You ever notice how the morning you get up late is the morning when shit just pours down on your head? Yeah. Me too.
It will be the morning you cannot easily find the things you habitually pack in your daughter’s lunches. It will be the morning your 2nd grader will “discover” more homework she didn’t do last night, and your hot tea will go lukewarm while you help her with it. Then you will find that you failed to transfer the laundry from the washer to the dryer and now your Kindergartener has no clean trousers, which will force you to root yesterday’s jeans out of the hamper and check to see if they are not so sullied as to be not wearable, which makes you feel like a Bad Mommy because ewwww your kid is in dirty clothes you slattern. You will be unable to find anyone’s shoes, for lo your children have distributed small sneakers all over Christ and Creation like some sort of footwear confetti.
You will find yourself screaming like a harpy at all three of your precious daughters to, “Hurry! For the love of God just put your jacket on like you’ve done it before, okay?!?” This will also make you feel like a Bad Mommy, and you will wonder if perhaps you have now destroyed their self esteem and they will grow up to become drug-addled talk-radio twatwaffles, living monuments to your failure to raise them right.
After you pile the children into the car, you will realize there is absolutely no way you can avoid the Mommy Walk of Shame … the slinking into the School Office to get tardy notes for your children. You HATE doing this because you know that no matter how nice the school secretary is she is secretly judging you to be the kind of unorganized dipshit who can’t even get your kids to school on time even though you are a stay at home mom and don’t have a real job.
Then, when you hustle the toddler back out toward the van, in the rain because OF COURSE it is raining, you smell an Affront to God and Mankind, which your cute youngest daughter has just unloaded into her diaper. You realize that your nerves are making faint sizzling sounds, and you hope no one else can hear it. That’s when some ginormous asshat in an SUV drives past you as you are strapping your baby into her car seat and splashes muddy, ice-cold puddle-water all over you from the waist down. Mentally, you draw a gun because you are No Longer Amused:
Because your house is between the school and the YMCA (where your toddler’s preschool if fixing to commence) you go home to change her diaper and your wet yoga pants. This delay means you are 10 minutes late to the preschool class, and you have to do another Mommy Walk of Shame to bring your daughter into the room with the rest of the kids … all of whom have Good Mommies who got them there on time.
After this you scurry over to the room your yoga class is held in and peek in, which confirms to you there is no way to get in there and spread out your mat and join the class without being as disruptive as an elephant giving birth in Old Navy. So you take you frazzled ass down to the snack room, grab a booth, and immerse yourself in your writing because the other alternative is to sob and suck your thumb in public.
When you pick up you child at noon, that’s when you remember you HAVE to go to the store or there will be NO dinner for your family that night. Completely demoralized, you swing by Big Store and your toddler screams like she is being burned with cigarettes if you put her in the cart, so you let her walk with you, and then she wants to help you push but she misses her grip and you are not fast enough to keep her from hitting the floor, where she cries in pain and rips your soul with the hot claws of Parental Fail. Everyone in the store turns to look at you, the Bad Mommy, as you clutch your sobbing child and try to comfort her. You finally get the hell out of there, get home, get the baby fed and down for a nap, and start to blog.
That’s when your oldest dog gets volcanic diarrhea on the living room rug.
I’m going to cook chicken soup for the rest of my family, but I am having margaritas for dinner with a Xanax-sprinkled bowl of ice cream for desert.
Oh my gawd Fokker, what a fucked up day, so sorry, FGBV’s to you. And the dog too. Know this. Tomorrow won’t be as bad. Sparklies flying your way girl.
There, there. What Braless said. These days are sent to us so that we can be properly appreciative of the days in which everyone has clean clothes, gets out of the house on time with their homework done and teeth brushed, and you get to both exercise and write because something is in the freezer for dinner. Of course, I think all THAT has happened maybe twice in my entire parenting career!
We all have those days. At my house, we generally call them “Tuesday”. Hang in there. It will be Wednesday before you know it!
When I had a toddler, there were times I only managed to make the last 10 minutes of the playgroup, so I sympathise. I have no idea how you ever manage to have organised days with three of them.
What are “tardy notes,” though? Round here, the children are blamed for any lateness and the head teacher just uses the school newsletter to exhort the parents to encourage punctuality.
Well, being America, we can get all militant about it. For the elementary kids the parents are the obvious culprits and we can actually get hauled into court if our kids are late too often … I suppose to make sure we aren’t druggies who are neglecting them. Anyway, I have a great dread of being found lacking in the “mommy’s got her shit together” department. *meep*
You have, undoubtedly, earned your ice cream.
Throw on an extra scoop for me.
You definitely deserve your xanax-sprinkled ice cream. What a day!
Awwww poor baby!! But at least you wrote about amoosingly. That makes it all better…
Awwww hugs!
Fyi: Lateness is very very common in school and it’s not like I’m performing surgery in there and can’t be interrupted—ain’t no thang. We never ever fuss when kids are late. We always say “I’m so glad you made it this morning. I missed you!” and help them get settled.
No one thinks you’re a bad mom. You’re human. And, hey, I lose my shoes so how am I gonna keep track of SP’s?
PS last night our younger dog was constipated and as I was trying to set up a playdate on the phone and dh was watching sp, older dog yakked on the carpet (because if you need to puke don’t do it on the easily wipable laminate floor) and the younger dog pooped all over the kitchen and so I spot botted while he mopped and then he held the dog while I clipped off the poop matted in his butt hair and SP bawled in the pack and play because she had been in there more than forty seconds. I feel ya, girlie.
“…margaritas for dinner with a Xanax-sprinkled bowl of ice cream for desert….”
EXCELLENT suggestion. I will hang onto this for future reference. I’ve had too many days recently that needed to end with this combo.
And yet, in the midst of all your chaos, you still had the presence of mind to post a Firefly reference. I bow down to you for that! My favorite line ever was “I can kill you with my mind”, which is a great thing to say to those who are on that last nerve…..just sayin’.
{{{HUGS}}} At lease you kept your sense of humor. I would have been foaming at the mouth for the rest of the day!
Some day I’ll tell you about the time my toddler and I ended up riding to the day care center in a patrol car with the lights flashing. WHY DIDN’T MAMA SAY THERE’D BE DAYS LIKE THIS? just go look at ‘em while they’re sleeping, then go pour another margarita outta the blender.
Eh, I think youre too hard on yourself. Parents are people too, and kids need to see that. Otherwise adulthood comes as a nasty surprise!