too tired even for cheesecake

I'm tired. Very very tired. I simply do not manage to get enough sleep. This is not about insomnia. I fall asleep okay. But I either go to bed too late or I wake up too early.

This is how it goes: Average day, I get up somewhere around 7am. Yada-yada-yada, it's about an hour an a quarter till I leave the house for my lovely commute to work. (Which I hate, by the way, even though it's usually only about 40 minutes. But it's a bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go-and-stop-and-go 40 minutes, almost the whole way. There's only maybe 5-7 minutes of highway in the whole thing. It is not fun.) Usually that yada-yada includes doing a few dishes from the night before (too tired at night), making coffee, making lunch for schoolchild, making-up & fixing bloody awful sleep-hair, and a few odds and ends.

The past 10 days or so, I've also been helping young broken-arm-girl get dressed and brush her hair. Then I started dressing her in school shirt for sleep and letting her use her teeth more (in lieu of functioning arm) and now it's just the hair.

So after all that, I typically get into work about 9am. Which means I am supposed to be there until 6:30pm (9.5 hrs.). On a standard day, that would put me back home by 7:15-ish. At which time, I either force myself to go to the gym for an hour or I collapse at home and forage for easy food, all the while trying to avoid any demands being made by anyone to feed THEM.

The rest of the evening is a boring blur. If I've gone to the gym, I'm home by 9-ish. In any case, I arrive with no energy for focussing on anything, but must deal with attention demands of "people" I live with. Yes, yes, I know working mothers all over the planet deal with the same thing, but this does not make it any easier to handle when you just want to scream at everyone to leave you the hell alone in PEACE already. Just to be quietly alone with my thoughts. To pick up a book and read a whole paragraph without hearing them bickering, or the tv at full blast, or walking into the room without knocking to demand that I do something NOW.

And it's a small apartment, so I hear every voice from the tv, and I hear her complaining when she doesn't get what she wants, and I hear him yelling at her to "go read" or "go tidy your room" and I can predict the moment she'll burst indignantly into my space and demand her god-given right to some attention. She'll eventually go to sleep only at 11pm, and then he wants to watch a movie with me, on the bedroom tv, and I know that 5 minutes into it he'll be asleep but I'll have trouble turning it off, and before I know it, it's midnite or 12:30.

And because the weather's changing, we're too hot so we turn on the ceiling fan, but then we're too cold so we wake up and put the blanket on, and then too hot-cold-hot. It's hard to sleep well in this changing weather, but it'll get even harder when it's just plain nonstop HOT and humid.

So I'm tired. All week long I've been dragging into work and wishing it was the weekend. I take my picnic blanket to the nice park across the street at lunch-time and just lay down and close my eyes for 10 minutes. It helps a bit. But then I drag back for the rest of the tedious day. I haven't been busy lately, so it's even more of a bore, but if I were busy I'd be having trouble concentrating.

Thank god there's another long weekend just ahead. Shavuot is the last for a few months -- it'll be a very long stretch now through to the new year in September. Let's make it a sweet one...

Enjoy the "dairy" holiday, my friends.