I have posted about this before but not on this board. I don’t know how anybody can help me (so if I seem to be saying no a lot please don’t take that personally) but I need to reach out.
Basically I feel I made an absolutely huge mistake when we decided to have a second child and this haunts me almost daily. I have read threads on this and most seem to be from women with the youngest child aged under one, so things are still shaky. For us, well, we’re nearly three years in and it’s still fucking awful!
My two are five and nearly three. Apart, they are OK … definitely not perfect but manageable.
Together they are unmanageable and I have really tried to follow the advice and read the books and it hasn’t made any difference at all and I’m still miserable.
They work one another up, they won’t leave one another alone, if one is happy and playing quietly the other intervenes to ensure that ends. They become different people around one another and people who in all honesty aren’t very nice. I am frequently mortified by their behaviour to be honest and I’m conscious that makes me tense up and things more likely to go wrong.
I am now at the point where it isn’t advice on parenting I need but how the hell I can survive this without becoming someone I dislike too. I’ve become irritable and tense, impatient and easy to anger. I’m also absolutely filled with regret for the life I could have known. And I know I need to get past this because I can’t do anything about it now, but I just can’t.