Exhaustion

One of the things about parenting that no one adequately warned me about is the level of exhaustion that becomes normal. It is utterly insane how tired I am all the time now, and how normal it seems, when just a few short years ago I was sleeping for entire nights and feeling awake all day long.

When you're single, or married without kids, there are times when you feel exhausted, no doubt.  Looking back, I can remember times when I thought that I was so exhausted I couldn't even think straight. Most of those times were due to staying out late, or every once in a while actually being sick. But for the most part, they were voluntary.

And that's where one of the big differences is. When you become a parent, the job is on all the time, no down time. If you go out late one night, your kid does
not care, and will still be up at 6AM or whatever time they usually get up. So when you're out, you always have that in the back of your head, that no matter what happens, you will have to get out of bed at a crazy early hour.

But the biggest difference, and the one that either no one told me about or I just wasn't smart enough to figure out myself, is that there is no time to "catch up" on sleep. Before, if I stayed out too late, or was sick for a couple of days, or whatever I did that made me exhausted, the solution was to lay around for a day or two, maybe get 12 or so hours of sleep in a day, and come out refreshed.  That just NEVER happens anymore, again due to the 24/7 time commitment of being a parent.

Throw in the fact that I just broke a couple of ribs, and let's just say that my current "normal" is to get about 3-4 hours of sleep per night. Which leaves me in a constant state of half-asleep, half-awake half-consciousness.  It's not fun.

But then, it is, isn't it??!!