Do you ever just have those moments where you just want to stand in the middle of your house and screams for everyone to just back off?
It’s that point when you’ve reached beyond tired, beyond stressed, beyond overworked, and just want to breathe air from an environment that you didn’t clean and is without children.
It’s when you’ve just unwrapped a new role of paper towels so you could clean the spit, fingerprints, and dried food off the back door only to turn around and see that your 16 month old has managed to unroll the entire roll of paper towels. So, you turn around to start pulling up 47 thousand feet of Bounty and in walks one of your older children whose tracking in a butt-load of sand on your freshly vacuumed carpet. You scream for them to go back outside and shake the sand off so they don’t make more of a mess. But, as they run back outside they leave the door open so the baby escapes to the outdoors. And, you don’t notice because you’re in the back of the house fighting to put a new bag on the vacuum cleaner so you can, again, vacuum the floor. You return to an empty living room and see the door is open. You do some cursing under your breath as you head to the backyard to find the baby sitting on the riding lawnmower that your Hubby didn’t put away. Plus, you’re children have managed to unlock the gate, turn on the hose, and are now playing some game they are calling ‘Wet Safari.’
At this point you start handing out random punishments and demanding that they each go play in their rooms until you call them out. You then spend a good 15 minutes cleaning up the array of Popsicle wrappers, water bottles, and Kung-Foo Panda characters that are scattered all over your chalk-decorated patio table. Once you managed to return to the less hot environment of the house you must comfort the baby who is crying her bloody eyes out because you had the gall to put her inside and then go outside without her. You leave the trash from outside on the fireplace so you can scoop her up and set her on the counter. Your arms are too tired from carrying her around the dermatologist and Home Depot from earlier in the day to commit to another round of ‘Walk With Baby.’ As you set her on the counter you start thinking about sneaking away.
You envision your husband coming home and encouraging you to steal a few moments to yourself. You start imagining an icy frappuccino from Starbucks*, a few uninterrupted chapters of The Friday Night Knitting Club, and the relaxing rub of a pedicure. You’re just about to call him and clue him in to the escape plan when you remember that today of all days is the day he left his friggin Blackberry on the kitchen counter and that’s the damn chirping sound you’ve listened to all day that causes the dog to bark randomly giving you a mini heart attack to boot! You could have possibly turned it off, but the instructions he gave you on how to do it were spoken in the car hours before you would be returning home. And next to the phone that has foiled your plans is a clock and suddenly you realize it’s dinner time. The kids, despite being locked in their room for their foolish antics, will soon be hungry. They will soon come pouncing on you for their nightly feed and nourishment. You remember that your spaghetti sauce takes hours and your kids won’t eat red beans and rice. Last night’s chicken melts would possibly induce a fight and a gagging reflex so you take the only other option.
Damn it. Frozen Pizza.
You pop it in the oven, breathe in the 13 seconds of silence that follows, and put your plans on hold for another day. After all, a breakdown was not on the schedule until May when school lets out and you have 3 children home all day. Alone.
* A low fat frappuccino, of course, because God forbid you order the full fat, delicious one and have to admit in your food journal that you were not making healthy choices in the midst of your breakdown.
