The Witching Hour is the literal worst. The other 12 hours in the day are not easy but then witching hour hits and it feels like your house has been hit by a crazy train. Doesn’t it always hit at the most convenient time too? Like just as you walk in the door from work, haven’t seen your kids all day, the dog needs to go for a walk and everyone is starving. Or it hits in that lull between dinner and bedtime. When you’ve run out of ideas to keep the kids entertained and happy, so your reaching for whatever works. Just hit us all at once….no big deal, friends. For a working mom it can feel like we’re giving and getting the worst from our children. It seems unfair. For a SAHM it can feel like we’ve given everything we have to our children for the last 10 hours, only to fail in the 5 o’clock hour.
In the baby stage the witching hour involves a lot of crying and screaming, sometimes from both mom and baby. It means a baby who just cannot be settled or satisfied. It means cluster feeding and questioning whether we know how to soothe our own baby. In the toddler years, witching hour gets stepped up a notch. It still means screaming and crying, but with kids who walk, talk, and throw things. It is no joke. It doesn’t matter how much of your kid’s energy you’ve exhausted throughout the rest of the day. Nap or no nap, doesn’t matter. A quiet day at home, or busy day at the zoo. It doesn’t matter. Witching hour is coming, whether we like it or not.
The kids witching hour in my house starts around 6:00pm, every damn day. We’ve just struggled through dinner, there is nearly two hours until bedtime and we’re all spent. My creativity is out the window and I’m reaching. Most days some time outside helps witching hour pass without anything catastrophic going down but on other days, it just isn’t that easy. There is a lot of screaming, too many questions asked and kids fighting over everything from bikes to a single Barbie shoe. There is a lot of literal (turning on every light and ceiling fan in the house) and figurative button pushing going on. It puts any chaos from earlier in the day to absolute shame.
My witching hour hits around 5:00pm, every damn day. Yep, my witching hour. Just like mommy brain, the mommy witching hour is a real thing. At least it is in this house and I’m here to justify it for us all. Moms can have a witching hour too. The difference being that we can’t scream or stomp our way through it. Instead we have figure out a way to calm the storm, while calming our own. My witching hour coincides with starting dinner. Cooking dinner with kids hanging all over our legs, begging for snacks and destroying our house? It’s a true test of patience. The mommy witching hour is the time of day when we’ve run out steam, we’re out of our minds tired and life is just handing it to us. It is overwhelming and exhausting. That’s the mom witching hour. The point in the day when the tank is empty. We try our best to not lose our patience but we’re human and sometimes the patience is long gone by this hour of the day.
To get myself through both witching hours? I open up the Tupperware cabinet and say ‘go at it.’ I play music in the kitchen to drown out some of our madness. I open up the basement door and let them tear apart a room that I don’t have to see all day long. I may or may not take the occasional time-out, locked in the laundry room. We play outside or take extra-long baths. And last but not least, something I’m confident we all have in common? We pick our battles and pick them carefully…to avoid a meltdown on their end or our own.
When the witching hour is over, the madness has calmed and we’ve all survived, we should be celebrating. It took an entire day to reach that awful hour(s). That’s an accomplishment. As that time approaches tonight and your waiting for sh*t to hit the fan, just remember something that my mom has always told me. This too shall pass…and it will, until 6pm tomorrow night 🙂
Mommy Diatribes
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