Friday, April 8, 2011

Am I bipolar or is my life?


[note: slippers were a Christmas present, from my husband, when I'd asked for lingere, 20 years ago. And I keep them -in case he ever forgets.]


Is it still manic depressive when this isn't that untypical a day? Wake up early and get in hot tub with husband. Argue over how best to handle ridiculous traffic charge against eldest driving son (really. they charged him with driving with no insurance because the card in the car was old -which is not an offense and in every state but ours the police can electronically check insurance status -and he had committed no traffic violation) and generally yell at each other over minor scheduling conflicts -because we can I guess. Pack lunch, find ice cream money, explain (again) there is no time to play on his brother's PS3 before school. Strip beds where in the occupants didn't quite make it through the night. Do more laundry (more than I ever imagined at this point in life). Push the pain meds. Answer email. Try to renew the SAS software, spending 1 and 1/2 hours on the phone with the IT guy before discovering I was using the renewal file for the wrong version. Get my hair highlighted -maybe that will help. Try really hard not to cry at the hairdressers since I had to cut my mom off from explaining how she had made all the wrong choices in life and nothing she'd fought for, believed in worked out -or something since the country was clearly going down the tubes, and no, don't try to figure it out. Go to the kindergarten and watch my husband entertain kindergartners by way of showing them the "jobs" different instruments do (this is how desperate our kindergartener's teacher was for a "community helper" volunteer for "community helper" day). Go home and finish trying to run a logistic regression (sounds impressive) to email the non significant p values to a dissappointed researcher, fold laundry, do more laundry. Have a snack of melted brie and walnuts with crackers with my mom while we watch some weird old musical. Make tacos, mistakenly give my mom impression they were done. Have to tell her not yet and then she turns almost in tears from the back pain to go back to bed. The 6 year old follows her and somehow gets his feelings hurt (did she snap at him? I don't know as neither are very clear, both being upset). Think teachable moment and patiently explain about Grandma being in pain but still loving him and he pulls in the tears, marches into her room (with me following to witness touching moment) and he chides her, "Grandma you made me feel bad." I do not blow up but I do whisk him out and put him in "time out" -and then he has a complete melt down and the taco shells burn. Daddy gets home. He explains it's not the little one's job to scold the big ones -and I admit he did a much better job than I did. Besides at this point I'm having a melt down. Dinner was pleasant -maybe because the little one (not scolding of course) did insist everyone pray. Then we had a great game of "The Cat in the Hat Can Do That" (if you're my age you will not have heard of this) and then we folded laundry ( in my mom's room to keep her company) and the second round of pain medicine had kicked in so we were showered with love and kudos as we did. (I should perhaps make it clear that the "we" here does not include any of my children over the age of 6, in case it should sound unrealistically idyllic). For brevity I skipped some parts.

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