Can I Have Both? Myself and Bruno?

"Will I ever get through this?" There are some days I question myself . . . after a night of waking every two hours to breast feed and at 4:30 a.m. Bruno decides that he really doesn't want to go back to sleep. Or perhaps it was one of those nights when I went to change his diaper and his little weewee hardens up and sprays. I reach for a wet towel and grab both his teeny ankles with one hand and raise his bottom to clean the leakage puddled underneath him. Now he starts to scream and wail.
"What's wrong?" I ask in that high pitched baby voice you just can't help speaking to them in. "oh my god," my tone drops to low tone. "Shit," I say and my voice raises in volume, hoping his daddy will get involved at 2:30 a.m., "you peed again, all over your face!" I want to cry with Bruno. It's the common tragedy comedy piece that comes with having a baby, so I've discovered.
But that's not the hard part . . . it's the bigger picture of the accumulation of lack of sleep, waking up at 6:30 a.m. tired, and knowing that there's no nap in sight. For the first two months Bruno would only daytime nap in his stroller on a walk. If I stopped moving he'd wake-up. That meant exhaustion plus taking daily four mile walks, two miles per nap, and the mid-day nap was an hour and a half session of Bruno sleeping ontop of me in the rocking chair. I would ponder, "how can I keep doing this?" and that's just the day. I look at the day now in its full 24 hour cycle broken into quarters. Late afternoon/early night is the most challenging. He would get super fussy, I would be super hungry and sometimes he wouldn't let me put him down to even rush to prepare something for dinner. His cries spoke of torture, painful physical disembowelment . . . they are hard for a mother to hear .. . .better to sacrifice myself than to witness him in such discomfort. The crying stops when I hold him. Has anyone ever needed me so much? It's beyond amazing. But I want to get through it. It would be nice to eat dinner. Not to mention the floors need to be mopped. The bedroom dresser has a half-inch of dust on it because it's overlooked. The bathroom is an uncomfortable dirty and mommy is always hungry. There's laundry to fold. The bills to remember to pay on time, and god how nice it would be to buy a new dress that fits my now d- size breasts and to wear lipstick again? Oh, the plants need to be watered, I sill haven't legally changed my name, Bruno needs a passport, and I need to pump my breast milk if I ever want to go to a yoga class or have a glass of wine. I am so behind myself with so much extra time and yet incapable of accomplishing the most bare essentials.
And then one day it's just all easy. And then when he hit two months old, he started staying in the bassinet and playing with himself. And then all of sudden during his fussy time he didn't throw a fit for a week straight. And the house is still dirty, but I bought a new dress and wore lipstick last night. I pumped and drank amazing wines and got solid sleep. Bruno is getting bigger and I am able to start doing a little bit more for myself and I made it through. My ass is still flat but it's starting to lift little by little and I'm hoping to now work on butt lifts in the middle of the day and I know it's possible. I have to admit, the first two months were very challenging, but right now it's becoming so amazing. I can actually start to have both: myself and Bruno.