An old kind of tired

I've been living off of caffiene this week, as not only am I being Mommy to a very active and needy 4 1/2 year old, but I'm also playing nurse and personal assistant to my husband as he recovers from knee surgery, AND running a 150 kid Vacation Bible School at my church (and yes, if you do the math, you'll realize that I started this blog the night before VBS began. Do you need further proof that I am a bit insane? I didn't think so)

On Monday afternoon I was trying to play dollies with my daughter, and kept nodding off. She would wake me up by saying "make them talk, Mommy!"

I had not felt that same kind of tired in about 8 years. Certainly, I was tired after my little girl was born. There's that bleary eyed state that all mothers go through from the constant lack of a good night's sleep, the constant attachment to this new, needy being, and the constant new worries about all the things you are certainly doing wrong and will end up costing you thousands of dollars in therapy for your little darling somewhere down the road, if you don't accidentally kill her first.

No, this is a different kind of tired. I remember it best from the summer of 1999. I had just moved to Los Angeles, and was juggling three jobs. I had managed to land parts in 2 of 4 plays being put on at the The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum , located in the beautiful hills west of LA. I was performing one show on the weekends, and rehearsing another during the week. But during the day I was also teaching drama at weeklong theatre camps, a good hour drive EAST of LA. And on the nights I wasn't at rehearsal, I was taking classes preparing for my new job tutoring for the SATs (which I thought would be a great job, and turned out not to be, due in no small part to the fact that the SATs are evil, but that is another story...). Basically, I left my house at 7am, didn't return home until 11 or 12, and spent every spare moment I had taking practice SATs. Let me put that in another way. I spent every spare moment doing ALGEBRA. And GEOMETRY. And all of these things were very important to me. They were new jobs that I wanted to keep. And I was in a new city and wanting desperately to make new friends... although socializing while also doing math problems backstage at a theatre... not so easy. I drank so much caffiene that they only way I could go to sleep at night was to have a glass of wine to counteract the caffiene. And I still, one day during a drama camp, literally got dizzy and fell to the ground while standing in front of a group of kids.

Fortunately, my biggest job for VBS is the prep work, and now that it is underway I have much less work to do. And it really is fun now that the kids are there and having a great time. But I will be glad when Friday rolls around. In the meantime, I have stocked up on Mountain Dew.