here

Oh this poor little neglected blog. I have lots of partial posts in draft. Things I have started to hammer out on my phone while I'm sitting in parking lots and waiting rooms. One of these days, I will finish them. I want to tell you about Listen to Your Mother and the fabulous weekend it was a part of.

I want to tell you about the marathon I feel like I am running as the school year comes to a close.

I want to tell you about hearing the Bloggess read from her book last weekend.

But alas, it's after 1am already, so I will leave you with this, my latest DC Moms post, my thoughts about Tide's upcoming graduation.

I'll be back. I promise.

LISTEN!

Oh mah gah, you all. Blogger has changed EVERYTHING at once and I'm staring at the page trying to figure out how on earth to type a post. Come on, Blogger! Can't you go with the Facebook Model of Change where you make small but annoying changes every couple of days and then once or twice a year throw a somewhat larger change at us. This all at once nonsense has me running for my pen and paper. (The horror!)

Anyway... if you haven't already heard... and if you have, you've heard a zillion times, so sorry, but here's your zillion and one... this weekend is the DC Listen To Your Mother Show. It's sort of like a poetry slam without the poetry.  It's open mike on motherhood without the open... Or, more accurately, it's a "national series of live readings by local writers in celebration of Mother's Day." (Well, there we go. I could have looked at the website first.)

Fourteen women from the DC area are reading personal essays about motherhood, and specifically, in our show, about the mother as warrior.

It's GOOOOD, internet. It's really good.

If you are in DC, it's on Sunday at 2pm. If you are elsewhere, you might be able to catch it in your city. (Click on Local Shows at the top.)

You can read the story about how I ended up in the audition. I'm not a fan of public speaking. And most of the speaking I do currently is aimed at the windshield, but directed at children behind me. And instead of waxing poetic about motherhood, I'm generally barking at whoever has made us late for whatever we are currently driving to and how *I* feel he or she should better manage his or her time.

So I'm in low-level panic mode right now. I went out dress shopping... oh, hey... the day after someone thought I was pregnant. You can probably guess that that didn't go well. I decided to wear a dress I already own, but buy new shoes and jewelry.

I won an eBay auction for the necklace I want to wear, I paid within minutes of winning and then explained to the seller that I would pay for faster shipping or whatever it would take to get it here before Sunday.

Then she very leisurely waited 3 days before dropping it in regular mail.

Ok then.

Then I picked out a pair of shoes on Zappos. And while I was changing my credit card on file (because HELLO, our number got compromised AGAIN), the shoes SOLD OUT. I kid you not.

So I ordered another pair. And then, a few days later, God bless you, Zappos, I got an email that the original pair was back in stock. And they sent them to me overnight. Because Zappos loves me even if the eBay lady doesn't. (And now now I'm caught in a vortex of indecision about which pair to keep. They're very similar, but one has hooker heels and the other has very practical wedges. Gah.)

Then, I decided that since I don't have a new dress, I won't have the necklace I want, and the shoes are completely flummoxing me, I would take myself to a fancy hair salon and get professional color and a fancy new cut.  It was quite a treat, but of course, I'm having buyer's remorse because I cannot for the life of me get my hair to look anything like how it looked at the salon.

So I'm having a blowout on Sunday morning.

Anyway, Listen to Your Mother is going to kill me! Honestly, I can't wait to just get up there and tell my story and stop worrying about my hair and outfit. (I even thought about getting new glasses... I can only imagine how wrong that would have gone.)

Here's my goals:

Don't barf.
Don't fall.
Tell the crap out of my story.

I'll let you know how it goes.

(If you want to watch previous Listen To Your Mother Shows, check here. This one is one of my favorites. Mine will not be NEARLY as amazing as that.)

epic

Friday was one of those epic days of parenting. The ones where you wonder if your neighbors called social services on you. And then you wonder if they did show up, would you invite them in for some coffee just so you could talk to another adult to for 15 minutes?

When it comes to parenting, we all strive to bring our A game, right?

Oh I try... and fail. On my best day, my kids get my B or C game... dinner is always late, the laundry is never folded, too often there's a screen in front of my face.... but I try. Every night, I force myself to read yet another chapter of the latest Magic Fairy book. I try to listen intently to some incredibly long and detailed monologue about Minecraft, which I think is a computer game. I wait on the bleachers as yet another baseball practice runs way over time.

There are days when I yell too much. And days when I should probably yell more. There's times I snap at the kids when I'm stressed about something else. And times when I order pizza so I can to hang outside and watch them play longer than I should.

But at the end of the day, I'm always trying.

Kids though, are biologically programmed to bring you their Z game. Especially when they're little. Or have special needs. Or it's a day that ends in Y.

They keep it together at school.

And when they get home, all the stress and grouchies and tiredness and feeling incompetent or insecure gets dumped on mom, like a cup full of hot coffee in the McDonald's drive though. It's Z game all the way, baby.

Which, on one hand, is a good thing. My kids can mostly keep it together at school. They may one day actually have jobs where they don't tear things into little pieces when they mess up, or cry when they don't get to go first, or hit a co-worker who butted in line. Hallelujah, right?!

On the other hand, it SUUUUUUCKS.

We do all the scut work in this gig. We feed, wipe, dress, tuck, coddle, pester, encourage, support and drive (omg, do we drive) only to have someone else get the precious A game that WE TAUGHT THEM.

WE TAUGHT THEM HOW TO BEHAVE. And they go off and do it at school and then they come home and crap all over us.

And that's part of the contract.

That mythical contract that none of us read before we signed. (It was in that first set of forms at the OB-GYNs office. Right after you declined the chicken pox titer but just before you got your complimentary copy of Fit Pregnancy magazine.)

So that was my Friday afternoon.

An absolute Best. Of.  Shout's. Z. Game.

And I lost it. I flipped. I couldn't take it any more.

I saw her Z game and I raised her one.

It was right after she tried to kick down the bathroom door while I was taking a shower. The door that just got fixed two weeks ago from the LAST TIME she tried to kick it down.

Remind me next week, internet... Friday afternoons are bad. They are the culmination of too many days in a row of A game performance. I need to get out the cushions, put on a helmet and load up the fridge with a box of chardonnay.

I bet it was a mother who invented Happy Hour.