Mulligan

I'm at my office, it's Monday, I'm on hold with the IRS and I can't seem to get my brain wrapped around anything. I'm sleepy and I can't think straight. Bellissima was up around 4am wanting to nurse. It's 1pm and I haven't pumped yet. Can't seem to wrap my brain around office work. My daycare is closing it's doors for good in two weeks, so all I'm doing is worrying about where Bella will go when that happens. It's rural here, there isn't anything within forty five minutes other than the place she's already at. Desperately unhappy at work but can't quit my job because it would mean financial ruin. I pray for them to lay me off sometimes, but I can't ask them to lay me off. I just took this promotion four months ago, mostly so I could afford to pay $12,000 a year in daycare. Now I have the high stress job that I didn't really want and no daycare. What will we do?

Totally overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility I'm carrying at work and at home. So brutally tired. I feel sick, really, sick all the time anymore. Part of that is an infant in daycare. I actually am sick most of the time...sick and bone-tired. But also, sick from the stress of no family or help closer than an eight hour drive, a daycare that is closing, a highly demanding high-stress job and not a minute, not one minute to commit to the most basic care and maintenance for myself. My hair is a mess. I know I'm deficient in vitamin D, it being the middle of the winter in a northern clime. My joints are stiff. I haven't had time to exercise (or do yoga or shave my legs or sleep through the night) since the baby was born 9 months ago. My romantic time with my husband is like, in the negative digits. I feel gross, and tired, and overstressed and exhausted and halfway-to-incompetent and honestly, just this edge of completely losing it.

Is this normal? If it is normal, why is this ok? Why is it ok from a societal perspective? Are we really all on our own out here? Why has our society shifted so far toward every person for him or herself? Is this individualism? What am I supposed to tell my daughter?

I can't think anymore. I'm so tired, my brain doesn't want to work. I just want to sleep for a long time, or maybe run away to a remote tropical paradise in Latin America somewhere where we can go walking in the jungle, swim, siesta, have a little garden and a couple of animals kicking around, and just live....quietly, simply and humbly. Can't I get a mulligan on all of my student loans and mortgages and car payments and just opt out? If I had known the price of all of those things and where they would lead me, I would have opted out. Sometimes I wish my parents had offered some financial and life guidance when I was younger. I wish I knew then what I know now. I won't make the same mistake with my daughter.