NOW who's a wet blanket?
When you wake up suddenly in a pool of your own urine, it's normal to wonder where your life took a wrong turn.
Was it just last night? When I drank too much elderberry tea to boost my immunity, and then failed to use the bathroom before falling asleep? Because I was already in bed with the fussy baby and the shifting of the mattress might rouse him to a scream? Again?
Or were the seeds of the problem planted far, far earlier than that?
Was it my failure, from day one, to sleep train Elijah? Putting me in a sleep deficit, night after night? Where any slight irritant, a cold or a tooth or an upset tummy, means the child demands to nurse every hour, on the hour? So I only get 40 minutes of sleep at a time, and when an unexpected long stretch comes, say between 1 and 2:30 in the morning, there is nothing rousing me, NOTHING, not even the urging of my own insistant bladder?
Or does it go back to his birth, which I chose to make at home? Or the births of my other two children, also at home, all of which in their own unique way normalized on the release of bodily fluids onto my mattress?
Or was it the choice of that third baby, was that the thing that pushed me over the edge? Mentally, in terms of exhaustion, but also physically? In very nitty gritty terms? In terms of the ability of my sphincter muscles to hooooold it in until my mind regains consciousness?
It's hard to know exactly where I went astray. All my decisions seemed like good ones. Maybe peeing in my bed is the natural result of a life well planned. Maybe I should count a few midnight accidents among acceptable losses.
When you wake up suddenly in a pool of your own urine, it's normal to wonder: Who am I? How did I get here? Where oh where did I take a wrong turn, and how can I possibly backtrack to sanity?
Then again, my children piss their beds all the time. They just get up, shower, and ask for breakfast.
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If it takes something like this to get you to write in the blog, I say it's totally worth it! Every once and a while..