Does anyone else ever get the urge to just run screaming from their life as a SAHM?

[Olihan]

I'm just hoping what I'm feeling at the moment is normal and someone else can understand where I'm coming from.

I have 3 dcs of 5.6, 3.10 and 2.6. I'm a SAHM and have been since I stopped teaching when ds1 was born, so 5 and a half years.

I know in some ways I am very lucky that I don't have to work but the sheer drudgery and monotony of life is starting to send me a bit doolally.

The constant nagging to get them up and dressed in the morning, the horrific 5 minutes as we try to leave the house for the school walk, the constant mithering for food, the fighting, the permanent mess, the fact that I have no time or space to myself, the never ending washing/drying/ironing/putting away, cooking decent healthy meals from scratch that end up in the bin, spending hours trying to come up with meals that they might eat, the battle every night to get them into bed.

It's so bloody wearing.

I don't wish I hadn't had them, I love them more than life but at the moment I just want to suspend my life, go back to being single, childfree and remember who I used to be.

Tell me I'm not alone in this, please?

Let me know when and where the coach will be setting off, or can you do a pick up in Morecambe?

I love my dd's with everything I've got but there is no getting away from it. It is constant, unrewarding hard work (apart from the cuddles and other stuff that makes you realise why you do it).This is harder than any job I've ever done, the on call comment is so accurate!

Like you. I've recently had a taste of freedom. A childfree weekend in Cornwall. Swimming, surfing, drinking, sleeping and eating..... Took me a week to get over the down in the dumps feeling when I got back!

Oh well, only a year and 3 months til eldest can go to school and youngest to pre school!

The dreadful thing of course is that I also have nightmares about having to let go and send my DDs to nursery or school. To think that I will have to say goodbye and walk away! I will be one of the Mums who is having to exercise every ounce of willpower not to grab hold of her leg and lie sobbing on the ground.

Meanwhile in reality though, I am completely knackered and can't believe that that day will ever come.

And does anyone else want to scream sometimes from all the whinging?

I would definitely possibly allow Colin Firth to interrupt my solitude and also Richard Armitage and maybe Gene Hunt but that's it. I vant to be aloooone .

I often join in, MrsTM - just start shrieking along with them.

It works in two ways, makes me feel better and usually stops them in their tracks .

good grief this thread makes for depressing reading!!! I am pregnant with my first. With our lives the way they are now I am barely coping, never mind when we have children thrown in the mix. We are going to get a cleaner when little one is born and I don't care what I have to sacrifice to pay for it.I plan to go back to work 3 days a week but am in the same situation that so many other are, it almost isn't worth it financially and is a 3 hr round trip commute...but I will have to for my sanity either way. Off now to think about cute baby stuff to cheer myself up, soft skin, tiny little fingers and toes, that sort of thing :-)

Aw willow, we're only letting off steam andhavng a good moan. .

Not as often as I had the urge to run screaming from my previous incarnation as a child-free career ladder climbing worker!

I'll book a seat please, but I'll need to be back in time for DD's dinner.

I'm a SAHM but do a bit of work from home and Oh it's hard- if you moan you're ungrateful, if you want 'more' then you don't value them enough and so on and so on. I saw a friend yesterday who works full time with her two DC and for the first time in ages I wasn't jealous, I actually thought 'how the hell do you do it?' and more interestingly 'Why the hell do you do it?'.

I'm consistantly bored by it all but as others have said, they are only wee for a short while and then we'll be back in the grind missing our babies.

But if that coach is about then feel free to pick me up

God, yes.

Actually, I did once freak out and just walk outside and walk and walk (leaving DH with the kids, and we live in the country). DS was 3 and DD about 6 months I think, and DH had just got back from a week working abroad (big respect to all you lone parents). I was so at the end of my tether, having done everything alone 24 hours a day for a week - and DH made some mildly critical remark and I just freaked!

I haven't read the rest of the thread but just came online to vent and found it.
I have just screamed at the top of my lungs at DD2 that I am going to kill her in a minute.

DD1 DD2 are off svhool and nursery respectively with headaches. Calpol and then 4 hours later Nurofen have meant they and their younger sister are improved enough to:
Demand ham sandwiches.
Demand milk
Tease the cats
Demand ham sandwiches
Go into the garden and eat all the unripe strawberries and then spit them out on the decking.
Dig up gravel and get themselves filthy
Water the decking and path and themselves
Demand ham sandwiches
Knock to be let in a million times
Demand to be let out again a zillion times
Demand milk
Tease the cats
Get scratched and yell
Fight and yell
Yell
Demand food again.
You get the picture. I made myself a cup of tea and thought it might be pleasant to sit in the garden and read my book but it was when I carried it outside that I discovered the filth/water/wet clothes scenario.
The house is a tip again. Oh and DD3 has drawn all over her face with a turquoise felt pen.
I have done SAHMdom for 9 years and I am sick of it.
I long for a job. I feel trapped in the childcare/summer holidays/earn enough to cover it all conundrum.
Sorry to vent all over your thread.

Oh Dunoon, I just giggled (in a very sympathetic way) at your post. Vent away, I bet there's not one SAHM or WOHM who doesn't feel a sense of affinity with what you wrote .

And thinking about it, when I wanted to run screaming from my job there was a brilliant wine bar with unlimited quantities of dry white wine only a short shriek away!

Oh damn just read the rest of the thread and had to acknowledge that work would probably make me insane too.

Oh do you remember being able to go for a drink at lunch-time and not worrying about falling asleep/ being hungover at 'teatime', oh those child-free halcyon days. Wine hmmmm

Mine are upstairs and I hear water running and laughter. That means Mess Seven or whatever.

Yesterday DS took a dump then rammed a toilet brush down the loo, then tries to clean it up with a hand towel, You all understand the scenario.

Have I mixed up this thread in my mind or is there now some bus full of bored housewives on its way to Bavaria? Oh bugger me....

I think I need to find ways of seeing the positive. The tip about writing down funny things they say or do is a good one [as long as it doesn't descend into a vitriole filled rant that they find and read when they are 14].
How about a nice hard back notebook with photos and notes.
Meanwhile can i come on the bus please, West Kent pickup

i'm in..where we off??

i have always been a sahm during the day and worked evenings so that i can be with my kids, and also not pay for childcare. i have fairly recently taken on a job in a school for teen boys with ebd for 3 days a week. whilst i love my jobs, it is hard work going from kids screaming and demanding at home to the same and worse in work..

i love my drive to and from work...its the only teeny bit of piece in my day....sigh.....

i'm longing for a day off.....from life really, but unfortunately the annual leave from motherhood is non existent!

Dirndl's day has just improved .

DS1 has a friend over for a play tonight. Normally they play brilliantly together. Today they have ripped one of the ties that keeps the trampoline net up, thrown a full bottle of water into the road, covered the bathroom in water (I hope it's water, anyway), been sent down from the table because they wouldn't stop fake burping, and broken one of dd's toys. Not to mention upending 99% of the toys all over the playroom.

FFS.

Is ten to six too early for gin?

So true what you say Maninadirndl!

Welcome to mumsnet (perhaps you have been here for ages).

I agree that being a SAHP teaches you skills and takes you to limits that you didn't know existed.

Good to hear that the experience is universal re other parent coming home and grilling about TV watching, stuff achieved, etc. It isn't a gender thing. Not much comfort for you but good for the rest of us to hear.

I live in France and find it hard being away from my network so sympathise with you also being in another country.

Mine were quite good today but mostly I do find myself going from mess to mess in a never ending treadmill of, well, mess. Of course all this with a soundtrack of bickering and whining in the background.

Also have to fight off the urge to drown my sorrows in cheap French wine (not always successfully).

Ah well , tomorrow is another day and it won't be long 'till we're complaining cos we never see them and they are always in that place called 'out'.

Can you add pick up in West Yorkshire?

I have a great imagination and find it comes in handy to think of lovely things whilst the DCs drive me insane.

Everything is a competition with them, from who gets to go downstairs first, who brushes their teeth the fastest and who can eat the fastest. It is wearing. They are boys aged 6 & 3.

The fighting is draining and ds1 is in school so although it only happens for a few hours a day it feels like 12.

Big deep breaths all round. Now I have to go upstairs to tuck them in, as my amazing/wonderful/completely supportive husband is putting them both to bed. God I love him to bits.

It's the groundhog day aspect that is so wearing - EVERY DAY at 7.30am there is a mess under the breakfast table to clear up; EVERY day at tea-time there is the same mess under the tea-table to clear up ..etc....etc. EVERY DAY the same moans and excuses about home-work, EVERY DAY the same fights and complaints.

At least when i worked there was some variety to the hell ...

I just want to say it does get better Olihan. I felt like you when my two were both at home all day.

Then DS1 went to school and it was just me and DS2 - so much easier.

Then DS2 went to school and I have a big wedge of time between the morning chaos and school run and the afternoon pick-up. There's plenty of time to do the shopping (on my own - bliss!), do the washing, tidy up, cook, and sit around reading books or having peaceful coffee with a friend.

Hang on in there!