A Written Excuse

Dear Nagging Feelings of Guild and Aggravation:

I didn’t post last week because I had stomach flu and for four days I was either lying on the couch trying to sleep, trying to choke down a saltine cracker, or lunging for the bathroom. Then, once I felt marginally human again, I decided to follow my very hopeful program of taking real care of myself, and I took it comparatively easy….

Also, my sister sent me 30 lbs. of organic raspberry granola, and I stared at it like a deer in the headlights for statistically significant parts of five days thinking:

a) 30 lbs of granola?
b) I do like raspberries
c) 30 lbs of granola?
d) How am I going to store all of that?
e) If this is what didn’t fit in her pantry, how the heck much granola did she buy?
f) Maybe I should haul my cramping self over the computer and look up granola recipes.
g) 30 lbs of granola?…

Then there was the excessive mothering part of my week. The Doodler is in honors Algebra and will be having a placement test for high school math at the end of this week. His math teacher, otherwise a very sensible person, has gone completely insane, and assigned a 2-foot high stack of review packets on everything they’ve been learning for the last year. They are expected to work through several inches of it every night, and the Doodle was getting frustrated and behind and starting to want to avoid math.

Enter Math Mommy, who picked up a new battery-operated pencil sharpener on a trip to the store for Kaopectate and sat down every night to work through the math worksheets with him. Relearning multiple uses of the quadratic formula and revisiting a childhood nightmare in which I was unable to factor equations because I missed that week in school, was really hard on my ego, as well as on my dramatic skills, i.e. faking being utterly delighted and calm over math things I haven’t visited for a period of time measured in decades. Not only did my mouth feel chalky, but my brain felt pretty well calcified, too.

And that was just the after-dark mothering component. During the day, I got to deal with masculine and feminine versions of teenage moodiness, which I think is now called “being emo”, and Spawn having a temper surge so excessive that I’ve made an appointment for him to go talk to a third party about anger management. It took some mighty snappy maternal footwork to de-escalate that situation and show the kids how grownups deal with situations that are worrisome without stressing anyone out.

I had a good Mother’s Day, though. Got some nice, modest plunder, hubs cooked and herded the kids around, everyone was either nice to me or not making much noise, and I only spent 4 hours with Doodle doing math worksheets. Just enough to warm up the brain cells! I also watched a marathon of “Deadliest Catch” in spells with hubs. Reality shows like that one remind me that life could be worse, and wetter, and involve a lot of things that pinch and smell funny.

I feel fine now, and I’m ready to get back to it. Oh, by the way, do you have any recipes involving granola?

Affectionately,
BoS