BadMommy comes back

Things here have been going pretty well lately, or so I thought. But today, all my hard-fought-for self-control went straight out the window.

It all started at midnight. The girls have developed some sort of sudden virulent summer cold thing, and the snot and The Cough are back with a vengeance. So the two of them spent the entire night, both of them, in my bed. Awake. Coughing, sniffling, asking for kleenex, water, covers, etc. So, a good night's sleep was out of the question.

Oddly enough, when I woke up this morning, Tank wasn't wearing any pants. Or underwear. I swear she had them on when we went to sleep... nowhere to be found this morning. Until we went into the living room. Where she had apparently gone in the middle of the night, pulled out my whole bag of nail polish and files, etc., peed on the couch, taken of the wet pants and left them in the middle of the floor, and come back to bed, all without waking anyone up. In the pitch dark, mind you.

Then, too, we woke up a little later than I had hoped, and the time it took to breakfast, clean, shower, and get ready for the Bear's soccer game was really tight. Let's not get me started on how I feel about three-year-olds playing soccer. She hates it. I hate it. It was all my MIL's idea. She just stands there on the field looking miserable the whole time. Which pisses me off. So I sit there, steaming, the whole time, wishing we could just call it quits. It doesn't help that my in-laws are sitting next to me, calling out helpful things like, "Run, Bear!" "Go for the ball, Bear!" "Come on, Bear!" when it's painfully obvious that she doesn't want to do any of those things.

Then, too, I had made tentative plans yesterday with a newish friend from work. Nothing earth-shattering: a garage sale and a trip to the beach. I forgot, of course, about the game, inconveniently timed so as to conflict with the garage sale. I overlooked, too, the fact that the garage sale, while relatively close to my new apartment and work, is a million miles away from my current location. By the time the game was over, the kids were changed, and we were ready to go, we wouldn't have gotten there til noon, which is way past the prime of any good garage sale. Not to mention the price of gas and the thought of spending two hours in the car with Things One and Two. Not an appealing prospect. So, needless to say, I didn't get to go.

And the thing that really grated on me is that my friend was all about making tentative plans and seeing where the day led. Which is all fine and dandy for the single among us, but as any mom will tell you, it's all about the schedule. I can't do this whole freewheeling, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants stuff. I need concrete times and plans so that I can work around the girls' schedule. So I was frustrated by that, too, but it's not the kind of thing that you can explain to someone who doesn't live that kind of life, so I just backed out and left it at that.

And then my MIL is pissing me off in so many innumerable ways I can't even explain. It's like now that she knows we're leaving, she doesn't feel the need to hold back on what she really thinks about me. Which is obnoxious to the nth degree, even though I kind of get where she's coming from. That doesn't mean I don't want to give her a piece of my mind about 2348901 times a day, though.

And Husband has been traveling for work a lot lately. Like, A Lot. Like, they only let him come for three days at a time between trips. And it's going to last all summer. Not that it should bother me, since I won't be here, but it's still very frustrating in ways I can't quite explain. I miss him, and I'm lonely.

Whatever. That's a lot of lame excuses for the fact that I can't control my temper very well. And my kids are the ones who end up paying the price.