You know what I am talking about, ladies. If you work outside the home, you are well aware of all that this entails. You are forcibly removed from bed get up, apply some makeup with trowel get ready for work, peel the kids screaming off your legs drop the kids off at the puppy mill daycare surf the internet bust it for eight or nine hours, pick up the little darlings from whoever’s been raising them all day, and then you start the second shift. Of course, the kids are crazy because they’ve been chained to a wall spoon-fed crack good all day, and they know they can really let it all out with you. So they are animals, running around the house, beating the shit out of each other, screaming like banshees, and begging to be paid attention to. Which wouldn’t be a problem if Florence had gotten dinner on the table. Alas, Florence has the year off. So no prepared dinner for you.

So you go to the kitchen, a child attached to each leg, and proceed to figure out the easiest, laziest meal you can make that doesn’t make you feel like Satan for feeding your preshus children processed foods. But anything that takes more than 30 minutes to cook is out of the question. Because even though you’ve been sitting on your ass for eight hours today, work is work, and sometimes it’s exhausting. At some point in the process, your partner comes home. They go to change clothes. He/she’s really tired, so they might put their feet up for a few minutes. Or go play with the kids. If you’re “lucky” (and don’t get me started on that whole thing) maybe they go out to mow the lawn or wash the car. Meanwhile, you’re still lugging at least one child around on your leg like the heaviest pair of Uggs in the world, and trying to set the table, finish up dinner, and clean a bit on the atrocity you created in the kitchen. You throw in a load of laundry. You step on at least three toys (it’s always the sharp ones.) You cuss under your breath.

A meal happens. At least that’s what you hear, because you missed most of that meal hopping in and out of your seat for more milk, seconds on fruit, to grab a towel, switch over the laundry, put in a new load…

After the meal, it’s bath time. And your kids wail like Yetti when anyone but you bathes them, so you do. While you’re in there, you knock a few layers of yuck off the bathroom. (How is it that the one person in the house for whom it is physically impossible to piss on the floor is the one that ends up cleaning the bathroom? How does this make sense?) After the bath, both kids are whining and moaning about whatever it is that they whine and moan about after every. single. bath. for the last four years, and you squeeze them into pajamas so that they can play for a while.

They cannot play without you.

You want to play. You do. But there are also a million things that need to get done. Your play is intermixed with tasks. More laundry, straightening up the house, putting away more crap that your family accumulated from a birthday, or a garage sale, or a vacation. Trying to cram ten pounds of crap into the five pound bag that is your house.

You set out swimsuits or tumbling clothes or diapers or whatever has to be taken to school the next day, right by the door, so that it won’t be forgotten.

You put the kids to bed approximately six times.

You cannot really account for the time between 9 and 10:30. There was definitely some laundry in there. More cleaning. Some nights this is when you have to hit the grocery store, or Sprawlmart, so that there is food/diapers/shaving cream for the next day. But most nights you completely check out, vegging on the couch flagellating yourself silently for not working out today, eating too much, not being present enough in your children’s life, being a crappy partner, or not being the supermom that so-and-so is. You feel all this is true. But you don’t do anything about it, because that would just be more work.

It is exhausting, and it’s hard, and it is true. To talk about this is not meant as an insult to our partners, or an accusation that they are not doing enough, or to say that no one else is doing anything. That’s not the point. It’s not about you! To talk about it is simply to say, “does anyone else feel this way? Am I alone?” I already know that no one but me cares how clean my house is, or that “someday all your kids will remember is that you were engaged with them, blah blah blah.” I know these things. I know that when your kids are small all you can do is just keep doing and doing and doing. I know that “someday I will miss these days.” I know that I’m “putting this pressure on myself.” I know that I need to “take time for myself” thanks to a million different magazines (oh yeah? WHEN THE FUCK IS THAT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN? BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 and 4 AM?!?!!)

I know.

But right now, I just need to say that this is some hard shit, and while I am not negating its difficulty for my partner, I think I have it hardest. And I don’t know what I expect for that– a star on my pencil box?– but simply that I feel like I want it acknowledged. Do you know what I mean? Have you felt this way too?