Where Do I Go From Here

Not sure if you noticed, but there has been some blog silence over here.  There are quite a few reasons why, but the biggest one is this:

I've hit rock bottom.

Last night (and this morning) were it for me.  I don't know that I have ever felt so useless in my entire life.  Erik and I are really struggling with Jacob.  Like, don't want to come home at the end of the day kind of struggling.  Everything is a fight.  Everything is a tantrum.  He's great at school.  His teachers love him.  They tell us every day that he is one of the most helpful and most caring little boys they've had in their class.  His name is on the board just about every day for being a good helper.  But at home?  I can't even begin to describe it.  It's awful.  And I know, I should be grateful that he's such a great kid at school.  And I am.  And I know, he's acting out at home in part because he is so good at school.  I get that.  But there is nothing -- nothing -- that Erik and I can do here at home to make him happy.  He wakes up screaming, just about every morning, at 5:30am.  There is very little that will make him happy in the mornings.  He's not content to just lay in bed.  His bed, or our bed.  He wants to watch "kids shows."  But if it's not the "kids show" that he likes, then he throws a fit.  Erik tells me that it's a battle to get him dressed.  A battle to get him breakfast (oatmeal, with cold water -- and good luck if he doesn't think the water is cold enough).  A battle to get shoes and socks on.  A battle to get his coat on.  A battle to get him out the door.  When I pick him up in the afternoon, he's happy to see me, but that's short-lived.  Once we're in the car (and sometimes it's a battle to get him into the car), he's screaming because his seat-belt is too tight, or we're not driving home past the trucks he wants to see, or he wanted me to turn right and I turned left, or the music isn't up loud enough, or the song he wants isn't playing RIGHT THEN.  We get home and he screams because he wants a snack.  And milk.  He wants me to carry him into the house.  He wants to take his coat off but he gets mad because his arm gets stuck in the sleeve.  He wants a napkin, but not THAT napkin.  He wants me to play (which is fine), but I have to drive a train engine a certain way.  And if I don't, then we scream.  I have to sit on the floor.  And I have to sit on his blanket.  Dinner doesn't get made fast enough for him, then it's not what he wants (even though we gave him choices and he decided what he'd eat).  I'm not sitting close enough to him, then he wants me to go away.  I go away and he screams because he wants me back.  After dinner, we have to play exactly as he wants.  Bath-time is a battle.  Getting pajamas on is a battle.  Bedtime is a battle.  And then it just repeats the next day.  And the day after that.  And the day after that.  I don't even want to talk about weekends.

And we just don't know what to do anymore.  We do our best not to give in to him and let him get his way.  We feel like nothing we do ever makes him happy.  And it hurts so much, because we love him so much.  And we just want him to be happy.  There are brief (very brief) little moments when he laughs, or has fun, but those are so few and far between.  I feel useless.  And I feel like the worst parent in the world, because I feel like he doesn't love us.  He certainly never tells us he does.

There are a lot of other things that are causing me stress right now, so this is certainly not helping.  But I think that this is, by far, the biggest stress I'm dealing with.  I don't really want to be at work.  The only thing right now that really keeps me going there is the group of people I work with.  And I don't want to be at home.  I have no where to go.  And I feel awful.

I'm not writing all of this so I can get sympathy comments.  I'm writing this because I really don't know what else to do.  And I hoped that writing it would make me feel a little bit better.  Please don't tell me that Jacob is just going through a phase and that he'll grow out of it.  I know that's probably the case.  I need to know what to do right now so that I can cope with it, because I really am at the bottom of it all.