A few times I lost my shit recently

For old times' sake

I was talking with a newer mom yesterday about how, now that I have a kid almost in high school, I feel less shocked about my status as a mother and am in fact kind of used to it by this point—and whether that is bad for my creativity. Complacency!

But never fear, I still got it, baby. Here were a few instances in the last week where I just couldn’t take the bullshit and, as one of my kids’ former educators once amusingly put it, used my loud voice:

• When the younger kid would not stop arguing and talking back over things that should not be debates. Like how he should not go check on whether his brother was actually doing homework in case he was possibly doing something fun instead. Or why, after two instances of finishing-projects-in-a-hurry-due-to-poor-planning he should take his school binder out to check it every night including that very night.

  • In fact he muttered “Be quiet” to me when I was unspooling a very rational litany of why we need to stop with the last-minute-projects thing. Be quiet. To me!

• When same kid was messing with the dog by getting out all the dog toys (which live in the kitchen) to wave in the dog’s face while I was cooking dinner. I told him to put the toys back and he did with this sort of energy:
  

  

  So I dramatically dumped all the dog toys on the floor and told him to try it again.

• When I subsequently took my dinner to eat alone in the basement to calm down and I saw a mouse and lost my shit one more time.

• When the older kid (so you don’t think I play favorites) got home after the cleaning people had been over. Cleaning up all our shit —sometimes literally— before they get here is exhausting and I also tip a lot for their trouble. Said child took his shoes off directly in front of the door when he got home and closed the door so not only were they on the floor, I couldn’t open the door all the way.
  
  “Paul?” I yelled.
  “What?” he asked from his room.
  “COME DOWN HERE NOW!” I yelled.
  “What??” he yelled back.

  🔥🔥🔥🔥COME DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  I gently said. And asked him to put his shoes on the shoe rack next to the door.

Anyway, I don’t like losing my shit. It’s taxing and then you have to apologize after and it’s a whole thing. But it still happens sometimes, even to the best of us.

If you need to get a few amusing shit-losing moments off your chest the comments are open.

And if you appreciate having this space to talk about how it’s normal to lose our shit and put ourselves in time out be a pal:

(Especially because soon I’m going to be putting out the call for paid subscribers to send me their ads for our classifieds section! Free subscribers can contribute in the comments but the true heads get placement in the email that goes out to over 25K people.)

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One witchy thing