After reading the responses in the "Keeping in touch with your spouse" thread and thinking about it for awhile, I am starting to think DH and I are in an unhealthy pattern. Here's why:

DH left for work at 6:20 this morning. Our son Joel has been home for two days with a sore throat, coming down with a cold *I thought*, but since he was no better today, I decided he needed a strep test. I paged DH twice at about 2:30. He never called back, so I took Joel over to the office and asked the receptionist if I could get someone to swab Joel's throat. They were happy to help me out, and the strip showed positive almost immediately. I saw one of the FPs in the hallway, and he gave the techs the okay to call in the scrip. I then left DH's office *without ever seeing DH* and went to pick up the other two boys from school and get the antibiotic. DH did call at about 5:30 to remind me he is working an in-house shift tonight. I am still waiting for a little work/life balance around here. Seriously, the only time I feel relaxed lately is when we leave home, because then I know DH won't be going in or getting paged. I have not had a conversation with him all week......granted, part of that was due to my concert Monday night and the fact that I felt yucky last night, but sadly, it is becoming a fairly typical pattern. I am lonely but have no time to connect with my few friends here because I am always driving somebody somewhere. If I stopped working, I would get to see DH more on his somewhat irregular days off, but I would be bored out of my mind the rest of the time. It just makes me sad that the only answer seems to be for the boys and I to just totally do our own thing and hope that DH catches up with us from time to time. The "doing things as a family" dream is dying hard here. I handled DH's absence fairly well during residency, but it is different when you have three school-aged kids missing their dad, not to mention the fact that while I do enjoy my job, I feel like I spend all of my time coaxing and cajoling recalcitrant mini-humans into civilized behavior. What no one knows is that I am barely clinging to civilized behavior myself!

Vent over. I just need to get the school year over. Each of these last few days feels like it is a year long.[/QUOTE]