Gold Medal Mother Moments

There are those moments in motherhood when you feel like a complete and total ass.  Loser.  AWFUL parent.

Tonight was one such moment.

I've been struggling with my children as they wade through the newness of sharing a room.  It involves a severe lack of sleep on everyone's part.  Things have been getting better (kind of), but new ugly things are popping up.  One of them is that my toddler now insists on keeping the baby up when it's bedtime.  He jumps up and down in his crib, screams, yells, sings, does somersaults, and hucks his lovies into the baby's crib across the room.  Shockingly, this keeps the baby from going to sleep.  Today it resulted in something worse.

Today, it resulted in a bloody nose for my baby.  BLOODY NOSE.  BABY.  Seriously?

The baby has just learned to pull up, so he's not particularly stable yet, but he tries like hell to keep up with my toddler.  Accordingly, today the baby was trying to hop up and down like the toddler (when both were supposed to be going to sleep!), and apparently this resulted in a bloody nose.

Here's where the gold medal moment comes in: I didn't respond for a full 5 minutes.  To my baby.  With the bloody nose.  Yup.  AWESOME MOTHER, RIGHT HERE.

Why the hell would you not respond to your crying baby?!?!  Because I have a crying baby a lot.  Like, A LOT.  He's a high maintenance one, this one.  And he cries for a plethora of reasons, few of which require my attention at bedtime and very few of which are actually worrisome.  So, I let him cry for 5 minutes.  Because that's what you're supposed to do.  So they'll learn to self-soothe.

Yes, I know they aren't supposed to be left to perform triage on themselves.  Jesus.  It wasn't on purpose.

Anyway, I did go in and saw that he had pooped.  (Well.... smelled that he had pooped.)  I picked him up to change him and went to wipe his snotty little nose.  And then I realized that it wasn't just snot.  The poor kid conked his face on his crib and gave himself a bloody nose and his good-for-nothin' mother didn't bother to show up and help him out until she felt an adequate amount of time had passed.  You know, for him to suffer.

Ugh.

These are the times when I think, "What was it that made me think I'd be good at this?"  Not really sure, but I sure am questioning myself now.  Thankfully, I think everyone questions themselves in this parenthood gig.  (But not everyone leaves their infant to bleed in their crib for 5 minutes!  Gold medal for me!!!!)

Reason #1 (of 4,374) for my youngest to attend therapy in the future: my mother left me to bleed in the dark.  Benign neglect: successful.  Damn it.