There is no milk in my house.
I haven’t been home lately. Even when I have been physically in the house, I have been working, working, working. Otherwise, I’ve been flying in circles, running around keeping clients happy, making the data behave, making it all look easy and effortless, even without luggage.
And then I get home again, and there’s no frigging milk. And the baby is just not right. And my bed is comfy, but there’s a whole lot more room between Brian and I in it than I remember. And my desk? It is buried.
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We were grounded yesterday morning. Literally stuck on the ground at O’Hare for 4 hours or so. First there were delays at LaGuardia, so they wouldn’t let us out. Then when they were ready to let us out, the onboard computer broke. Then something else broke. Then it all got fixed and we were on our way, 4 hours after our original departure time.
The silver lining was the fact that we had been upgraded to first class. They still feed you in first class. And if you’re the guy in the front seat, serve you 4 Bloody Marys. If you’re the guy next to me, you’re just plain nasty anyway.
But I did get some work done while I was stuck in my cushy seat.
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Abby is just not right. She’s really cry-ey and anxious. Some of this is typical three-year-old stuff. The “I can do it!” And the screaming frustration when she can’t, in fact, “Do it MYSELF!”
But the hour-long crying jags? The refusal to move or get dressed or finish her medicine? The willful disobedience while inconsolably crying, as if the only way she can control her world is to just freeze up inside it? That’s not typical. And that’s not my Abby.
After 60 gruesome minutes of screaming back and forth with her father, mother and grandmother, all of whom are on edge ourselves, I ended up just sitting and rocking and holding her on my lap and crying inconsolably into her hair. I think I shocked her with my own tears of frustration, because she got very quiet and her eyes got very wide. And when my tears stopped, hers started up again, only this time there was fear. She was afraid she had broken Mommy.
I promised her that I wasn’t broken. I apologized for the screaming. I told her how sad I was that I was rougher than I needed to be when she ran out of time getting herself dressed and I needed to forcibly pull up her pants. Auntie Jan handed her a baggie of fruit snacks for the car since she had screamed through breakfast. I zipped up her coat, gave her a kiss and told her to be good at school.
And this time, she flew away from me.
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I’m pretty sure we’ll all become grounded again soon.
