open book open heart

This week has been a daily exercise in frustration. Every day has been so frustrating that the word “frustrating” isn’t quite big enough for the experience. Every simple errand ballooned into 45 splinter errands.  Projects that should have been straight-forward were thwarted by user error and stupidness. Things that were done had to be redone and were poorer for the redoing of them.

I needed to fill a prescription.  Nothing simpler right? But after four trips to the pharmacy, I found myself staring in incredulity at the head pharmacist as he explained to me that after all the chasing around, calling of doctor’s offices, re-verifying that the prescription was legit, they had (“this is SO embarrassing, we don’t know HOW it could have happened”) lost the prescription. So, you know, we’ll be needing to re-see the doctor and start up this particular shenanigan-show all over again next week.

Then, I found myself standing in the paint store while the store manager explained I should have been shaking that particular can of paint upside down.  Upside down?  Really? Does it mention that on the label? No. But that’s how I had screwed up the paint – shook it up right side up, clogged the sprayer, and delayed my painting project by days because of that particular user error.

But my favorite was my eleven-year-old’s fiasco of homework this week. My stupidness gave us an extra day that didn’t exist on a deadline (dang those Mondays off and how they throw me). So we scrambled to get everything turned in a day late. Wait though. In case you are confused… I’m not a mom who micromanages or does my son’s homework. I’m just a mom who understands my son’s limitations and so sets up the structure around the homework-doing.  This was a huge project – 5 pages worth of instructions, 30-50 pages worth of work. He has been working on two to three assignments for it every week for months. We thought we were on top of it and just had a couple of ends to tie up. But no.

Two assignments we thought had been turned in already, two assignments we thought were saved on our computer, weren’t. Because when Joey tried to turn them in, his teacher said they’d been too crumpled up in his backpack. So, she threw them in the garbage. Yeah. So, we had to redo those two. And that made me stomping mad.

BUT!

BUT!

I have this fabulous friend who helped me put things into perspective in one short text message.

More about her… she lives in super-close proximity to me.  She’s a young mom of 5 children under 5, including a particularly rambunctious set of two-year-old twins.  She has been a lifesaver reminding me how to parent two little kiddos because, I forgot!  She’s incredibly self-conscious, unnecessarily so, because she’s fabulous, capable, strong, and beautiful.  She’s had a bad streak of a couple of weeks with first the regular flu and then, on it’s tail, the stomach flu cycling through every one of her seven family members.

After a long night of cleaning throw-up and then listening to me complain, she texted me:

“Well, at least you didn’t brush your teeth with Desitin.”

Because, yeah, she did.

Look!  It’s the #1 choice of moms!

So, that is now my new measure of just how bad things can get.  No matter what, at least I didn’t brush my teeth with Desitin.