Have you ever had a day that began with burning the roof of your mouth accidentally on a warmed cinnamon roll, skinning the roof of your mouth, making fresh coffee and anything else hot too painful to consume?
While you’re licking your wounds and cursing all things heated, you stumble around in your non-caffeinated state to get the children ready, drop them off, to return home to nurse a teething, cranky, cold-ridden baby, only for her to wail and cough and wail at you, as though you’re not doing anything at all, despite all your best efforts to soothe and nourish her, causing your head to ache, your brain to pulse, and your ears to practically bleed?
And just as you get your darling, sweet, but cranky infant off to slumberland, for the eleventy-billionth try, she is suddenly awakened by your four-year-old dinosaur, cheerfully barreling into the room to (loudly) ask you a question, startling your then-sleeping-but-now-awake infant, causing her to wail once more, causing all your morning efforts to get her to sleep to cease, essentially causing you to start over from scratch?
As you rock her (again), you catch a glimpse of your spazzy-haired, bleak reflection in the living room mirror, causing you to immediately burst into (quiet) tears, because you’re oh so tired, and there’s no break, no help, your husband’s out of the country?
Countless minutes later, as the tears have soaked your face, but somehow avoided soaking your infant, keeping her awake, just as you are able to lay her down, your four-year-old reappears to announce he’s crapped his pants and never told you he needed to go in the first place.
Cue full-on momsplosion.
Baby, of course, wakes up again, this time wailing harder than ever, because you’re full-on hysterical because you just.got.her.down.for.the.fortieth.freaking.time. and now you’re wiping poop from your son’s legs and gagging while crying in the bathroom.
All this before 10am.
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As positive and in control as I am naturally, it amazes me how just ohsoverywrong things get when my husband goes away. It never used to be this way. He used to go away once or twice a month back at Fort Bragg, traveling to a monthly conference. The kids and I had everything handled in his absence – a great working system while he was gone, he never had to worry about a thing, we were a well-oiled machine of awesomeness. I mean, his deployment to Iraq wasn’t a piece of cake, mind you, but his little trips here and there after that went smoothly for us. It wasn’t until being stationed at Fort Polk when things went very, way off the deep-end, kind-of wrong.
Regardless of whether he’s away or not, I wake up each day, hopeful, happy to have a fresh start and a new day ahead. And each day beats me down with the Murphy’s Law stick of epic proportions, reminding me that, no matter how in control I think I am, or that I’d like to be, that Murphy is always going to kick my ass into submission e-v-e-r-y-t-i-m-e. I don’t know why that is, and I sure wish I knew the answer to stopping it.
