Take a look at Home Start www.home-start.org.uk/Pages/Category/things-we-can-help-with. They are awesome. Non judgemental, their volunteers will come over for a few hours at a time and just help. If you need to sit with the baby and cry, they’ll make a cup of tea and listen. They’ll help with toddlers and preschoolers and just generally shovel washing along or do whatever you need. It’s a life saver.
You can refer yourself, or you can call your health visitor and ask them to. It’s not about not being good enough; it’s about the fact that anyone, including Supernanny Jo Frost or even Mary Poppins would find 6 people in a 2 bed incredibly stressful and overwhelming, especially when one is a baby and the oldest is only just into double figures.
Of course you’re stressed, over stretched, exhausted. And of course the house is a mess.
You’re feeding the baby (or were when you wrote it, and probably will be again when you read the replies). Is there any way you can switch off from the mess and the chaos whilst you feed? Just closing your eyes and breathing for a little bit, trying to see this as a legitimate chance to take a rest, rather than willing your baby to feed faster so you cold get on with the next thing?
Then I wonder if there’s any way you can make some piece of your daily life a little easier for you? You mentioned washing pans multiple times a day. Do you need hot cooked meals more than once a day? Could you move the family to a cereal and yoghurt and toast breakfast, a sandwich or picky plate type meal and just one hot meal that everyone eats? Obviously not if that’s actually going to create more stress for you, but maybe it would help?
Do you think you might be anaemic or a bit low in something? Could you stretch the budget for some post natal multivitamin type things? Anyone in your situation would be exhausted, but just maybe there’s a deficiency making things even worse.
How old are your middle children? 2 yo probably not hugely helpful but 6 and 8 could be putting a baby bath back in the bathroom or pulling washing out of the machine and into the dryer if you have one. Or pulling dry clothes off the line ready for the next load, even if they can’t hang them up just yet. Again though, if getting them to do things is more stressful then don’t add stress - do what you need to do in order to survive. My sibs and I quite enjoyed a bit of healthy competition at that age though - too young to wash up heavy pots and pans maybe, but not too young to have one of them go at the high chair and one the table with a hot soapy cloth and see which one of them can get their thing shiny the fastest.
Summer is coming. Might not feel like it, but it really is! And as soon as it’s warmer, you can eat outside (if you have a garden or a balcony), and that will make a big difference to the amount of mess created.
I’m sitting here looking at the chips my child has ground into our rug. I’m not talking from an idyllic perfect palace at all. For me one too thing is to keep the washing machine empty as much as possible. if I can just get the laundry drying then the machine is gaping ready for the next load. And shitty baby grows can be tossed straight into it along with all grotty clothes. If I can set it going as I go to bed then I can empty it when I’m boiling the kettle in the morning (I’m single, but that’s a job anyone could do including long hours working OH). And then when the inevitable wet bedding is discovered in the morning that can go straight into the machine too.
If you’re really drowning in washing and you need a hard reset, can you scrape the money together for a service wash? £12 for an IKEA bag sized load here; take it to the launderette dirty and pick it up the next day clean and dry and folded. I know the laundry won’t stay done forever, but if you’re facing more loads than you could physically do in a day, could be worth considering. It resets it all anyway.
I don’t know if you have the budget, but if you do, then maybe give yourself a few days where your cooking is less than you do just now. For me that would mean a few days of giant family sized ready meals - lasagne, garlic bread and salad, fish pie and a bucket of peas, whatever the family will eat with minimal fuss but without you juggling pots and pans and babies. If the budget doesn’t run to it, can you cook enough one day to eat it the next too?
Can you pick out just one thing that would make things easier? Not big “have a bigger house” type things or “have more money” but “if everyone would just clear their own place and someone else would do the washing up” or “if I could just know that someone else would sort school uniforms” or whatever it might be? I assume that you and your OH rub along reasonably well together, or you wouldn’t have managed to grow babies together. So can you just quietly explain how utterly beyond exhausted you are, and how much it would help if he could just do that one thing, without needing to be reminded? At the moment it seems as though you are taking care of everybody, but no one is taking care of you.