Dear god, the rage

When I was a kid, I remember only one time throwing a big ole tantrum and destroying my room.  Tumping over toys, trashing the place.  But afterwards I realized that the upheaval was pretty dumb because I then had to clean it all up.   

As an adult, if my temper got out of hand, I would explode, be ready to yell or throw something, but once it was out, I could move on.  

But this, the "Summer of Keeping 3 Young Kids Relatively Happy and Suffering From Inconsistent Sleep for 10 Months," and especially this week, knowing that a "break" of sorts is coming with N heading back to school on Tuesday, has had me raging, exploding at the kids on a far too frequent basis.  And at the same time, this week I have felt a little sad knowing that N will not be with us every day.  

I am trying to figure out why my patience has been so, so, so thin these past 3 or so days.  I know much of it is that I am just plain tired of trying to balance the needs of the kids.  

N and G can play together, rough-house and have lots of fun, but M, now that he is crawling, gets into the middle of it and is sure to be hurt.  But when I try to move him to safer quarters, he fusses.  And when N and G's rough-housing gets to be too much they start squabbling.

The other situation is that G and M like to do "babyish" things, like read board books or just sit on the floor and play with Little People toys.  But this is boring for N, so she turns whiney and demanding, wanting me to entertain her in ways that I simply don't have the energy to do.  

So someone is always bored or being squashed or trying to run over someone else with the Thomas the Train ride-on toy.  

Perhaps some of it is this goddamned heat which has made us unable to get outside at all this summer, even to play on the covered patio.  The humidity has been unbearable for anyone, but especially a young baby.  So we've been inside alot, watching far too much tv.  

This week I have flown off the handle repeatedly at N's sassiness and her expressions of "entitlement," such as acting like her tv programs are so much more interesting and important than anything else we want to watch.   Acting like she gets to decide for G what Netflix queue program he should watch, regardless of what he has said he wants to watch.  

And then I have lashed out at G's amazing ability to pester M to death.  Since M began crawling a few weeks ago, G has been trying to sit on, stand on, somersault on top of, lay on, ride and be inappropriately physical with M.  I don't think he is trying to be mean.  He wasn't this way before M became mobile.  I think G thinks M's ability to move around makes him a wonderful playmate, and G simply doesn't "get" why he can't rough-house with M the way he does with N.  

Maybe I have just reached my limit at having to get after them about the same.damn.thing.every.single.fucking.day.  Many.many.many.times.a.day.  

Today we met one of N's school friends and his mom/siblings at the Science Center.  We were there for about 3 hours, and N and G had a wonderful time.  M fell asleep on the way home and most of the time I can transfer him from the car into the house.  But today, G started screaming, deliberately trying to wake M up when I turned off the car.  I got G to quiet down but M's eyes had opened for a moment.  He may have gone back to sleep if N hadn't gotten out of her booster seat and stood up in front of him, wagging her head back and forth with her tongue hanging out and her eyes bugging widely.  

So my hoped for "plan," to get both boys down for naps, was screwed.  And I was LIVID!!!!!!  

And I know, I know that having a "hoped for plan" was pretty stupid, but I'm grasping at straws, searching for little nuggets of peacefulness, of relative quiet (or even the volume turned down to 6 from a roar of 11), of being able to pee without having to rush out of the bathroom to keep G from squashing M or N and G from taking each other down in the living room.  

So now as a mother, I still feel the "volcano," the rush of spew that comes out of me when my children have pushed me to my limits, but it is flavored with guilt.  Over yelling.  Over cursing at times.  Over feeling like I really could physically harm my children if I didn't get control of my anger.