BeFrazzled

Ok, am working on a longer, more substantive post, but am too wiped out to put in the necessary thought and effort. Instead, horrifying parent moment 234987254, brought to you by Jane and the fine folks at Taco Bell.

On Mondays, I work late. I tutor a little girl who is truthfully not that bright. Not that she's "not bright," she's just a very, very average student. Whatever. Who cares. On Mondays I work late.

Due to the nature of where I work, the relationship of where I work to where the kids are in school and where we live, and the various times required to travel between the three, I can't pick the kids up from school on Mondays. To do so would require me to bend the laws of space and time, and if I were going to bend the laws of space and time, it would be so that I could spend one night with Johnny Depp, not haul ass to daycare. Ahem.

So, on Mondays, my MIL picks up the girls at school, because she is Awesome Grandma like that. And I know that she does this every Monday, and she knows that she does this every Monday, but every Monday I still call to check and make sure she's going to get them on time. It's just a thing that I do.

Today, I called, and she said yes, of course I'm getting the girls, it's Monday, isn't it? And then she said that she was *thinking* about taking them out somewhere this evening (location irrelevant to this story). The place that they were going to was in another town, and if they had gone, they would have not been home when I got home.

And all the cold, rainy way home from work today, as I watched the windshield wipers flap and listened to tales of economic woe on the radio, you know what one thought kept running through my head?

Please, please, please let them have gone out. Please let the house be empty when I get there. Please. PLEASE.

I may very well be the worst parent in the Western Hemisphere for this one. Not only had I not seen my children all day long, I was actually wishing for them not to be home when I got there. It's gotten to the point that there are times when I don't particularly *like* my children very much.

Don't get me wrong here. I *love* my children. They are the reason I do everything that I do. They are soft and innocent and smell like lotion. They are funny and smart and obnoxious as hell. My kids. I would cheerfully walk through fire for my children, any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

But there are times when the sheer magnitude of having a 2 and a 3 gets me down. Times when the screaming, the biting, the no-ing, the not-sharing, the pickiness, the need-need-need-need-need-iness wear me down to the point of exhaustion. Times when I hope and pray to the invisible gods of motherhood that the house will be empty when I get home, even for just an hour.

And if that makes me a bad mother, then I'll just have to join the club. Maybe we'll make t-shirts.