I’m feeling very bipolar these days.
There are only 4 days until xmas, and part of me is happy about that. But not as big a part as I’d like. There’s too much angst in the air. I spent all of yesterday cooking xmas fare. I made a beautiful maple syrup bone-in ham and a really tasty beef roast. We have food and drink to feed a small army. All the presents are wrapped and the house looks very festive. I should be basking in all of it. I should be looking forward to the holidays and time off from work and being with family.
Thing is though, I can’t stop thinking about bad juju. The beastie has a cold – as young beasties do – but he’s being a handful and both Katy and I are so very very tired of having to deal with screaming-baby-at-mealtime. It’s becoming a bit too much these days. This too shall pass but, damnit, it’s not passing quickly enough at the moment. I feel guilty about wanting to go to work on Monday morning just to be able to get some quiet time after weekends like this past one. I’m getting over my cold, but much slower than I usually do. I’ve been getting sick more often than I normally do recently as well, and that’s a slight worry. Katy’s picked up what the beastie has and she’s still in the rough part of it, so she’s not feeling grand.
Her work situation isn’t going to get better any time sooner, which is also a continuous cause for concern. Her employers are, for lack of a better word, right fucking bastards. She’s been made to feel guilty any time she takes time off, so now she’s continuously on the knife edge of exhaustion and I don’t see how things are going to get better any time soon. The holidays aren’t going to help a lot either, cause she has to go in to work for xmas cover for a few hours every day. She needs a vacation – but we don’t have the time or the money to be able to do anything. And with the peanut in tow, it wouldn’t be as relaxing as she needs either. So we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. I’d love for her to be able to tell them to take the job and shove it, because they’ve gone out of their way to be unpleasant all throughout her maternity leave and return to work period.
I’m pretty sure that her part-time hours are going to be reviewed to full-time ones. If that happens, after factoring in childcare costs, it basically means that she’d be working full-time and clearing about £100 a month. Full-time hard work for basically nothing. I think I’d prefer her to quit, if that were the case, but that puts us in another difficult situation because it’s better for the beastie to be around other kids than to stay at home all the time. Having said that, we’d need to seriously rework our spending if we were to send him to nursery part-time if Katy weren’t working. It could probably be doable, but it’d be tight, and probably very stressful.
So yeah. Between lack of sleep and disturbed sleep when possible, money stress, job stress, family stress, and stress about being so stressed, the holidays aren’t looking as rosy as I’d want/need them to be. Trying to put on a brave face and being gung-ho cheery sometimes works, and sometimes feels fake and strained. I’m sure that I’m seeing the world through gloom-coloured glasses at the moment and that things are probably a lot better than I see them. I know I have a lot to be thankful for. I think that something fundamental needs to change. I just wish I knew what. Onwards to therapy.