To just feel a bit down in the dumps and stuck in life with two young kids

[toule]

I have a 2 year old and a 4 year old and I'm currently on a career break.

My H is away daily from 6 am until 8:30 pm.

The nursery run takes 1 hour each way. My eldest goes to a school nursery 5 days a week and my little one goes 3 days a week.

The weekends are spent doing play dates / birthday parties, Day trips and seeing family.

The days my kids are both in child care are spent catching up on laundry / cleaning / cooking / food shopping and going to the gym. I'm so lucky I have time to do those things and can stay off work for a while as I was suffering from pretty bad burn out before.

Anyway, I just feel stuck and down and so tied down. I know these are normal feelings but sometimes it feels pretty dark. I try not to feel / think about things and just get on with things, but the feelings get to me sometimes.

I sometimes get frustrated with my kids. I feel like they are the boss of me and everything I do is to try to avoid them screaming at me.

I know I'm so lucky, so I don't understand why I'm still struggling.

I get where you are coming from. Mine are 3 and 6. I work 4 days a week. My husband does his share but also works away quite a bit and at the weekends.

I have to work at home Half the time as I can't get home on time to get the kids at 6pm. I struggle to get me work done and feel lonely at home to be honest. As soon as work is done it's back to mum duty straight away. There's no flex. I'ts relentless. The weekends are just boring. I am literally hanging on. I just don't have the childcare I need and a long commute. So I have no time for anything else but work and mummying.
I'm going to try to get more help after the summer holidays. My daughter will get 30 hours then so I can probably afford it.

For you it sounds like you need work. this period as temporary and should improve. Stick at your sport . I wish I had that! But the way you are feeling is pretty normal. Hope it gets better

I struggle with that - actually getting my hours done in the time childcare allows. I go to the office once a week and can only work 6 hours that day so spend the rest of the week clawing back my time.

You are making a lot of choices that are hard work

You don't have to do your sport so intensively.

You don't need to put a four year old in a nursery a half hour drive away.

These are choices. If they aren't making you happy, you are allowed to make different ones.

I have a two year old too. 😴😴😴

You keep saying how lucky you are, but why do you think you are lucky?

You have a husband who is out of the house for 14 hours a day and the responsibility of everything to do with the house and children falls on you. Including spending two hours a day driving back and forth to pre-school.

Thats not what i would consider lucky.
It sounds very lonely and crap to me.

Being in the role of a SAHP doesn't automatically make someone 'lucky'.

OP, you sound properly burnt out and also depressed which often goes have in hand. I’d considered ADs and you absolutely need therapy to process whatever shot happened to you at work. Been there. Seen friends who’ve been there. Right now, it doesn’t seem like you are doing anything at all for your burn out - you literally just swapped one job for another. From the sound of it, you are “can’t get out of bed” burnt out. But you do force yourself out of bed and continue slogging. That’s not going to make anything better. Especially with existing medical issues on top. You literally need to disappear for a month which I realize may not be possible but you’d be heading that way anyway if you end up having a nervous breakdown. Seen that too.
Put both kids into daycare full time, get a cleaner to come in more often, may be get a housekeeper who can also cook and let everything go. Screw the mess.
also, I get it that your DH is self employed but leaving out dirty dishes, really?
is this whole set up worth it - he is out of the house 24/7 by the sound of it, lots of driving (school and hobbies), cleaner only once a week?

The third wasn’t planned actually 😂 and also yes I’m saying id kill for that time because it would make my life easier, but I do enjoy our chaotic life and I wouldn’t say I’m disliking it. It’s hard work but fun. If I had one less DC plus three days a week to myself I struggle to see how I could be finding it such a grind.

I get it. Life with small kids is relentless, exhausting and dull.
I would have chosen a nursery nearer the house though - driving for two hours a day is my idea of hell! We have three nurseries within a 10 minute walk of our house and I'm sure you have other options too. There's no problem changing school when they start reception. They're very adaptable at that age.
Anyway, I'm afraid I don't have advice. I was a SAHM mum and I found those years difficult and lonely. All I can say is it gets easier. Once they're at school I found life much easier and more enjoyable. I started to feel more like me again and was able to pursue my old interests. Now they're 11 and 13 and life's completely different. They don't need (or want) me like they used to and it frees up a lot of my time.
You just have to get through these tough years.

@Chaosx3x yes we get it. You're superior to me because you wouldn't struggle. It's all good. We got it after your first post.

I think you're filling your time being busy. I get that - when I was a SAHM mum and the kids were at nursery, people would say "What do you do all day?". I'd say "I'm so busy! I have to tidy, clean, do the food shopping, cook and also exercise". The reality was I was making those chores fill my day. Now I work (admittedly part time) I still do the same chores but I fit them around work. I get a weekly food shop delivered so I don't spend time going to the shops. I do a load of laundry at night to hang out in the morning or I do it in the morning to dry when I get home from work. I do some batch cooking when I have time so after work I can just reheat meals. You don't really need 5/6 hours a day to do all these chores. You can do everything more efficiently. I know you're not ready to go back to work but I think you should try to give yourself more downtime. Do things you enjoy as well as doing domestic chores. I used to feel like a complete drudge filling my days with cleaning and laundry - do fun things too, find a hobby, meet friends.

Maybe I really should finally take the plunge and take ADs. I just want to be a good mum to my kids and enjoy them more. Maybe this would help

This makes more sense now you've explained it's only been few weeks. You need to allow more time to get back to yourself. Be patient and look after yourself.

I don't think your lucky.

Get an audio book for the car, not music, the key thing is it progresses through the week.

My revelation on childcare at home was reading "Maises House" to a toddler. Like nursery Maise also had a routine. Nursery has a strict routine. Do this, it's mostly food based but it breaks the day into chunks.
And it gives you the power to say no, because for example storytime is in the afternoon.

Toddlers are selfish so shower attention on them, make them feel the centre of the home. Put Lego on rug, play with them, talk to them and then let them play by themselves, walk away, shower more attention after you have done a task. Set them another challenge, repeat them tidy up together.

Talk to them a lot, and talk to them about the things you like. Like the post before, my kids thought it was normal to enjoy heavy plant, concrete construction and tractor makes. (Civil engineer in rural area)

Don't let food take-up headspace -go boring and repetitive, use a meal service to switch it up occasionally and bake random, challenging things with your kids.

Stop thinking you are lucky, honestly if the whole set up was 'lucky' my husband and his father before him would have found a way to be a SAHP. Once I started resetting that I found it easier to cope - I'm bored because it is boring but I make it fun by doing this for me and it's quirky for the kids.

Best wishes

’I know I’m lucky’
I wouldn’t calm this sort of a life lucky. It sounds as boring as hell! Get back into the workforce. Use your skills have some actual stimulating conversation.

Ah no way. Not yet. I don't need that at all right now.

I feel like I understand you. You definitely need counselling. Try Better Help, it’s all online, I found my counsellor so helpful in untangling how I got to burnout. I don’t think I’d have recovered without unpicking it all in order to refresh and redirect myself in a healthy way. I used to book mine for after school drop off and I felt clearer for the day ahead. In the beginning I was having therapy two days a week, I really needed it.

It seems like you’re doing what I did when I had a career break, which is fill every minute with tasks. It’s easy done because, for me, years of being a lone parent and working, meant there were a million and one jobs in the house and admin that had run away with itself because I’d never had time to prioritise it. I must have spent months sorting out cupboards, closing dead bank accounts, chucking out rogue socks and emptying drawers of crap. I could see gaps in need for my kids, jobs needing doing round the house, and set about fixing everything. Only after months did I, after much encouragement from my therapist, start to have a day off where I would just sit all day watching a series. It was desperately needed after years of being a hamster on a wheel. You need to heal yourself from burnout before you start thinking about what you want going forwards.

It’s a cliche, but you really can’t pour from an empty cup. Burnout is real, and isn’t resolved by just not doing the big thing that caused it, you have to face it as an illness and actively treat it. For me that was therapy as well as giving myself chunks of time for each thing. Like eg sort house out and get on top of admin - 6 weeks, take time to relax and do standard housework only 6 weeks, start looking at options of what to do next 6 weeks, something like that. I’m better if I have structure so even lazing about and mentally healing needed to have a certain order to it.

I’d say set yourself the least intense thing that you do every day with the kids that they enjoy but doesn’t weigh you down too much, say every day you stop at the park on the way back from nursery or every night you read to them, and when that’s done you can tick off your internal checklist of like ok I’ve spent time with them and they enjoyed it. When you’re feeling more like yourself, or the clearer and happier part of yourself, you’ll feel less overwhelmed and doing things with the children will be a pleasure and not a stressful experience.

I also think you're doing too much and making your life more difficult than it needs to be.

You're burnt out. You need to do nothing - literally nothing - as much as humanly possible. Drop the kids off and then go back to bed. Spend the whole day there. Nobody will die. Up their childcare hours for a while, until you've had some time to actually recover. That's what you need when you've been burnt out. You're hiding from your feelings in constant activity and it isn't going to work.

You also need to move to a closer school/nursery. It will only get harder to make that change if you delay it, and the chances this school is sooooo good that it makes up for the lifestyle impact of being so far away is practically nonexistent. And I think you need to pay for some talking therapy. Consider ADs too but I'd try the doing nothing for a bit first.

You definitely should, they would help. You are a good mum OP, please stop beating yourself up for something you can't help.

Your posts really resonate with me because I've been struggling with a similar situation for the last year or so after a really stressful/traumatic period last year. I've got 3 kids, the smaller two are 16 months and 2.5, and I went back to work in Feb after double maternity leave. It's fucking relentless. I started having counselling, and it was my counsellor who made me see that I really need to slow down and give myself chance to rest and process and bring my stress levels down in order to get on top of the feelings of anxiety and self deprecation.

Like you, I'm in the habit of doing doing doing, all day every day. People are always saying things like I don't know how you do it all, how do you keep the house so clean/look so great/make time for xyz when you have so many kids/work etc. But the truth is I'm not coping, not really. It's all an illusion and under the surface I'm frantically trying not to drown in it all and at the same time have this need for everything to always be perfect, so I'm putting these massive expectations on myself. To counter that, my counsellor has challenged me to actively find ways to pause and rest and prioritise myself and just NOT DO ANYTHING. Even if it's just taking 5 minutes to stop and do some breathing exercises a few times a day.

To give an example of how I'm trying to manage it, I'm working from home today but I'm currently sat in bed drinking a coffee after H got the kids up and to school/nursery and left me to catch up on sleep. And I'm not letting myself feel bad for it. Yes it means it might take me a bit longer to finish my work and yes I'm lucky I have the kind of job where I cam manage my own time like that but honestly, my mental and physical health is more important and I keep trying to remind myself of that.

Give yourself permission to cut corners and rest. The other stuff will follow.

OP have you name changed mid post?

Because you aren't suffering from mental health issues like OP is.

P.S get your shopping delivered or get your OH to do it. Why make life harder?

Try the flylady cleaning system.

That does genuinely sound difficult so you're doing great.

But everyone has a different life, expectations, energy levels, health, capacity etc.. no point in comparing.

I think you're doing a lot (I'm sure someone has 6 kids, looks after ageing parents whilst working 2 jobs here on mn) but I'd say it's a lot of grind and not much fun.

A few suggestions/thoughts.

1. Are you getting sleep, prioritise it even if other things fall behind
2. You chose a school far from home this was always going to be difficult. When looking for a home and a school everyone said make your school run as easy as possible. However you did this for a reason and its wonderful that you chose a good school that dc loves. You must be a really good mum ❤️
3. Try to find small things you can appreciate each day. It's tricky I'm reminding myself to do thar now. Like maybe you can listen to good music in the car, or go for a nice walk in the day.

I remember them days it will get better.

Because I usually shop at Lidl as it’s cheaper and as far as I know they don’t deliver (at least not round here).

OP I don’t think I’m superior to you but you have to be aware surely that you are in a fortunate position to have childcare for your youngest even if it’s not all week. Most people cant afford that if they’re not working. I would quite like to have my middle one doing full days at least a few times a week but we’d have to use a private nursery and we can’t afford that at the moment. It’s a bit like starting a thread saying you’re struggling on a 50k income, you’re bound to get people come on and say well how do you think I manage on 35k/20k/etc.

I’m sorry you’re finding it tough. I agree with pp just drop your standards at home. I literally have none, there’s no point!