The Simple Life?

I woke up this morning with the feeling like a huge ball of snit was knotted up inside of me.  There's nothing wrong in particular; just the dumb stresses of life.  Maybe it's the heat.  I know I have been whining about the cold forever, so it's not that I'm complaining that it's hot, it's just that ... maybe the heat takes awhile to get used to? 

I told Trainer Jill that I needed to lift some really heavy weights to help break up the snit ball.  But after my training, the ball was still there. 

I had some emails to send when I got home, and they were vaguely of a professional nature, and I just sat there completely unable to send them.  I clicked over to Facebook instead, then looked at some random websites, which is what I always do when I'm trying to avoid something.  I thought about the people who were creating the contents of the sites, the people who were making things happen in their lives, whereas all I could do was sit on my couch and think about my own incompetence. 

I used to be an overachiever, at the top of my class.  I imagined I'd always be professionally successful, or at least competent.  Now I just sit here sometimes and think, what has become of me?  How has having a child changed me so much? 

Earlier this week I had a most maddening conversation with another mother.  She was talking about how she had chosen half-day kindergarten for her child, even though the norm at his local school was full-day kindergarten, and all the other kids in the class would be staying full-day.  "I actually like being with my child.  I don't want to send him away," she said, with all the judgment and condescension with which you would imagine somebody would say something like that.  She went on to say something about how she made all these sacrifices so she could stay home with her children, and about how she thought full-day kindergarten is designed to cater to working mothers.  She went on to cite some stupid study about how children put in daycares are more aggressive, and how families are so disconnected because kids are too busy with school and organized activities.  I seriously didn't think there were people who still thought like her. 

My point is, I don't see myself in her camp.  I don't believe a woman should give up her whole career to raise children.  And yet ... here I am.  Feeling stuck.  See, here's the thing I never realized back when I was in my whole "women should do it all" phase: somebody still has to care for the children.  And I'm not saying that the "somebody" who cares for the children can't or shouldn't be a paid caregiver.  In many ways, I think children are better off spending some time without their own parents.  I'm just saying, once you have a child, you realize it's just never simple. 

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like having a child is like suddenly having to have the energy and emotion to run two human beings, yourself and that child.  I imagine that if I had another child, it would feel like I was having to be three human beings.  And no matter what kind of childcare setup you have, it feels like that child is still running on some level in the background of your being. 

And I know I'm being weird and vague here, but I think the bottom line is that I'm scared to try to jump back into professional life.  I'm scared of a life where I have to juggle a bunch of responsibilities and expend a lot of emotion and give up sleep because of all the unpredictability that comes from that child constantly running in the background (or foreground) of my life. 

I can feel the Old Shannon wanting to smack me.  But the Old Shannon didn't realize, it's just not that simple.