Yesterday All My Troubles Seemed so Right Damn Here: Another Tale from the Underbelly of Motherhood

Yesterday was a fairly crappy day.

The landlord showed up (for no discernible reason) in his top hat, twirling his handle bar mustache, Little Nell (played by Boy 2) immediately got stressed at the sight of him, and I can't say that the rest of us took his presence any better. Apparently, he can circumnavigate the peaceable living laws and show up whenever he wants because it's a shared yard duplex. Unfortunately, we had people over both nights of last weekend (Sunday-Monday is our weekend and he showed up on Tuesday which is our Monday morning and he arrived just before I was going to clean the yard) so the yard looked like a cross between the aftermath of a frat party and the basement of a daycare.

He wasn't pleased to say the least. It literally took me ten minutes to have the entire thing in ship-shape order, but tidy people do not realize how quickly a deluge of debris can be contained. He decided that the rocking chair on the front porch and the three newspapers in the drive way looked too messy so they were loaded into his truck and taken to a land-fill, I assume. The Man didn't ask me if I cared whether or not the rocking chair that I rocked my first born in was assigned to the rubbish heap for its one broken spindle. Luckily, I don't really care, but I would have liked to have been consulted on the matter.

The trickle down stress meant that The Man yelled at me, and Little Nell got angry and kicked a hole in the wall. Cue more stress. The Man fixed the wall and went to work, leaving us swimming in a swamp of swearin', stressin', and screamin'.

Eventually, I abandoned the island and popped to the neighbors for a minute to pick up half the contents of her crock pot. As we had fed her family the night before, she was going to feed my family that night. While I was basking in the wanna-be-hippie-faux-compound-casserole-sharing-love of it all, douche-bags one and two took about fifteen unsupervised minutes to let things denigrate into a Lord of the Flies type scenario, and they beat up their friend. When I returned and found him crying and on his way home, I completely lost any faith that I had in our ability to ever be nice or normal.

Apparently their friend has a big heart because all was forgiven by the end of the day.  

After a seemingly interminable crappy day, bedtime finally rolled around and we cuddled up until they fell asleep. I realize certain people still subscribe to the notion that if you lie with your children at bedtime, they will never learn how to go to sleep by themselves. A) Let's keep in mind that axiom was derived from a society that is sleep deprived and addicted to sleep aids. For thousands of years prior to the arrival of that crazy notion, babies were soothed to sleep. B) Maybe those people are nicer than me because after a day of being a total bitch, I love to know that we can share one moment of peace, and it gave me a chance to apologize and Little Nell a chance to say, "I love you, Mommy. Tomorrow will be a better"

The only redeeming thing about yesterday is that it was another testament to the children's and my ability to transgress upon and forgive each other a limitless number of times in a day.