I haven't been posting much lately and I will probably be backing down a little for a while. My life is difficult at the moment and I just don't have the energy to check the forum much, let alone respond to people's posts, and I'm sorry about that.

This has been a rotten year and I am feeling utterly spent. My husband's career has always involved long hours, and I accept that, but for the past five months he has been working six-day weeks, fourteen hour days. Now they want him to work seven day weeks until the show's finish date in mid-May. He's exhausted and barely sees me or the kids. I feel isolated and lonely. I have to hire a sitter if I want to go see my friends, which happens rarely because all of us are in the throes of career/raising kids and no one has much time. I miss my husband, I miss my friends, and although I'm doing a good job of raising happy, healthy children, I feel inexplicably unfulfilled. Probably part of the reason I got into the habit of posting on this forum in the first place is that it helps alleviate some of the loneliness. Talking about style is fun, and you are a lovely bunch of women with whom I enjoy chatting -- but as I'm sure you all know, a forum is no substitute for real human interaction.

I'm not a natural stay-at-home mom. I love my kids to bits, but raising children (especially when you're mostly doing it on your own) is endless tedium punctuated by one brief crisis after another. I've been slowly going crazy for the past eight years, but because of my husband's long work hours, going back to work has pretty much been out of the question for me -- unless we want to hire a nanny to raise our kids, which sort of defeats the point of having kids. And we probably couldn't afford it anyway. However, my younger child starts K this year, and I had been hoping get some part-time work to help relieve the slow deterioration of my mental capacity. There is light at the end of the tunnel! Or so I thought. Now it's not looking so certain, because there's a strong possibility my caregiving energies are going to be needed again. Neither of my aging parents is particularly healthy, and my mom has the beginnings of dementia and is "losing it" at an alarming rate. My brother, my only sibling, lives in London and has problems of his own. So that leaves me. For the first time, I'm looking at the future with dread instead of hope, and I don't know how to snap out of it.

And to top it off, I had abdominal surgery in December that was supposed to only remove a uterine fibroid, but resulted in a partial hysterectomy which I did not want. I am still experiencing fatigue which I sure hope is related to surgery recovery (I've been told it takes a full year to totally recover). I'm just tired ALL THE TIME. And I don't much like not having a period. Instead of feeling freed from my cycle, I simply feel adrift and a little out of control. Maybe I wouldn't feel this way if the rest of my life wasn't going to hell in a handbasket!

Thanks for reading, and sorry about the TMI. I may get back to contributing more in a couple of months, but for now, forgive me if I only pop in the odd time.