7:10 a.m. The alarm goes off and I stumble around in search of the phone ringing. And then a door slams and the children’s toilet makes its howling jet engine sound and I glance at the alarm clock and hit the snooze button but turn on static instead. I am not thriving just surviving on five hours of sleep. Jet planes flying overhead and a nagging concern over a public fight with a friend kept me awake until 2 a.m. [...]
Monday morning. 7 a.m. EST. Sparrows chirp outside my window. It’s too early for damn chirping birds. “Mom, you gotta wake up. Ben and I had a food fight,” Jim urges in his shatter-glass voice. “Huh? What? Why? You what?” “Threw Frosted Flakes on each others’ heads.” “Huh? What? Why?” I groan, shifting my weight off my throbbing hip, “Why?” “I don’t know. Sorry mom.” Spring Break? Spring Break is a misnomer. I break out the vacuum cleaner and gripe [...]
The other day, an acquaintance of mine sent me one of the coming to Jesus corrective notes, and I never feel good when I receive those. I was feeling pretty shitty anyway, and then when I read what she wrote, it tapped into my inner hater. Some people have inner critics but I have an inner hater and when she gets going, she’s a bloody beast. Even as I felt shitty about the things she said about me, I couldn’t [...]
Madeline slammed the bedroom door against the door wall and dramatically glided into my room. For much of the afternoon, I had been lost in contemplation. The day before, a friend had threatened suicide. She lives thousands of miles away from me, and the only thing I could do to help her was to call the police in her city. Now she is furious, and keeps finding new and creative ways to tell me just how furious. As she burst [...]