Friday – this week I am grateful it is almost the end of the year

2010 has been one of the longest and most difficult years of my life. It is, without doubt, the year I have had the least sleep. I am tired to the bone. Tired in a way that a week of solid nights’ of sleep will only partly remedy. I read the lovely Kerri Sackville’s blog post The Never Ending Weary. I was nodding furiously and wishing I could be in bed while reading it. Kerri has carefully categorised her tiredness. My tiredness is just the kind you have in the first year of your child’s life, with the added extra of one or two other complications life throws at you, simultaneously.I could have mitigated some of the tiredness. I could have stopped making proper cake for morning teas at mum’s group. I could have stopped planting out our vegetable garden. I could have not done a number of things which would have allowed me to sleep instead. Importantly, I didn’t. I didn’t stop reading. I didn’t stop seeing my friends, meeting people for lunch, going for walks, trying to clean up the shed. If I had, I would have been less weary, but also I would have been less me.

In reflecting on the first year of my child’s life, I have to conclude that the best and most important thing I can do for him, and for the rest of the family, is to be me. The best me I can be. With all vulnerabilities, strengths, joys and sorrows on show. Trying to be different from how I am, or a ‘better mother’ (whatever that means) is the road to a shameful chimera of me.  Acceptance is what it is all about.

So this week I am grateful that it is nearly the end of the year. Finally, things are winding down. School will finish, parties will be had, work will be over for the year, papers will become ridiculously skinny and full of fluff pieces, the hot weather will allow for a bit of running around outside under the sprinkler. I will drink a few too many large gin and tonics and we will pack and repack for our holiday.

I am grateful that I have made it to the end of my first year of motherhood with my sanity intact. I feel my heart burst when I see my boy walking (!) toward me shaking his maracas for all they are worth and grinning at me.

I am grateful we are going on holidays and that it is a lovely, lovely holiday place with no family, no duty visits, no fixing broken things, no distractions. Just me, my lovely man and my baby.