The curse of the mama schedule

I have two small boys at home. They are both pretty interactive little boys (which translates variously as “strongly attached” or “made of velcro” depending on the day). I have daycare for Small Boy two days a week, days on which I used to get a fair amount done – or at least enough to feel as though I had gotten a fair amount done – but as The Boychen grows older and more adventurous (which translates variously as “curious” or “highly destructive” depending on the day) I’ve found that my single-son days are hardly more productive, work- and/or adult pursuits that replenish the spirit-wise, than my double-son days.

I am not one of those people who can get by on a fistful of hours a sleep a night; on the contrary, getting only a fistful of hours a sleep at night brings me dangerously close to a return to the post-partum depression days. Staying up late and working, or waking before the boys (who are early risers), is simply out of the question at the moment. I can work after the boys go to bed until about 9:00 or 9:30 but then it’s time to start getting ready for bed.

Here’s the problem: I find that when I work right up until bed-time, when I lay me down to sleep my mind is racing with ideas, reviewing that poem I wrote or thinking about that journal I might submit to. A phrase comes to mind, a better way of closing out that stanza that was troubling me. I’m wide-awake, as wired as if I were hooked up to a caffeine-IV drip. Last night I was awake until 2:30 this morning – the new 2:30, that is. (I got a lot done – one submission package completed and ready to go out the door and a group of poems picked out for revision and submission to a second journal – but it’s hardly the ideal situation.) Fortunately today is Sunday and R and the boys are over at The Farm for lunch and a little afternoon stroll with the grandparents and I can recover. But when that sort of thing happens on a Tuesday night it’s a bit of a disaster the next day.

So what’s the solution? Only work until 8:30 in the evenings and then spin-down with a book or TV? But Small Boy only goes to bed at 8:00 – that’s hardly any time. Crunch all the work in on the weekends when R takes the boys? But weekends are family together time. It’s a real time-crunch. The hours just are not there and when I steal them from the wee hours, the wee hours take their revenge.

It’s just where I am these days, this is what my days look like right now, but I’m having a hard time accepting it gracefully.

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