Is it only Wednesday?

In my carefree youth I did a brief stint as a secretary at an architectural firm. It was a super-traditional, old-fashioned place where there was no voice mail and if you called you had to talk to a receptionist (i.e. me) before being connected with anyone else in the office. Several of the architects and draftsmen were fathers of young children, and their wives would call, it seemed like, several times a day, asking in pitiful tones of voice to speak to their husbands.

What is wrong with those women? I'd fume to A, reclining on the couch in our peaceful apartment after a grueling eight-hour workday, gazing forward into a long evening of doing whatever the hell I wanted. Can't they go eight hours without talking to their husbands? Can't they just deal with whatever it is and leave their husbands alone at work?

The past few days I have become familiar with the taste of those words as I've eaten them over and over and over again.

There are colds here all around and ear infections on babies, and several nights this past week I swear Iris hasn't slept more than a half hour at a stretch. During this afternoon's desperate phone call to the husband, I suggested in a pretty serious tone of voice that a good solution would be for me to go back to work full time, and also for me to move out of our house to someplace where I can be by myself. For, like, six years.

Crazy as that sounds, I don't think I'm actually depressed. I think I just don't like sitting on the floor all morning, holding a cranky baby, trying in vain to satisfy toddler of my interest in the day's fifth reassembly of the Wonder Foam Giant USA Map Puzzle. While exhausted. And unable to breathe through my nose.

Thank you for all of your sweet delurkitudes on the last post. Eight bucks for Moms Rising. Nine if Emmie follows through on her offer to moon me, which I think would be a perfect way to perk up the mood this week. Don't you?