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I'm at work just past the mid-point of 24 hour duty right now. Keris is spending a night away from me for the first time since that one week when she was three months old and Mom kept her while I was in the field. I am exhausted with inputting data into a records database, and I am sick with worry about how Keris is doing. She hasn't slept worth a damn since we got here -- wakes up at least twice a night, sometimes more, not just fussing but CRYING, and if I try to pat her on the back or calm her down by whispering to her she works herself up into a frenzy. I have to nurse her back to sleep -- nothing else will do. So I'm hating it thinking about if she (or her child care provider, who is charging me an arm and a leg) are getting any sleep at all. I can't blame the poor kid; she's on her fourth child care provider in 9 weeks. We've had the absolute WORST luck with babysitters, and this is a terrible duty assignment for a single or dual military parent. But just when I was feeling awfully sorry for us, the sergeant in charge of the records came by to see how the database load was going, and she asked me if she could have my BabyTalk magazine that I'd finished reading. I remembered that she'd gone to the States to have her baby a couple of months ago, and now she's back, without her kids. Her mom is keeping all three of them, including her newborn, until she gets back to the states this fall. She's not a bad mom, and it's not that she doesn't love her kids. She just wanted them to have some stability. I have to wonder what I'm doing to my baby. We're so much better off financially over here, since we're in government quarters and I've paid off a couple of bills, and she had a big Christmas and has lots of toys and clothes and videos and things that I could never buy her before. But I'm just not sure the trade-off is worth it. Even if I were working 12 hour days as a civilian, at least she could be cared for during the day by somebody that will still be a part of her life next year, or the year after that, instead of moving around all the time and changing child care providers every two weeks. The goal is to get out of debt and get some money saved so that I can get the hell out of this Army and take my baby home, and not be on welfare when we get there. I just hope this doesn't do too much damage before we finally escape.
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