Exhausted
Every night for the last couple weeks, our 3 year old son has been waking up and refusing to go back to sleep. Prior to that, he'd been waking up at 5-5:30 AM, which we thought was pretty miserable at the time, but in retrospect wasn't nearly as bad.
The problem for me is that while I have no problem going to sleep at night, if I wake up fully at 3, 4, or 5 AM, I have an incredibly hard time going back to sleep. It's 5:30 AM right now, and I've been up since before 4. I've put my boy back to bed about 5-7 times in that period.
Right now I want to kill everyone and everything in the whole world.
And he just got up again.
We don't know if he's scared or going through a thing or what, or when it's going to end. But it needs to end at some point, or I assume I'll just expire from critical fatigue.
My wife has it worse than me, but she's better at handling it. When he's upset, she's the one he really wants. When I'm awake in the middle of the night for the 4th night in a row, it's all I can do not to speak in pure curse words only. Normally, I try to get out on my bike a couple times a week, but that just leaves her stuck at home longer. At least I look at it as "stuck" which probably isn't the pediatrician-approved terminology. Getting away keeps me sane, since we both work at home and are, as such, ALWAY HERE and more recently ALWAYS AWAKE AND HERE. I'm also too tired to pedal, and it won't stop raining either way.
So in the meantime, what on earth can you do? Obviously I can't actually kill everyone. For one thing, I'm too tired. You can try to go to bed early, but since I'm a blubbering simpleton now, due to the lack of sleep, I'm not getting anything done. By the time we get him to bed, we've got maybe an hour to just relax and then try to get to sleep. And I've got shit to do! This isn't working. It's almost harder than when he was an infant.
But this is the real meat of being a parent. It's the part where you understand that you exist solely to take care of that kid because you are literally all he has. Some people adapt to this better than others. I do not adapt well. I get cranky and surly and resent everything mine eyes look upon when I'm this chronically tired. I resent the kid for doing this, even though I know full well that he's in no control of his tiny dictator brain. I resent my wife, even briefly for not just letting me sleep and taking care of it, even though she's dealing with it more than I am. It doesn't have to make sense to create an emotion. Of course following that is the guilt for having those irrational feelings in the first place. The resentment is chemical an fleeting. It's not real. But it feels real.
When it all comes down to it, I just tell myself that this will end eventually, and ignore the fact that some other problems will take over these, and those too will be forgotten eventually. In the meantime, I've had a headache for days, I've seen 4 AM far too many times in the past week, and why the fuck do those birds have to be so loud?
