phone, he's still resistant and I feel like a constant nag.  So there's that.  And I actually told him as much later, that if he wants me to be less tired, finding a way to behave (around his brother and in general) so I don't have to scream like a banshee would be a huge help.  But yeah, good luck with that.

So why am I so tired?  I've actually thought a lot about this lately because it's been a tough couple weeks for self-motivation.  Ironically, as Craig has gotten more active and lost a bunch of weight, I've been having a heck of a time convincing myself to work out or eat well.  I think part of it is still just recovery from a tough June at work (and at home, honestly, with all of the school year-end stuff), and a short vacation that was anything but relaxing.  I haven't taken any more time at work because I feel guilty that the kids are at camp and we'd be paying for it even if I took them out.  I don't want to take time for no concrete reason either, because inevitably I'll later figure out some good reason to do it and then feel bad about taking too much time.  Also, my days off are a very delicate balance--if I try to rest I feel like a slug and hate myself for wasting the day, but if I try to fill my day with productivity, I'm exhausted.  Less stressed about whatever projects I did, and maybe more fulfilled by a fun activity, but tired nonetheless.  So how do I find that balance?

I've also thought about it lately because I finally got to read "The Valedictorian of Being Dead" by blogger Heather Armstrong, a.k.a. Dooce.  I've followed her for years, and her struggles with depression were pretty well documented.  She went through horrible post-partum depression, and it was clear that post-divorce she was struggling a bit.  More recently, she laid low for a few years--her blog was quiet, her social media a bit sparse and vague--and I mostly just assumed her daughters were ready to be out of the mommyblogger spotlight and she was just moving on.  Well, it turned out that she was actually going through about 18 crippling months of depression hell, and her desperation to beat it culminated in being part of an experimental treatment where they used the drug propofol to bring her brain activity down to just about zero--in essence a tightly controlled medically induced coma--for ten sessions over a few weeks.  The treatment is meant to "reset" the brain and mimic the effects of other more extreme treatments like shock therapy, without the same side effects.  The book recounted the period of time before and during those treatments, and the title is in reference to her striving to be the best at everything in life, and she was really good at being dead-ish for those ten sessions.  Fortunately, the treatment worked for her and life has been remarkably better since.

Now, I'm sure I'm not depressed, though I did read a description about functional depression a while back that I related to quite a bit.  And many times over the last few years, mostly with kid struggles and general life frustrations piling up, I've considered getting myself a therapist to talk through it all--mostly to proactively avoid things ever getting worse.  But the way I've been feeling lately (and periodically at other times), where I just can't seem to motivate myself to do certain things, no matter how much I know I should, felt very similar to her describing her angst with mundane things like emptying the dishwasher or getting up in the morning to get her daughters through the morning rush.  She was a full-time single mom with a full-time job, and all of the the things were just crushing her.  Clearly I manage to get myself out of bed, shower, and move a household along every day, and do a good job at work, so I know I'm far from where she was.  But to some degree, that weighed down feeling of "I just can't" is not far off from where I've felt about working out and meal planning and just generally functioning over the past few weeks.  So many things feel like a struggle, like I will internally collapse if I have to get off this chair and do just 20 minutes on the elliptical.  Even workouts that generally make me feel empowered, like a run or bike ride, hold no interest.  Meal planning has been hellish.  Every day I know I need to plan something, but I can't bring myself to figure it out because everyone likes different things and I don't want us to get sick of what we can agree on.  Jacob's gluten issues combined with Craig's newer lactose intolerance have left me clueless.  Inevitably I'll get home from work, freak out about it for too long, then finally decide on some sub-par choice and be annoyed when we're eating super late.  Sports complicates this as well, and in the end it all just makes the exercise aversion worse because the last thing I want to do after the post-work rush and dinner making is go work out for a half hour.  I just want to sit and do nothing before the bedtime routine hits.  Even after bedtime, I'm trying to cram in as much "me time" as I can, so I push bedtime back farther than I should, and end up with far less sleep than I need, which only makes the next days harder.  It's a vicious cycle that I feel like I should be able to get out of, but right now I feel a little stuck with every single step.

And that's pretty much where I was during those nap attempts over the weekend.  I didn't really want to waste my day doing that, but I also didn't have the will to get up and figure out what I should be accomplishing.  I think sometimes I paralyze myself when all the things I need to be doing are overwhelming me.  I want to do them but don't feel like I can, but also feel guilty doing something less important...so I do nothing.  And yes, I'm well aware how stupid that sounds.

Jacob hates when either of us naps the day away, because unlike Carter who's content to just sit and watch TV (ugh), Jacob wants to be doing things.  However, he prefers to do them with people.  He wants to play basketball with someone else and he wants to swim as a family.  You'd think having a sibling as a built-in playmate would have been helpful, but he's either too particular about how he wants to do things (like, God forbid the hoop be too low or the ball be too light if he tries to play with Carter), or the times they do manage to play together turn into some epic battle over some perceived injustice on one side or the other.  So that means one of us has to be available, and if it's not me I feel guilty and if it is me I'm annoyed I can't be resting, too.  I should be better about having backup activities planned when we get in a rut like this, but again, that just hasn't been something I've had the energy to muster lately.  My kids are growing up far too fast and I know I'll regret all of the playing I didn't do and the screen time I allowed to happen instead, but sometimes I just don't know how to get out of that rut.

I've talked about the mental load before, and that's definitely what a lot of this is. It's keeping track of everything from what we should be eating on which night and what appointments we have this week, to what Jacob needs for his field trip and who's running out of shampoo.  Wrangling the kids is exhausting, as they simply can't leave each other alone and neither one will ever admit they started it.  It's sort of a chicken-and-egg situation--maybe Carter just did something out of the blue, but maybe Jacob said something unintentionally jerky and Carter reacted.  Or maybe Carter did something harmless that Jacob took the wrong way, and Jacob overreacted.  It's always some sort of chain of events like that, where you never quite know what started the dominoes falling, so once they've fallen, it's hard to know who to punish.  I often feel like we're sports referees who are perpetually, unknowingly calling an instigator penalty on the one who was actually retaliating for something else.  We're both so exhausted by the constant back-and-forth.  Today, because Jacob insisted that our interference in their fights were making them worse, the therapist suggested we try to stay out of them.  Anyone want to bet on how long it will take before someone's in the ER?

On top of everything else, there are house projects that need to be contracted out, ever-present yard work, needing to manage my health and weight, trying to keep our marriage strong despite limited time and energy, frustrations with work, and lack of a social life to refresh us and help balance it all.  On a day-to-day basis, it's tiring, but there's so much to do and a routine to stick to, so it's usually easier to push through.  But on weekends when there's unstructured, unscheduled time and all of the household work is physically in front of me, it's easier for all of the things to start overwhelming me.  And I think that's why I'm just so tired.  It's all just too much to process, let alone do.

Some days are better than others.  I'm fine, I promise.  But Jacob's right--I'm tired.