"If I die before I learn to speak, can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep."

"If I die before I learn to speak, can money pay for all the days I lived awake but half asleep."

This line speaks so much to me so often. Every day I wake up tired, and go to work. I come home tired from work, try to get myself to work out, clean, maybe cook, play with my daughter. The whole time I'm tired. I just want to sleep, to relax. I don't enjoy feeding my daughter or playing with her, because I'm tired, and just want to relax. 

The title of this blog is "Working on the balance", I meant for this to be a place where I could share everything that goes into balancing my life. Work/home balance, balancing my health and fitness goals, finding time for me, finding time to enjoy my very young daughter. Finding my mental balance. 

Right now, I have no balance. I am rushing headlong into the future, running full force simply because anything else would leave me flat on my back and incapable of coping. 

I never meant for this blog to be what is seems to be right now. A place where I sporadically dump all my negativity, so that it doesn't spill over into the rest of my life. 

I hate that i rarely post here. 
I hate that I rarely have time or energy to post here. 

When I was pregnant and for a while after I had my daughter, I looked forward to returning to work. I have always been someone who felt the need to be productive, when I wasn't (for a few years in a few points in my life) employed, I tended to languish, becoming increasingly depressed and lazy.

This time was different. As my maternity leave wound down, I found myself regretting the time I was going to be away from my daughter. When I went back to work, to a job I do truly enjoy, I found myself only half involved. My head and heart is often not in my work these days. 

I tried telling myself that what I was doing was best for my daughter. Me working did a few very good things for her. It allowed us to purchase a house, with a back yard, in a neighborhood we love. It will show her, in the future, that women can do this. That she can have a family and a career. 

I am lucky enough to have a partner that shares equally (oh who am I kidding, he does a lot more than his share) in the domestic day to day chores. One who cooks, cleans, folds laundry, does dishes, changes diapers, wakes up in the middle of the night, and every other small thing that comes with having a small child in a house where food is eaten, clothes are worn, and life is lived. 

I am doubly blessed that his family and mine helped out tremendously with child care right after she was born. We had to transition her into traditional day care about a month ago after my nephew was born, since the Aunt that was watching her, would now be watching him. I lucked out with the day care she goes to now, they're awesome people, and now that she's adjusted to them, she loves them.

But all of this help seems like a drop in the bucket, and as often as not is offset by other things. The day care is awesome, yes, but it is pricey. Knowing that a significant portion of my income (read almost all) is going to pay for the day care so that I can work depresses me. It also leads to an extremely tight financial situation, where every expenditure needs to be calculated, debated and budgeted for. I'm managing the finances (barely), which means watching that balance like a hawk.

Even with all of the help from WorkingMan, the house is still a mess. It goes in cycles of better and worse, we clean on the weekends, and then all week it gets slowly messier. Dishes pile up, laundry piles up, random things end up strewn around the living room. Even in it's "clean" state, there are still the piles of clean laundry that never get put away and the still packed boxes in the back room. Last week some friends and their four year old came over for dinner. This required a panicked cleaning of the downstairs to get it "guest ready." It also resulted in a giant box of "We need to go through this" stuff that was cleaned off the dining room table so we could use it. That box is now awaiting attention in the infamous back room of doom.

I keep thinking that if only I could focus, we could get on top of all of this, and hit a rhythm. It never happens though. I can feel us starting to fall further and further behind on everything from bills to cleaning. There's cat puke on the carpet in the hallway, the upstairs bathroom is starting to get a little gross. The buffer we built up in our bank account has eroded. We are almost literally living paycheck to paycheck.

All of this is adding up to a slowly suffocating feeling of hopelessness that sits in my chest most days. Somewhere along the way I started day dreaming of staying home with my daughter, or at the very most working part time. Of having the time to actually clean the carpets and put away the clean clothes. Of not feeling a sense of panic when someone asks us if we can hang out because ohmygodifwedothatwhenarewegoingtodo(insert weekly chore here)?! And then the realization that unless things that are outside of my control change, that will never happen. That this is it. This is the best I can do. Try to manage the chaos and panic and just keep moving forward. Keep things just shy of disaster. 

It's not balance, is far from anything one could say is even remotely related to balance. It's holding the ship together with shoe strings and duct tape. 

The worst is feeling I can't speak up and say I can't do this anymore. I can't ask more of everyone who's helped me so much already, and really, I don't have a choice but to keep moving. 

Right now I'm struggling to keep the good things in mind. My desk at work is covered with pictures of my daughter. I stare at them and try to remember that I'm doing this so that she can grow up in a house, with food and health care and two parents who love her. It's hard some days, actually it's hard every day. 

I'm tired of it being hard.