It has been one of those days.
Those days that start hours before the alarm to get the kids ready for school goes off. When you hear one baby crying for you and the other coughing in her bedroom, surely sick and needing to stay home from school.
The ones when you walk into your baby’s room and the smell of urine smacks you in the face at the same instant you feel three little Legos impale the sensitive arch in your right foot like shards of broken glass.
That’s the kind of day it was.
When at breakfast, your previously urine soaked baby screams louder and more shrilly than the thousands of Justin Beiber teenyboppers you were surrounded by with your oldest daughter at the concert last night.
The kind of day when there is no Excederin left in the medicine cabinet, and your 2-year-old has just dropped an entire bowl of milk and Cheerios across the freshly swiffered dining room floor and then decides to take that moment to do an ice skating piroutte, fit for the Olympics, landing nose first into the corner of the wall. And you have to stop yourself from thinking that at least it got the baby to shut up.
That day when your husband is at work on his third 14-hour double shift in a row, and you are stuck in the house with no transportation and three children demanding snacks and fighting over what cartoon to watch — when you start counting down the hours until bedtime before 9 a.m.
It was one of those kinds of days.
That kinda day when naptime finally rolls around and after struggling to get your baby down in his crib, he is awoken minutes later by your screaming toddler as you bring her upstairs to put her down for her nap.
It’s that day when you suddenly realize you cannot remember the last time you showered as you look down at your two napless two-year-olds, and see that while you were reheating your coffee for the third time, they had gotten into the garbage and were now putting pieces of sticky banana peel in each other’s hair.
That’s the type of day it’s been.
The one where I snap at my kids too often. I curse under my breath. I ask myself how I have made it this far as a mother. I question not how I will make it through the rest of the day, but even the next half an hour.
That’s the day I’m dealing with it.
But as I finally sit down after this hell of a day, I realize that I made it. It’s over. My kids are still healthy, and taken care of. We are safe and provided for. And I remind myself that these kind of days are going to happen. And they’ll drive me to the brink of insanity again and again. But I’ll make it through each one of them. And I’ll have good days that outnumber these.
Who knows… maybe tomorrow will be one of those days.