The Snapping Point
My husband's been in Hartford all week. He left at 4:30 on Monday morning to make a 6 am flight. He gets home around 6 tonight. I'm going to make it.
All week, I've vascillated between really nice, easygoing mother and snarling hellbear. I'm really trying, seriously, but somehow going from midnight bedtimes on vacation to the first week of fourth grade was not an easy transition, especially not when the week kicked off with a bored child home all day Monday and Tuesday while I was working. At this point, we're bouncing off each other like pinballs.
This morning, we both had a hard time getting going. We got up on time to make the bus, but considering how she was lying like a sloth in her bed (I couldn't get her to go to sleep last night until 10) and the fact she needed to take a very heavy package of copier paper in to school (school supplies, right!), I decided to just drive her in.
We bounced off each other a little more getting through breakfast and getting dressed and getting into the car, and I felt my inner pressure rising with the ache in my shoulders and neck that has resisted stretches, Asparcreme, a heating pad, a massage chair and a Theracane this week. We made it to school with two minutes to spare, and I told her to take the paper. She has a Trapper Keeper-equivalent binder this year in her backpack, and a thing of water, and it IS heavy, and the paper IS also heavy, but she only had to go about 40 yards to get to the office to drop off the paper.
But she wanted me to carry it in. There was a car behind me, and I could see those perfect kids telling their mother they loved her and eyeing us with disgust.
"I can't. There's a car behind me. Take your stuff and close the door." Vicki the Sebring is a two-door car. I can't reach the handle from the driver's seat when the passenger door is open, and she knows this. The car behind me was still there.
"I need you to carry the paper. It's too heavy."
"There's a car behind me. Shut the door. You need to carry it. You can make it."
"No, I need you to ..."
And I lost it.
"SHUT THE DOOR. SHUT THE DOOR. SHUT THE DOOR. THERE IS A CAR BEHIND ME."
She stared at me with barely concealed rage. She bumped the door helplessly a few times with her hip, then when she saw the cold fury in my eyes, she finally got it bumped enough where I could reach it. The other car was still behind me, at this point likely texting all her friends about the idiot in the convertible in front of her who couldn't even get her fourth-grader to carry a package of paper half a block into a school building with one minute until the bell rang.
I pulled out of the drop-off line, freeing the minivan behind me. My girl hunched down on the ground, considering. I could tell she was waiting to see if I would come and save her, and I thought about it, then the fury sort of bubbled up again at all the things she'd asked me to do this week that she could and should do herself. It's not too much to ask a perfectly healthy nine-year-old to lug both a loaded backpack and a package of copier paper to a building, right? I didn't even make her take it on the bus. Finally, she picked it up and lugged it into the school, looking back once with laser eyes, though I don't think she saw me from where I'd pulled in to make sure she didn't just leave the paper there on the sidewalk.
All the way home, I vascillated, as I have all week, between feeling bad for her and guilty as a mom for yelling so much this week and feeling bad for me and guilty as a person for not taking better care of myself so I'm not at such loose ends and yelly. I'm not happy that she has gone to bed so late all week -- despite starting the bedtime process by 7:30 most nights -- so that there was almost no time for myself in the evenings. I'm not happy that I haven't succeeded in fixing my back yet. I'm not happy that instead of writing for the hour I wanted to last night, I only made it twenty minutes -- the one thing I wanted to do for myself, and I couldn't even make it halfway there. I'm also not happy that I can't seem to be successful at something I know all kinds of people do every single day -- parent by themselves and hold down a job and a household at the same time. I mean I got there -- I made all the meals, I washed all the dishes, I emptied the litter box and paid the bills and took out the trash and mowed the lawn and did the laundry -- but everything I did was half-assed and jumbled and negotiated around with my pinball twin, who also vascillates between being a really helpful and cheerful angel and a sullen tween whose only vocabulary word is "wait" whenever I ask her to do something.
In the end, I think it would've been easier to just park and carry the copier paper in myself. It certainly would have been faster. But me, stupid me, just needed to be obeyed for once this morning. At the end of the drive, I realized that was all it was. Even though I know it's not a contest, this morning I just needed to win one.
I'm not very proud of that.