Yesterday Sucked

(For the mandatory reporters among my readers: No children were harmed in the making of this post.)

-=-=-=-=-

There is no nice way to put it: yesterday sucked. Which is why I barely posted. I just couldn't believe the sucky factor of it all. We were all completely sleep-deprived because Bud had woken up about every hour from midnight to 5 a.m., four times alone between 4 and 5 a.m. Separation anxiety, nightmares, special bunny falling out of the bed. It was brutal.

By 8 a.m, he had been in timeout three times, which is a record considering it had been a few weeks since he'd had any. Oh, the fighting and crying and whining. From all of us! Even people who called me on the phone could hear in the background how awful it was. We even had several "time-ins" when we try to make it better, explain our feelings, and say sorry or fix it. That didn't work either. Nothing seemed to.

Yep, it was not a pretty parenting day. I'm not usually a mom who bribes, threatens, or even yells, but I did all three yesterday. More than once (well, I think I only actually yelled once, to stop them from breaking a toy, but it was a good one). I hate it when I'm like that and apologized to them for losing my cool almost as soon as it happened. I'm glad yesterday was not our last day on earth, because it sucked.

And then Mama came home and we did our bedtime ritual. But instead of going to sleep or soothing themselves like they usually do, Bud kept crying out and then Sis would ask all sorts of questions when I got upstairs, even though I try not to engage them.

Twenty minutes of this found me weeping in the laundry room, exhausted and mad at the world. Luckily, they finally went to sleep. I know, I know, dear readers, I should feel so lucky that I'm complaining about 20 minutes of restlessness or one bad night of sleep, because many of you have that all the time. I'm spoiled.

I told Mama when I emerged from said laundry room, "You suck. And I hate you." She had been--get this--meditating while I was going up and downstairs (yes, yes, I told her it was okay to do her meditation then, but how was I supposed to know that the kids weren't going to go to sleep??) For the record, I do not actually hate Mama, and she knew I was venting, because we then went on to discuss how those two feelings differ and are not mutually exclusive. Also, in general, I don't like the word "suck" and its connotations, but it was what I was feeling yesterday.

But I digress. Mama hadn't done anything wrong, really, and I was mad at her anyway. It was one of our "I need to be not near you" moments. That free-floating rage that only seems to grab me in its clinches when I am PMSing (ooooh, I know, internalized sexism) really affects everything: dinner wasn't good, the house was messy, nothing was right. But, a new dinner was made, I laughed at the appalling-ness of it all (I can't think of a better word, but that one will do just fine) and my overreaction. Sometimes I am just as funny when I'm angry as Bud is when he furrows his brow like a baby neanderthal and says, "I'm grumpy. I need alone time." I think I just needed a timeout (long before I ended up in the laundry room): 38 (can we round up? My birthday is in two months) minutes of alone time. It really was, for a day with no emergency or real crisis, a crappy day.

And so, Mama started singing, "Oh Crappy Day" to the tune of "Oh Happy Day."

Honestly, that made it all better.