I did more programming yesterday and today. I am definitely more deeply engaged in my work when I spend the day programming. And my back is feeling it. I am as stiff as if I spent the day unmoving.

Who knows, maybe I did.

But it was a productive day. Yesterday I probably had hundreds of errors and threads of things to fix. Today I bet it’s more like 20. I do not typically fix one to two hundred errors in a day. This is an out of the ordinary workflow – the current task involves figurative surgery to remove a home-grown ORM from an application and replace it with Doctrine. As soon as I generated the new model classes and updated our models to extend them, everything broke. (Duh.) And then I’ve spent the last two days putting it all back together. Fun!

I think this fatigue shit is getting worse. Last night I brought the kids home and then I lay down on the couch thinking, “and I’ll get up and start supper in ten minutes.” Yeah, an hour later Ian came home and I was still on the couch by the fire. In part I blame the cold and the rain from yesterday. I got soaked walking to work and didn’t dry out for about 3 hours and then couldn’t warm up all day. I was still chilled through at suppertime.

At around 9:30, I started to think, “my legs feel achey. I should go to bed early.” Twenty minutes later, I started to lose it. My legs were in agony, I couldn’t find the energy to finish sentences, I was swaying when I tried to walk to the kitchen for painkillers. On the way back I sat down in the middle of the floor and then I lay down where I was and burst into tears.

This morning I overslept by an hour and still woke up exhausted. Ian says, “well of course you’re exhausted, you get up at 5 every morning. This would only be sustainable if you went to bed around 9 instead of after 10.” And I say, “okaaaaaay. But you let me sleep in every day this last weekend. After three days of sleeping in, maybe I wouldn’t be all back to normal, but I shouldn’t be in this state.” But who knows what is and is not sustainable. Especially if some little thing is running you down. And trying to stay up later to get stuff done is sure not accomplishing anything. While I am failing to catch up on my sleep, I am also not getting anything done. So maybe I’ll spend a couple of weeks going to bed early and see if that does or doesn’t clear it up.

Obviously every time I duck out of helping Ian fold laundry for tomorrow or making soup for our lunches for the week or even sitting and spending quality time with him and a glass of wine, I freak out a little about how he is going to lose it one day and tell me what a worthless piece of crap I am for never doing anything around the house. This is where people who know Ian laugh in my face and tell me how he’s too good a guy for that. But that’s why the guilt is so compelling isn’t it? Because even the people who say reassuring things are framing it as if it’s pure charity on his part.

The obvious fear is that tending the kids and keeping our daily lives running with suppers and laundry are supposed to be my tasks. And that I haven’t done anything to earn breaks for recuperation.

And if I’m taking un-earned breaks, and god knows I’m not looking sex-ay or putting out since I’m so exhausted, then clearly I’m a dead loss as a spouse. Good thing he’s so benevolent, but better hope he doesn’t realize what a dead weight I am.

Yuck. I could write this off as my own buying into crap about men’s vs. women’s responsibilities. And I am so guilty of giving profuse praise and thanks for changing a diaper. Or for his help putting together wedding invitations. But I’m going to put most of it down to bad past relationship patterns.

I’ve never had a relationship with someone who didn’t keep score before. Ian’s silence on the topic makes me nervous that I don’t know what the score really is. And if he doesn’t tell me up-front what the cost of a break is, in other efforts or in negative impact on his regard for me, surely that means it’s going to be really bad.