midnight mommies

Once you land on the European continent, each and every shrill scream that can be heard from your child’s mouth when she is angry and the “cute” tendency to knock things over and act like a lummox in a china shop will go from dwelling at the level of partially manageable to driving you totally insane.

There were ten of them, maybe twenty, walking in a fine delicate line across the counter top as another group of four or five worked mightily on picking apart a flake from a piece of bread in the corner of the windowsill. How’d that crumb get up there? More important, how did those ants get [...]

What if we had a day of no plans at all? What if I just followed the kids from room to room and we spent the day lazing about the house in our jammies? Forget the zoo! Maybe we’d go out later to somewhere simple like the bookstore if we felt like it, but maybe we wouldn’t. For once, we wouldn’t run out the door to make a lesson or an appointment. We wouldn’t try to get dressed and packed and buckled in before it was time for Avery’s nap. We wouldn’t meet friends at the park or run up to the grocery store. We’d just sit in our PJ’s for as long as we felt like it, and do whatever activity struck our fancy.

Every once and a while it happens–you have a moment of absolute clarity that will stick with you for a lifetime, or so you hope anyway because you really do deserve to have your memory serve you well when it comes to a moment of mommy uplift.

I had one of these moments the other day as I was loading my car, in the Target parking lot, full of goodies for my son’s birthday. As I situated the bags of blue-and-yellow construction truck wrapping paper, precurled ribbon to match, and the sunglass-wearing, singing-pig birthday card into the back of my little SUV, I found myself falling into a familiar thought pattern. “How lame I am! Do I have to start every (self-employed) work day late?!” Guilt, disappointment, and feelings of failure bounced around in that crowded head of mine.

The clarity with which I make my decision is stunning. I will absolutely start working out next week. I have to, for God’s sake. My knees. My back. It’s only a matter of time before something gives.