Tears of nothing

I'm sitting on the sofa, on a warm summer's evening, and feel like crying. And it's not entirely because I'm watching England playing rugby, though that experience has been known to induce tears in my fiercely competitive soul.

No, this time, the tears are just... nothing...

I've spent the weekend "glamping" (of which more another time) and seeing my family for BabyCousin's 40th birthday party. I guess he's not really BabyCousin any more. But he'll always be the littlest, and I have to differentiate him from the others somehow.

Really, I should be happy. Except...

... I saw my mother, my aunt, my brother, my niece and nephew, my cousins, their children, and assorted other relatives that are more or less related but defy description. And it feels as though I only managed to exchange a few sentences each with anyone, and at least 50% of those sentences were, "I'm tooooo hot and I don't like it!"And I was reminded how much time I used to spend with various parts of my family, and how much I used to enjoy doing so, and I feel a welling sadness at the passing of time, and the losing of connections, and the inevitable changes that growing older brings.

... I tried to spend time talking to my family, and so I neglected my LittleBear, who was rather forlorn, and for whom I hadn't provided enough toys or games. And he was very good, but I felt like a heel telling him to go and play on his own when there wasn't much for him to do. And I felt like even more of a heel because I didn't really gain much benefit from not playing with him in terms of talking to my family.

... I've woken up at 5am for the past two mornings as the sun streamed into my shepherd's hut (see reference to "glamping", above). I don't function when tired.

... my LittleBear has been poorly, in a vague sort of a way, since Thursday. He was sick (from an empty stomach, so not very sick) in the morning, and then fine. Since then, what with the heat, and the vague illness, and not sleeping well, he's now not really eating properly. And so now he's more-or-less-constantly tired, hot and low on energy. Therefore he whinges. And my reserves of sympathy and motherliness decrease in direction proportion to both my own tiredness and the ambient temperature. And once I start being crabby and short-tempered with a tired and pathetic little boy, I start to castigate myself for my own unkindness.

... I am, if I dare say so, a tad hormonal today. (BigBear did dare, and is alive to tell the tale).

... I drank a reasonable number of glasses of Pimms today. And, as everyone knows, Pimms contains gin. And, as everyone also knows, gin is Mother's Ruin.

In truth, I could probably chalk up all incipient tears to being due to insufficient sleep, and a surfeit of gin. But the rest of it feels like it matters more. Just now anyway.