I gave birth to my second son in August and after bringing him home, my mom asked if she could get paid for watching my oldest son while I was in the hospital. I know that I was experiencing some baby blues, making me extra emotional, but it hit me really hard how alone I am. That my own mom isn’t interested in helping me out during the birth of her grandchild unless there is money involved. It knocked me into a depression for a couple weeks. I recovered pretty quickly and she has started dozens of arguments about money since then that haven’t hit me as hard. But tonight, for some reason, her ridiculous request for money really got me down.

A little backstory about our arrangement:

My mom does not have an income. She is in the process of applying for disability. She is living with us for free. We pay all of the bills for the house. She does have food stamps and goes to the food bank, but I supply all non food items, like toilet paper which she goes through like a pregnant woman. I work part time and pay her $50 a day for babysitting each day that I work. I’ve only been working one 10 hour day a week most of the time. She complains that $50 a week isn’t enough for her, but if I accept more shifts so she has more babysitting opportunities, she complains that it is too hard on her health to babysit that much because she really is disabled. So basically, she wants to continue working only one day a week, but get more money from me. She comes up with every twisted logic she can think of as to why she deserves more money and she holds it against me anytime she even holds one of the boys, like I’m getting free labor and owe her.

So tonight she asked if I was going to pay her more because I was 30 min late getting home from work yesterday. Yesterday was a crazy day, had to use my lunch break to go to my sons 6 month appointment and it took so long that I ended up being a half hour short on my pay for the day. Regardless of my pay being short, I still gave my mom the full $50 plus $15 gas money since she met me at the doctors office with the boys. I ran around like a crazy woman all day yesterday and didn’t even get a lunch break, was a half hour short on my own pay, and out $65 in childcare, and she was asking for more!? This is normal of her to pull this, but for some reason it really got me down tonight.

I feel so frickin alone. I almost instantly felt myself slip into a depression. I sat on the couch in a daze way past my kids bedtime. Just let my toddler run around, when he was obviously tired. Let my infant fuss and thrash around in his rock n play. Finally, an hour and a half late, I got the boys ready for bed, but skipped a lot of their routine. Then I saw a text on my phone and replied to it. Turns out it was a group text with my husband and my husband’s mom and my husband had already replied, so he snapped at me for unnecessarily texting and interrupting the video game he was playing. I walked out of the bedroom and moved to the couch. He never checked on me or asked why I moved to the couch and I can now hear him snoring from the other room. I’m obviously not going to get any support from him.

I hate the way I’m feeling and I know I can’t care for my boys if I slip into a depression. They take a ton of work and I don’t have the luxury of being depressed, since I am their primary caregiver and no one will pick up the slack if I falter. These feeling just can’t happen, but they are. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel better. Ever since I experienced major depression a decade ago, I’ve been able to slip into depression quickly and then slip back out just as fast. So hopefully this is one of those times when I wake up in the morning back to normal. 🤷‍♀️ All I know is that at this moment I’m scared, alone, and losing hope.