Feeling very alone. Does it get easier?

[satsumagirl]

I've got a 3.5 year old and an 18 month old. I work 4 days a week split across 5 days. DH works very long hours and isn't at home much. He also is away with work most weeks.

I'm finding juggling work and doing most of the childcare very hard. I am very organised and I get on well with my children, but its quite tough doing a demanding job and most of the kids' stuff. When they are sick most of the time I have to juggle everything . I feel very isolated and lonely.

I am trying to focus on the positives of having two lovely children, being okay for money etc. I know those are important. But I've spent so much of the last few years feeling low or depressed sometimes those things are not enough. I went to see my GP last year to ask for antidepressants but she said I was just having a bad day.

DH does his best but we are just coming through a very rocky patch in our marriage. I envy him so much. He can just walk out the door everyday and go to work and he is hardly ever back for bedtime, although he is much more hands on at the weekend. Meanwhile I'm here holding the fort and I hate it. I feel powerless and unnoticed.

Please tell me it gets easier as children get older.

Thyroid and anaemia were the two ones I thought of, but there are probably others (Vit D?).

satsuma I don't know what the GP will do, but he/she has to do something. I'm just a stranger on the internet and I'm worried about you. It's not fair that you should feel like this, for this length of time when your GP hasn't even tried to help you. I would tell the GP just how bad you have felt, and for how long, and that your preference would be to try blood tests/ADs/counselling/all 3.

Mine are 4 and 5 now and it does get easier.

I'm working part time over 4 days since May and that is helping too. I can totally understand your feeling of being an active human being in a work setting and then a drudge to irrational small people in another.

I have just come off citalopram, antidepressant, after two and a half years. It helped. I stopped crying over things with DH. I felt more able. Calmer emotionally. As a friend said when telling me to go to the GP, you have to do this, but you don't have to do this alone.

Go to another GP. One who has a clue about mental health. They can run some thyroid tests too with a simple bloods to check there is nothing affecting mood, and then ask you some basic questions about your mood and how you compare it to your normal.

if you can afford get some paid help.
Cleaner and/or someone to pick them up from the childcare and perhaps take them to the park. Nursery nurses often do that and your kids know them so that can be done pretty quickly.

If you get a couple of hours daytime for the next few months then you will be less tired and feel the difference pretty much straight away.
I think having paid help is something what saved my sanity. In any case I worked full time from the time they were 1 and 3 so I had no alternative.