Member- iarebridezilla
- 4 years ago
- Wedding: June 2012
I’m in a hell of a slump at present, and I’m hoping that if I write about it and talk about it, I can figure it out and maybe find a way to feel a little better.
You know that sigh you let out when you thought you had washed all the dishes but then realize there are still two big filthy pots sitting on the stove that you forgot about? I am that sigh in human form at the moment.
The backstory: DH and I met and fell in love while living in the DC area. We had a boatload of friends through a mutual hobby — in fact, that hobby is how we met each other in the first place. But DH is in the Army, so eventually our time in DC ran out and we had to move. We chose to come to the Seattle area, since my parents and sister live here and DH had gone to nursing school here so he loved the area. And his best friend lives here too! It seemed like the perfect place to move to.
I was able to transfer my job so I still work for the same people, but I work remotely out of the local office out here. Because I do not actually work for/with the people in this office with me, I hardly interact with them at all through the day. And the head honchos in DC are slowly forgetting that I exist — out of sight, out of mind.
My family, while much closer than they were when we lived back east, is still a good 45 minute drive away from our house. So it’s not like I can just pop over there on a whim and hang out. And the hobby that brought me and DH together, and is how we had made all our friends back in DC, kind of sucks out here. It sucks a lot, actually. It’s the same activity, but instead of being populated by cool older people with their lives in check, it’s populated by a bunch of 22-year-old singles trying to hook up with each other. We hate it and don’t participate in this hobby anymore at all. Which is really sad.
After moving here in October of 2012, I became pregnant sooner than expected in mid-January of 2013. This put a pretty serious damper on Operation Make Some Friends, because I couldn’t drink and wasn’t interested in going out to bars to just sit there and sip on water. I was also pretty exhausted a lot of the time. Then Audrey was born in October, and since then I feel like I’m on this treadmill where my entire life is a to-do list that gets added to as quickly as I am able to take things off of it.
I’m able to keep up with the treadmill, but there’s no joy in it. I keep the baby’s clothes and cloth diapers clean. I always wash her bottles on time. The house is clean. There’s always food prepared. But I don’t really get to feel proud about that because there’s also 500 things that HAVEN’T been done and are still waiting for our (mostly my) attention. I know that I’ll get to them, but they’ll be replaced by new tasks a moment later. So I’m just tired.
My days are a big gray lump. I get home around 5 from picking DD up at daycare, and she has her bath and prepares for bed at 6. So during that hour, I try to play with and enjoy her as much as I can, but I also have to wash the bottles and deal with the cloth diapers and eat something. The only respite I get is after DD goes to bed … but I usually only relax long enough to maybe have a glass of wine before going upstairs and getting in bed myself. After all, DD is still pretty unpredictable at night so if I don’t go to bed really early, I could end up severely screwed when that alarm goes off at 5AM.
Because she wakes up at 5 every morning during the week, the best I can hope for on weekends is to sleep in until 5:30 or 6. This means I still don’t stay awake past 9 on Friday and Saturday nights. We have no one to watch the baby if DH and I were to go out and do something, so we don’t go out and do anything. DH goes to his home brew club meetings, which I absolutely allow and encourage him to do, while I stay home with the baby. No point in us both being lonely and miserable. So DH is making lots of new friends and getting really deep into a new hobby while I sit at home reading The Cat in the Hat to an infant. He keeps saying I should come out and meet the wives of the guys he’s befriending, but hellooooo, someone has to watch the baby and that someone is me. DH feels bad and always offers to take DD all day one Saturday or Sunday so I can have some time to myself, but there’s nothing I even want to do with my time. I go get a pedicure and then come home. That’s it.
I don’t know if it’s a new parent thing, or a winter thing (I am very outdoorsy and am excited for summer so I can take the baby out for hikes in her ergo and jogging stroller), or a no friends thing, or what. But I feel like I’m just kinda getting through the days with no particular endgame in sight and it sucks. It sucks that the Seattle version of our hobby is no fun. It sucks that DH has friends and I don’t. It sucks that there is nothing I want to do with a full day to myself. When I was miserable in high school, it was okay because I knew that eventually I would graduate and move on to college and leave that dumpy world behind. But now I’m afraid that I’ll be stuck on this treadmill indefinitely, and I don’t want to waste a single second of my life being unhappy.
But I am. 🙁
I don’t really know what I want from this post. Commiseration? Advice? Sympathy? Reason for optimism?? I’ll take whatever you’ve got.
