The post of not coping

This is a warning: I'm going to be brutally honest today. If brutal honesty isn't your bag, look away now.

I am OVERWHELMED. Everyone in our house is sick with a cold virus, including me. The kids aren't sleeping and need painkillers and cough syrup administering throughout the night, and that's exhausting enough in itself, but I'm struggling with it even more because I feel like shit. I can't actually remember what it feels like to be well. I'm starting to think I might just never be well again. I mean, it's been FOREVER. On top of that, I started on the overflowing laundry bins yesterday and now my kitchen closely resembles a Chinese laundry. Other than running backwards and forwards from the washing machine to the tumble drier, the only other things I have done are clean the downstairs floors and wipe round the toilet and the sink in the bathroom. The rest of my usually lived-in-but-clean home looks like a dump truck full of random crap has sneezed all over it. Actually, it's worse than that; the truck hasn't so much sneezed as power-vomited the various detritus of family life everywhere, and I have no idea where to start.

To be perfectly honest, I'm regularly panicking over when I'm going to have time and feel well enough to catch up on everything that needs doing. To the point where, if the kids don't wake me up with coughing or sneezing or fevered screams of "MUMMY MY NOSE SMELLS FUNNY!" (I'm not even kidding), I will wake myself up in the middle of the night with WORRY.

The thing that I keep coming back to, though, is this: People cope with more than this. I've seen these people on the TV and read their blogs and I know that I could not be one of them. I proved that when Baby Taylor was ill at the beginning of last year. I fell apart. I know there's the common belief that we can cope with anything if we have to, but I also know that's not true. I've read a lot of blogs by a lot of parents, and some of those parents have been through and survived things that I know without doubt would have me crawled up in a corner, rocking and muttering.

On the other hand, people keep trying to reassure me that there are fuller laundry bins and messier houses than mine, and I do realise this, but I hold myself to a higher standard than I do other people. It's just the way I was brought up, and I can't change it.

It's just that, unfortunately, I only have enough energy to worry impotently about everything I need to do right now. Actually doing it will have to wait until I feel better. Which, at this rate, will probably be next January.