Someone recently asked me something like, how do I turn a bad day around? An excellent question, I said. But I didn't have an answer, I think I rambled on for pages about how every day is a bad day and I try to get out of the house occasionally. I don't remember. My head has a train moving back and forth through it.
Anyway, yesterday I learned the definitive and comprehensive truth that some days really are bad, terrible even. But to frame it off, you should first imagine me sitting at my dining room table, in the pleasant Sunday after church glow, enjoying a glass of wine with friends, when one child comes up to tattle on another child and you find your husband leap up, go into the kitchen, and shout down the stairs, “what kind of poop is it? Hey, I'm talking to you! What kind of poop is it? Is it fresh? Is it dry? Hey!” And then a posse of kids come tumbling up the stairs to provide their various answers.
Then on Monday you go have a tooth filled and think, you know what I need? I need to make a lot of food I've never made before. And I need to wander all over town with a swollen jaw, looking for stuff that I wouldn't recognize if it smacked me in the face. Then, instead of coming home and making the food, you come home and watch four episodes of Good Eats and go to sleep. But while you're sleeping you realize that something is wrong. Badly wrong.
However you turn in bed, every single which way, there is a smell from which you cannot escape. It is every where. Everywhere. Everywhere. Around three am you do admit that it is the dog. Around five am you face facts that it is definitely poop. At seven you awknowledge that you have slept all night next to a dog and his poop and you finally struggle out of bed and give him a comprehensive bath in which you manually remove amounts of poop from him. You scrub yourself from head to toe and feel violated. You decide not to work out, possibly ever again. You make yourself an egg and hope that the day will get better. You try to exorcise the aura of poop by painting your nails red. Your husband says, and I quote him, “our blog should be called The Poop Driven Life, because that's how it really is.”
Now you might think that starting your day depooping a dog would automatically make it a bad day. But as I said, almost every day can be a bad day, if you have your head on straight, and so my bar for bad days was too high and I didn't get the message. I pulled myself together. I began our school day. I opened my mother's King James Bible to Proverbs 2 and began to read. And the door bell rang.
And from thence on, every.single.time.I.sat.down.to.speak.the.doorbell.rang. You think I'm exaggerating? If it wasn't the doorbell it was the phone. I seriously considered describing every interruption in detail but then I realized it would make this too long. People would begin to drop off from the trauma and exhaustion. By noon I was so exasperated that I gave up. I completely and totally gave up.
And let me just say, I almost never give up. When my school day starts to go sour, I usually dig in my heals, tighten my angry jaw, and plow through, no matter how much yelling ensues. That's how I accidentally finished school six weeks early. The thing about homeschooling is, You Can't Give Up. You can't. If you do, you will eventually fail. But yesterday, even the prospect of failure in no way equalled the devastation and ruin of having six children repeatedly run to the door just the moment you had got them settled. Interspersed with phone calls.
So I started making pho (I won't pretend to know how to say it) and nems, and something else whose name has escaped me–marinated pork and picked vegetables. After four hours I had managed to turn out the pho and nems and was forced to shove the pork in the fridge for later. So great was my level of defeat that I commanded the babies to go watch tv, whatever it is. Go watch Jerry Springer, is what I think I said. But I guess I was saved because I don't think it exists any more.
And then I layed everything out. And Matt and I drank wine and watched the kids mess it around in bowls and spread it on the floor and vaguely complain and finally go away, only to return 45 minutes later to say they were starving and could they eat bread.
No you cannot eat bread! Wretched offsring. You can be grateful for all that The Lord has delivered into your wide complaining mouth. I guess that's what he was probably trying to say to me.
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