One bowl of tomato soup, self-pity on the side

I'm still feeling sick but on the mend, though Small Boy now has a runny nose and is sneezing many Small Boy sneezes. Poor thing, I really thought he was going to escape this.

I had my soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. They tasted like childhood. In all honesty, Campbell's is not my soup brand of choice, usually - I find it too salty and too processed-tasting, but it's the tomato soup of my childhood.

I remember the first time I got sick in college, sick enough to skip classes and miss meals. My roommate brought meals on a tray up from the dining hall and made a run to the quad store to stock me up with OJ. She studied in the common room or the library so I could sleep and rest, and she brought up my mail. I wasn't so sick, I didn't even go to student health, but I remember how awful it felt to be sick away from home; how shocked I was at how much I wanted my mother, with whom I had such a prickly relationship; how much I wanted to burrow in my childhood bed in my childhood home and have tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I was physically sick, but emotionally I felt much worse. Sad. Alone. Nobody to take care of me (except that nice roommate who did all those nice things, but who, of course, didn't count in my phlegmy self-pity). It didn't happen often, but through all four years, there was always something particularly awful for me about being sick in college.

That's how I felt on Monday. I have a head cold, it's not that bad, certainly nothing to visit a doctor over (though it's a special kind of awful being sick when you have a small child to take care of, and thank you R for coming home at lunch time two days running and thank you Grossmütti for coming over Monday on such short notice), but emotionally I feel awful. I don't know, maybe it's a year's worth of sleep-deprivation and conversations with a guy who's two-and-a-half feet tall and who lacks a way with words that have caught up with me. Maybe it's my frustration at never, ever getting anything done, and at seeing no end in sight. Maybe it's the five kilos. Maybe it's the peas on the floor. Maybe it's the eyestrain from not being able to wear my glasses when Small Boy is awake and oh Lord! Small Boy is always awake. Maybe it's having spent much of the last year on the floor because Small Boy just freaks out if I'm a foot away from him. Maybe it's my resentment that other parents got less intensive babies, babies that nap, that amuse themselves once in a while, that let you do something, anything. Other parents paint. Recommit themselves to dissertations. Cook actual luscious-sounding things. Speak truth to power. I shower. That must count for something, right? And the rest of it goes to Small Boy and at the end of the day I'm so tired I just want to die and there's nothing to show for it.

And I'm such a shrew for complaining about this Boy, when I know perfectly well how easily there might have been no Boy. Are post-infertility parents allowed to complain about how hard this is? Isn't that, well, a tad on the ungrateful side? Yet it's so unrealistic - and unfair - to think we're not allowed the occasional gripe like every other parent. And I feel so disloyal complaining, so disloyal wishing he were different but I wish he could just idle at at lower rate once in a while - hell, I wish he could idle, period.

And most parents get to leave the insanity of the first year behind them, get to forget a bit about how hard it was before thinking about the next child, but that's a luxury infertility steals from you, because you can't wait. You can't think you can actually space your children the way you always thought you would - the hubris of even thinking children in the plural floors me. No, you have to assume it will all go wrong, you have to assume it won't work and it won't work and it will take forever and so you have to think about your second child before you otherwise would - look at me, I'm still breast-feeding this one and it's almost time to talk to the RE about a FET.

And I'm so tired and I feel so spent and this is all just self-pity, I know that. Whiney, truly whiney self-pity, but I can't help it. I don't have the energy to fend it off. It's just a head cold, and how pathetic is that, that I can't even see around the corner to how good I really have it?

I just want to crawl into bed, my childhood bed, with my stomach full of tomato soup and a glass of orange juice on the bedside table, and sleep the sleep of the dead.

I never though I'd say this with so much longing. I never thought I'd mean it this much. I never thought it would happen at all. I want the one thing I can't have.

I want my mother.