Up for a rat race, anyone?

This past weekend, I experienced some depression. This surprised me because I don't consider myself a doom-and-gloom type of person, and even though I didn't want to feel depressed I couldn't seem to shake it. I really think it was a combination of things related to the grieving process, lack of sleep, and stress.

The week following that weekend, I made it a priority to get to bed by 10:00 to help with the lack of sleep problem. I've noticed with myself that if I don't have the sleep I need, I feel less able to cope with stress and the emotions that result from that. Most nights I didn't make it by 10:00, but I consider it a work in progress. It wasn't from lack of trying though. I just can't seem to get everything done I need to get done within the time period allotted. Which leads me to my next point where it seems like all I do is work work work all day and night! I've often compared myself to other mothers with kids asking myself why they can seem to get some idle time in the evenings and I can't! I don't even get a chance to sit my butt down and watch anything on TV, so it's not like I'm being lazy and not making use of the time. There just aren't enough hours!

When talking about how much work I do on a nightly basis with others, I've often been asked the question, "what all do you do in the evenings?" I start listing the things that I typically do in an evening, "cook dinner, dishes, get Savannah ready for bed" and then I start drawing a blank and as I say them I realize that they don't really seem like they should add up to a lot. I ask myself, "am I just complaining to complain? Am I using my time inefficiently?" But upon discussing the problem with my husband I realized that there are only 24 hours in a day. I wake up at 6:00am and work until 5:30pm (11.5 hours - thank god I don't have a commute anymore!). If I want to get 8 hours of sleep, that leaves 4.5 hours in the evenings. Upon further investigation, I realized I do more than just cooking dinner (30 minutes), cleaning up (30 minutes), and getting Savannah ready for bed (30 minutes). Add to that the fact that we have to eat the dinner I cooked, (30 minutes), bathe myself daily (30 minutes), do laundry on various days (30 minutes), and yoga on Tuesdays and Thursdays (1.5 hrs). If you've done the math, you realize I'm left with no (nada, zero, zilch) time for other small things that seem to popup and eat into my sleeping time.

WARNING: The following paragraph makes mention to my sex life. Even though nothing explicit is mentioned, if you would rather not know about it or pretend that I don't have one, STOP READING NOW and proceed to the next paragraph!

But I've realized that I can make it a priority to trudge along at this pace wideling away at the minutes to get more sleep, but it hasn't even left me any wiggle room for sex (which has always been a topic of conflict in my marriage). I am content to ignore my urges which isn't hard considering how tired I am (yes, Kevin, believe it or not I do still have the urge!). But that isn't healthy if you want emotional and physical intimacy in your marriage. My husband feels like I'm not making him enough of a priority, and maybe he's right, but I don't know what to reprioritize. I feel like there is a solution to the problem that will make everyone happy, but I can't quite see it yet. Our most recent attempt at the problem is to agree to make time for each other on certain days of the week. If I know ahead of time then I can plan accordingly, but we've not been completely successful with this yet either. Something will come up to eat up all my time on top of already being exhausted, and I'll either forget we were supposed to be intimate that night or shamefully I'll sneak off to bed. I worry that it will only get worse as we have more children and as they get older and involved in extracurricular activities which will eat up more of the evening hours.

It is safe to return to your regularly scheduled blog...

My husband has pressured me to start my own daycare center thinking this will decrease the number of hours I work during the day leaving more hours in the evening. But I would miss the aspects that I enjoy about running the daycare in my home if I did that. Plus I'm not sure that in reality it would really increase the time I have in the evenings, especially while I am working to get the business off the ground.

He has also suggested that I just not work at all, but neither of us are comfortable with this solution especially in light of the current state of our economy. Our experiences has led us to believe that a job is never safe from layoffs, cutbacks, politics, or any other motives. If he was the only income provider, lost his job, and couldn't find another one right away, it would be disasterous for our financial outlook. I am unwilling to take that risk right now.

After all of that, I'm still left with the question, "How can I win this rat race?!"