That pressure cooker

This 4-day weekend was nice. As always, I feel like I'm not doing enough. Trying to be a mother and never feeling like I'm doing a good job, working full-time, buying a house, selling a house/packing/moving/fixing little things on the house...ugh, I'm just mentally drained. And I'm supposed to be going out of town from Tuesday-Thursday. Had this house swap not been going on, I'd feel fine. But I feel like I need to do a zillion things, I don't feel rested at all, and discontent in general.

We did pick a real estate agent. We interviewed 4. One was awful, and the other 3 were good. It makes it easier when 3 are bad, and 1 is good. As luck would have it, we interviewed 4 good people. We think we did okay. It doesn't make things easy when we got a response to the rejection note saying that one could have done the same things as the one we picked.

Julia's had a rough weekend. She's been out of sorts (teething???) and hardly eating. She was up screaming last night for an hour one time and half an hour another time. For the past few months that's atypical behavior for her. It makes me uneasy.

If you add in the holiday stress, I'm just frantic. I HATE THE HOLIDAYS! I have serious PTSD from holidays with my mother. It's never enjoyable, and it's like some mind game from hell.

On Thanksgiving I asked my mother what she and her husband would like for Christmas. "Nothing." Ugh, I hate that answer. Because with my mother that means I need to read her mind or be in the doghouse for getting her the wrong thing. After more needling, I finally get somewhere. She said she'd like chairpads for her 6 dining room chairs. Okay, what color? She tells me beige. Thank heavens, give me a tangible thing I can actually buy. Hallelujah!

So today I go to the store, and I call her from the store. They had two styles of beige chairpads, and I wanted to know which one she would like better. Cuz after all I'm NOT a mindreader and have made this mistake one too many times with my mother, and I usually want to hibernate until January so I don't have to deal with Christmas at all.

Well, my mother freaks out on the phone. WHY am I buying her chairpads? She doesn't want anything for Christmas. So I say that I want to get her something, and I'd prefer to get her something she WANTS to get. And then she says she will get her own chairpads and hangs up. (As a side note, she already sounded annoyed when she picked up the phone, so she had probably just got done fighting with her husband.)

So what do I do? I buy a gift card for her from that store for Christmas. Yes, she will hate me for getting her an impersonal gift card. But I ain't got time for her crap, so there...she's getting a darn gift card.

Do you see why I get such terrible angst over the holidays? I can't do anything right, my mother's always angry with me for about 5,698 reasons, I don't have time to give adequate effort to anything, and I'm just so tired of it all.

Probably this whole house buying/selling thing is too much given my high strung nature + dealing with a toddler who doesn't eat well. I'd really like to be one of those people whose main stressor is putting up a Christmas tree. Or I'd like to clone myself x 6 and then send each clone out on a specific task: cleaning the new house when we move in, feeding Julia, doing my job, dealing with all the mumbo jumbo with the loan & real estate agents, etc.

I sooooo don't want to go on this work thing for 2.5 days. The timing is just awful.

And Julia appears like she'll have another rough night. I hear her whimpering in her crib. It just kills me when she's uncomfortable and out of sorts. At the same time, though, I'd really really like a good night's sleep. It's hard to sleep, though, when your mind is constantly going: making lists and reminding myself of the 1,243 things I need to be doing.

This is why I was such a reluctant house buyer. I really didn't want to deal with all of this in such a short time frame. On a positive note, S and I had a great conversation last night about what we would want to do to the new house and a general timeline of things. That helped ease my concerns. It is such a great deal, and I'm just going to have to suck up my stressful feelings. It would be nice if I could clear my schedule a bit. I'm going to have to look into whether it's too late to cancel the work trip.