You know it’s going to be a rough day when you wake up at 7am and it’s supposed to be 6am.
The difference between 6am and 7am is a calm, quiet cup of kid-less coffee.
6am means there is no one at your door, there is a quiet moment for email and Hollywood Gossip and you gets a chance to wake up.
At 7am there is none of that.
7am means you jump out of bed, you chug half your cup of coffee before forgetting about it, and you have kids begging for breakfast before you have a chance to properly respond to the snotty email you have sitting open on your computer.
Who sends snotty emails at 7am anyway?
And yes that is a pounding headache you have. A gift in the morning for forcing yourself into rush mode.
Waking up at 7am means you never had time to respond to the snotty email and instead will fester over it all morning until the kids are gone at school and you can properly address it.
You ignore the computer, jump right into the morning breakfast ritual and before you know it you are shoving kids out the door with backpacks to catch the bus.
Wait!
You rush after them to sign their homework logs because somehow you’ve found yourself in a school system that requires you to sign off on homework or your kids suffer the consequences.
Why do I have homework?
You take your pounding head back into the house and rally the preschoolers for their drive to school and the rest of the day? It goes to Hell in a hand basket.
Children spit half chewed string cheese all over your floor. They chip dry wall off of your fire place during nap time because they’re bored. They poop, they pee, they spill. You miss deadlines, your head still hurts and you are irritable and barely hanging on at the end of the day. Never mind that stupid email. You don’t have time to fight strangers online today.
When it’s bed time you yell upstairs to your kids to get their pajamas on while you clean the kitchen. You shout for them to brush their teeth and get in bed. And when you go upstairs to tuck them in you find they have ignored all of your ‘get ready for bed’ instructions and are in fact still playing games.
You will say, “Excuse me! I asked you to get your pajamas on and head to bed” and the children will not budge.
“It’s TIME for bed!”
Again they will not blink, they will not move, they will absolutely ignore you and you can’t help but flash forward 8 years to a group of teenagers with an utter lack of respect for the mother who has given them quite literally, everything. You will know if you don’t nip this behavior now, you risk forever losing any kind of control over them. They will think you are a joke. You will become the Mom they tell to shut-up in front of their friends.
The rush of the horrible day coupled with this flash of the horrible future will send you into that horrible octave of yelling, just above “lunacy”, that scares every living being in the house, including yourself.
You will scream something about respect. You will scream something about refusing to be ignored. You will scream about how you will not be treated like you are invisible by your own children in your own house. You will scream about how you don’t even like screaming, but by God you will not be disrespected and if they can’t hear you ask them to get up and get ready for bed than YOU WILL MAKE THEM HEAR YOU!!!!
The children will cry and rush themselves to their beds in their jeans and dirty shirts.
Afraid of you.
And you will stomp back downstairs hating yourself. You will clean your house vigorously at 9 o clock at night because good Moms clean and they control themselves and they don’t let the accumulative crummy day and disrespectful children push them over the edge.
Before going to bed you will crawl over to your kids to hug them goodnight. They feel bad about not listening to you and you will ask them to do better tomorrow. You will feel bad about yelling so loud and you will promise to do better too.
Tomorrow will be a better day.
You will start it at 6am instead of 7am.
At least now it’s sparkling clean.