Four Days

Four days.

I live my life in four day increments.  

Every Sunday night I tell myself  'Ok four days, four nights and then you have 3 days with Tate.'

So those might not be the exact words I say to myself every Sunday night, but the gist is that.  I have to 'survive' the next four days of work to have three days with my sweet boy.  And now that he's in school it's really only 2 1/2 days.  

And I hate it.  I can't stand feeling this way.  But it seems so very true when you get down to the basics of our life. We're up by 6am and trying to get out the door every Monday through Friday by 7:15am.  That doesn't leave time to connect or hang out.  By the time we both get moving (he's much more a morning person that I ever will be! So he's raring to go immediately!) it's 6:15am.  Thankfully my morning bird can start his own breakfast, so I get up and do the basics for myself...wash face, contacts, straighten the bed and get downstairs to finish his breakfast.  I make his lunch, wash breakfast dishes, make-up/hair for me, cajole him into his clothes, he brushes his teeth and if we're super duper lucky, on a really good day which are very few and far between I'll read him a quick story and we have to leave.  That story rarely happens, so there's no real connection.  Thankfully he's really easy going, so rarely do I have to push him along and on those days when he's dragging I know he needs me, so I slow down and make time to connect with him to see what's going on.  I never regret those days I end up being late because I know he needed me.

The evenings seem the same.  We have at most 2 hours together.  Usually only an hour and a half.  To eat dinner, clean dishes, read stories, brush teeth and get him to sleep.  We do get to connect a bit while reading stories and while we eat, but it never seems like enough.  I mean seriously is 45 minutes (45 because part of the time is spent cooking, looking over his homework, cleaning up a tad, feeding the cat etc) enough time to reconnect with the most important person in your life?  A young person at that.  4 days a week times 52 weeks a year?  

And I know I'm blessed.  There are many many parents working two jobs to keep a roof over their families' head.  The idea of having a 3 day weekend is so foreign to them they can't even imagine it to wish for it.  So I'm grateful.

 Then we have those nights like tonight.  We had a really nice day....church this morning with Sunday School.  We ran a couple of errands, came home for lunch then Tate had a nice long playdate here with a friend which enabled me to get a ton of stuff done here at the house.  

We were rocking along, I made dinner and cajoled him into the bathtub while dinner was cooking.  

Then it all went downhill.  I was trying to help him dry off to get dressed and he was being silly.  I asked him to stop and he didn't.  In his jumping around he banged me in the head.  I didn't handle it well and angrily set him aside and told him he had hurt me because he wouldn't stop when I asked him to.  I stalked off and returned quickly having cooled off.  He was quiet as he knew he had upset me.  Then his pajamas were too small.  His underwear was too small...I knew the pjs might be too small, so I was prepared for that and just had him get new everything.  But he was still quiet.  But wouldn't talk to me.  I told him I was ok, my head wasn't still hurting.  Then he said he needed some alone time.  I said sure.

Then he refused to help with dinner, refused to eat with me.  Just sulked.  He needed more alone time.  I didn't handle it well.  I thought to myself...We have four days of really no time together and he's ruining our last couple of hours together....how dare he?  I told him that if he didn't come eat with me he would have to fix his own plate when he was ready, but I was eating right now.  I told him I wasn't happy he was ruining the end of our weekend together.  

I ate alone.

He continued his alone time in the living room while I ate.

After I ate I went and asked him how he was and he said he was starving.  I offered to help him get his plate.  He said yes please.

But I sat down first and asked if he felt better and said I was proud of him for knowing he needed some space from me.  I asked if he was mad or sad and he said no.  Then I asked if he was mad at me.  Sweet boy had a really hard time saying yes.  I told him that it was ok to be mad at me, that he's going to get mad at me a lot for lots of different reasons and that he's going to need space from me some of those times.  I even said he'll probably want to run away to get away from me a time or two .... that got a look of 'are you nutso lady?'  (maybe not such a good idea).  I just want him to know he can be mad at me and vice versa.  I told him that even when I'm mad at him I still love him and I asked him if he still loved me right then, and he said yes tearily.

So he ate his dinner while I read him a story.  I sat with him then we played a game of table air hockey.  More stories at bedtime with lots of hugs.  With that he was off to sleep.

What bothered me most was my deep feeling that a difficult Sunday night make the week seem so much longer and harder.  Because we go for so long without the chance to really be together.  And I realize that part of this is also stemming from my feelings this morning in church.  I was sitting with a friend at our Sunday School meeting and she had a brochure for the moms' group in the church...they have tons of activities for moms in our church...stay at home moms that is.  I can't go to any of those meetings or groups.  I don't get the time to study God's word with Tate in an organized setting;  I never did.  I don't get designated time each week with other Christian women at 10am with my child. Sure we go to church on Sundays, but it's not the same.  It just made the upcoming 4 days seem so much harder and longer.

Sometimes I think I'm just way too attached to Tate and that spending time with him shouldn't be as important to me as it is.  Yet I know I enjoy my time with my friends without him; I do...I really do.  I don't even feel guilty when I'm enjoying hanging with my friends while he's being well cared for.  

I just wish our time together wasn't so frenetic, and I know it probably only feels that way to me.  I wish it wasn't all shoved into a 60 hour time period each week.  I think it's probably the main reason I don't push to have him sleep in his own bed and room.  I love sleeping with him.  Though he's not a cuddler, I like having him near me.  It's why I never sleep-trained or why it never really bothered me to wake up with him over night when he was a baby.  Those times nursing in the middle of the night were our times to bond, and I loved that he ate during the night until he was almost 1.  And goodness knows he didn't sleep through the night until well past 1, so when we were no longer nursing I was just getting him out of the crib and putting him in bed with me...those precious minutes were almost glorious to me.  

I've got to figure out how to reframe our week days.  Because I cannot continue dreading the four days.  I cannot continue the pressure I put on our time together.  

Time.  There's just never enough.  He's growing so very fast.  Earlier today while he was playing with his friend I found my Christmas cards from 2008.  My last Christmas without Tate.  I hadn't even told many people I was pregnant.  I even found the Christmas letter that I had written.  I was 10 weeks pregnant.  Those 9 months of pregnancy and my 9 week maternity leave were the longest amount of time Tate and I have spent or will ever spend together uninterrupted.   

I just want more time.