Parenting While Under the Influence
Ever have one of those weeks where you are so tired that you can’t even see straight? It is just a part of being a mom that we’ve all come to accept. We learn to power through the extreme exhaustion and get our second wind.
Those nights when you are up all night with a sick child, feeding a newborn or, if you are really blessed, both. We’ve all been there. It’s amazing the amount of sleep that a new (or even a veteran) mom can learn to survive on. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
When you think about it, it’s pretty scary. I would never intentionally drive with my children in the car when I was in a state of such exhaustion. It’s like driving drunk on a daily basis for the first three years of your child’s life.
When my girls were toddlers, I did a lot of things while under the influence of exhaustion. Things that, in retrospect, was pretty dangerous. What I am referring to is something that has probably, in one shape or form, happened to most of us. I just got so busy, juggling so many things on so little sleep, that I had a week where I actually forgot to eat. The week we moved from Virginia to Indiana, I’m sure that I forgot to sleep, well, except for those 3 hours I caught on accident on Tuesday.
Anyways, apparently if you keep this schedule up for more than a day or two, bad things can happen. I was so tired after arriving at our hotel that I literally stumbled into the shower, with barely enough strength to lift the shampoo bottle, rinse, lather and repeat. It was the result of making the most of our last week in Virginia. It was totally worth every second of sleep I had forgone.
Next it got really hazardous to my health, after stepping out of the shower and grabbing the nearest clean thing to me to put on, I decided to dry my hair. Not until my 2-year-old daughter came into the bathroom and looked at me like I was completely insane (you know the look I used to give her when I’d walk into the bathroom and she has about 3 inches of hand soap on her 2 tiny hands) did I realize that I was running my hands under the water in the sink, while I was drying my hair!
Isn’t it bad to play with electrical devices while immersed in water? I decided then and there that I must get more sleep, even if that meant handing babies off to daddy so that he could watch them. I realized that if I kept parenting under the influence of exhaustion, I’d end up hurting someone. I relinquished my pride and took a nap.
Do you know your parenting limitations or do you power through your exhaustion?
Deborah, @TruthfulMommy is the creator of the snarky and brutally honest parenting site The TRUTH about Motherhood. She’s a writer, a wife, and a work-at-home Mommy who's trying to do it all well; occasionally falling short. She lives in the Midwest with her 2 little girls and her husband. She has a lot of degrees from a bunch of schools but mostly spend her days shuttling little people while trying to maintain her sanity. She loves being a mom because no matter how awful a day can be going, at the end of the night, there will be little arms around necks, nose kisses and cuddles.
One Response to “Parenting While Under the Influence”
Oh, it’s so very important to know your limits, isn’t it?
{Those were such hard lessons learned those early days, for sure!}