How to keep a balanced life: Mother, Wife, Nurse, and Nerd

I wish that I could write a how to guide on this, but unfortunately I feel I have more questions than answers.
Due to the nature of my profession I am taking care of people all “day” long. For 12 hours a night 3, sometimes 4 days a week, I must attend to every need of sick or post surgical patients. I am caring for the needs and wants of the people with every part of my being. Many of them rely on me for everything. If they cannot roll over, I do it for them. If they cannot reach their water, I hand it to them. If they cannot get out of bed on their own, I assist them. As their nurse, I am responsible for ensuring that their basic needs are met and the physicians orders are carried out.
You see, on these days, for these times, I am giving myself to others almost entirely. My goal is to get these people better. I want to share a kind word, smile, and my compassion with them. I want their experience in the hospital to be a good as any hospital experience can be. I want to make a difference for them.
Most days I really feel like I am able to accomplish this. Depending on patient acuity and load, all of my patients get what the need, and most get what they want (keeping in mind doctor’s orders).  I am proud of what and I do and very glad to do it. It is rare that a patient is unappreciative or disrespectful. Many of them are just thankful to have someone to talk to a few minutes at a time.
I do all this and give all of myself to my patients.
I unfortunately don’t feel I perform the same for my family.
I feel so selfish for even thinking this, much less writing it, but often I want to be alone. That almost never happens anymore. I love my family dearly. I can think of nothing better than spending time with them. But every now and then, for just an hour or two I would like to be left alone in my own head. My brain just needs an opportunity to reset and apply the needed updates, so to speak.
It is not so much that they “need” me constantly, they don’t. It is that my mind is constantly streaming a hundred things at any given moment from when to go shopping, the air pressure in the tires, to getting a new mailbox so the mailman won’t have to lean so far out of his car. I am constantly thinking and working out ways to accomplish things in my head.
Since I became a nurse this has multiplied ten fold.
I never realized how much thought would be involved in this career. I know that they spent the whole time in school talking about “Critical thinking”, but I just didn’t get it. I did not understand that they were telling me every day I would have problems to solve that didn’t have one right answer. There are always a hundred different ways something could be done and the right way is not always clear, defined, accepted, or adhered to. The right way may even be shunned or looked over by your coworkers, your facility, or the MD writing the orders.It is up to you, the nurse, to maintain the integrity to do your very best to “do the right thing”.
Its hard. The right thing is almost never the easiest thing, and because of that it causes increased stress and work. But it is the right thing, and really the only thing that should be done.
So in addition to the fact that I maintain a household and take care of a family, I maintain the integrity to take care of strangers as well. I am constantly thinking what is the best way, the right way, the most efficient way to accomplish the things I need to.
And every now and then my mind overheats, probably from lack of sleep, good nutrition, and overuse, and needs a cool down. I wish my brain was a simple as a computer in that if it is running slow, you just add some more RAM, upgrade the processor, or even the hard dive. But it doesn’t. I’m stuck with the same hardware, the same operating system, and a few upgrades in software. I think it must be windows based because I’m constantly screwing things up in there in an effort to make things more efficient, only to revert back to the way it was before because my tweaks only make things worse.
My brain needs to be a Mac.
They just work, or so I hear. I have not had the luxury of owning anything more than my beloved iphone. No tweaking, no changing, no modifying. You get the same performance with half the hardware.
That’s what my brain needs: simplification.
Steve Jobs, do you, and apple of course, plan on going into neurosurgery in the near future? Because this nurse would likely volunteer to be a test iNurse.
Ah my nerdiness in full force. Classic.