Sleep evades me

I haven't been sleeping.

I've been trying to sleep but it just doesn't come.

I lay there.

And lay there.

For nearly two weeks I've been surviving on 3-4 hours of sleep per night. Sadly, the hours are not consecutive. When I finally fall asleep, I usually wake a couple of hours later. I wake in a panic. Thinking about everything I said during the day that may have been dumb. Did I leave a dumb comment on someone's blog? did my email come across the way I intended? what was that phone call about? me? And so on. Then it turns to did I love the girls enough? why did I speak so harshly? why do I expect so much from their little selves? did I smile enough at them? I didn't smile enough at them. I never smile enough at them. Do they even know that I love them?

I think about the laundry that's washed and dried but has been sitting for days and some of it weeks. It's wrinkling. It's taking up space on the couch. I think about the pile of paper on the right side of the fridge that I never seem to get control over. I think about the lawn that's partially mowed. The pasture that's partially mowed. I think about how I'm just not keeping up.

I think about how I haven't menu planned in weeks. Weeks. I've been throwing stuff together. None of it very good. I think about how my husband has been putting in 12+ hours a day at work and 4+ hours in the evening somewhere else and I can't even provide him a decent meal. I think about the money he's been making and how instead of using the extra to pay off debt, I blow it.

I think about how I'm failing.

Last night it took me nearly two hours to fall asleep. Just as I felt myself drifting off, Spice woke up. I got up, plugged her pacifier back in and headed back to bed. It was 1:45 and Josh's alarm was going to go off at 3. I was still awake when his alarm went off. I tried to ignore the fact that he was up but it didn't work. I finally got out of bed to make his sandwiches but then headed right back to bed. He left at nearly four and I kept hearing things, sure that someone was outside our door.

When I did fall asleep I had a dream that I was in a large house with three children and someone was trying to kill us. I was rounding up the children, trying to escape out a two story window. It was awful and scary and I woke up because Spice woke up again. It was 6 am. I'd been asleep for a bit but the dream wore me out so much that I felt even more tired.

Today we won't start school until the afternoon. I need to clean my mother-in-law's house, I need to finish folding the laundry.

I need to wake up.

I need to go to sleep.