Back from New Hampshire

Thora and I traveled to North Conway, NH this weekend to cheer Sean on at the New England Rugby Tournament. It was kind of exhausting. The drive alone is 3 hours each way. The drive down, since we did it between 8 and 11 pm, was pretty uneventful for Thora, since she slept a lot of the way. But when we got there, she TOTALLY woke up. So much for our "plan" to transfer her from carseat to pack-n-play.
She ended up staying awake for close to an hour, what with the manic attempts at playing, the diaper change, the extra bottle, the inconsolable crying in the crib, the inconsolable crying in bed between us, until finally FINALLY Sean encouraged her to lay her head on his chest, while he rubbed her back, and she relaxed, even began to close her eyes. It was midnight after all. But still. If I didn't have to be absolutely still and silent (apparently letting on that I existed would break the spell that "Daddy makes it all better" and she would start to wiggle and fuss again) I would've broken out into such applause. And if I wasn't so so so incredibly tired.
To give you an idea of how tired I was: I was doing a bunch of car errands, something I very rarely do, and because of the car trips (dropping off the dog at the kennel, going to Home Depot for a replacement spark plug for the lawn mower, back to the other side of town to get the oil changed in the car), Thora took only ONE 30-minute nap...ALL DAY. At around 3:30, when I realized what had happenening, what was happening and how I was in no power to change it, while at Trader Joe's getting some groceries for the trip, I resigned myself to making the best of it by buying a bottle of wine to tuck into the suitcase and open once we got to the cottage in NH and after we got Thora to sleep in the crib there. I even splurged a little and spent a whole $8.99! I knew that it would take every ounce of patience, of creativity, of enthusiasm and compassion to keep little Thora going until we could get her in the car around 7 pm.
That's what I was thinking until Sean called at 5:45 pm and told me that he'd just that very minute finished seeing his last patient, that he still had an hour of notes left to write. So I'm looking at the clock and realizing that he wouldn't even be home until 7:15. Then we'd still have to pack up the car. With the phone to my ear I watched little Thora walk drunkenly around the living room. She seemed in good spirits, but seriously, it looked like she'd started drinking with lunch and hadn't stopped. And I realized, we're screwed. If I didn't have to drive us 3 hours to NH (Sean's neck was giving him a ton of trouble), I would've hung up and opened the bottle of wine right then and there. But as it was, Thora started to totally lose it around 5:15, begging for her bath: "ath? ath? ath?" So I bathed her and fed her a bottle at 5:45 and she was sleeping soundly at 6pm. I thought that would be fine. She'd sleep and we'd wake her up and transfer to the carseat, feeding her the second bottle that she normally gets before falling asleep as we drove away from the house. That was my plan, given the circumstances. That is, until she woke up screaming at 7pm. So a dose of ibuprofen later, we were wide awake when Sean came home. We loaded up the car, Sean sat in the back and fed her a bottle of milk. We pulled over so he could jump in the front seat, after which point, Thora went to sleep. And was asleep until I turned off the car in the driveway in front of our little cottage at the Spruce Moose Lodge.
Oh, I didn't mention that the first hour of that trip was spent driving into a torrential downpour through which it was difficult to see anything except for the brake lights of the cars in front of me. Even the white lane lines on the high way were faded and practically invisible. So as you can imagine, that's just how I wanted to unwind after a hectic and demanding day.
Back to my original motive, which was telling you just how tired I was. When Thora finally got to sleep a little after midnight, I lay there rigid, trying to get comfortable with a minimum of bed-creaking or sheet-rustling and I thought briefly and yet longingly about the bottle of wine buried deep in the suitcase, which was somewhere, and of the image I'd had of us opening it and relaxing and me regaling Sean with tales of Thora's sleep-deprived drunkenness, or us glancing through our copy of a Rough Guide to New England, planning out what we might do in between matches. But instead, there we were, me staring at the back of my eyelids, ready to fall asleep. That's what being a mom is sometimes, I think, laying in a dark room, motionless, having already been kicked multiple times by these tiny feet that you love, while a bottle of wine sits unopened in another room and a version of yourself plays out in your mind, and then you fall asleep.