It never fails

I realize in my life that I might create a little drama of my own from time to time, and if you ask one of my dear friends at work he’ll tell you I’m a drama queen, but, what I have discovered in my life recently is that I may not be the creator of all of my drama, unfortunately someone close to me – be it husband, ex, mother, children or dogs, and if it’s close enough you get sucked in like a vortex of emotion and bad acting. In addition to that, when the drama does come on, it’s not a trickle from a stream; it doesn’t come up and ask, “Hey, is this a good time for me to tweak your world for a bit?” No, it hits you like a bad storm – wave after wave of mind numbing information and emotion that you must process and react to instantly and, with as much tact and grace as you possibly can.


Case in point – This last week was supposed to slow down for us a little bit, we had finished off March Madness with a bang, no more Jr. NBA for the younger child and no more high school games for the older one. I was truly excited about this because it was going to give me my Friday nights and Saturday’s back – I for some reason volunteered to run the Snack Bar for all of the home games, it started off innocent enough just for the Volleyball season that somehow moved into basketball, and then for both the women and men’s teams, then for the elementary kids on Saturday as well. I digress. For some reason my husband and I decided it was the right time to put our puppy into obedience training, not really for obedience but for the social skills they get from playing with other well mannered dogs and the only date available that was convenient for the both of us was….you guessed it Saturday. In the middle of all of that the younger daughter loves softball, and for reasons unknown to anyone that doesn’t love softball that means we have to be at games on Tuesday’s, Thursday’s and of course Saturday’s, sometimes all 3 in one week too. Her first game was supposed to be when? Of course this last Saturday, But that’s not really where the chaos begins, this is just a little taste of what it’s like to have too many things up in the air all the time and only one adult that remembers all of the families schedules mostly in her brain but sometimes does have the forethought to put on paper or a Yahoo shared calendar. The chaos started on Monday when my loving husband called accusingly asking why the teenage was still in bed, I being a responsible parent thought desperately as to why the kid might be home at 1:30 on a Monday afternoon for the life of me couldn’t think of ANY GOOD reason, on top of that I leave so much earlier than the kids do that I couldn’t even tell him if she had gotten up to go to school or had just stayed home completely. Come to find out, there were parent/teacher conferences and she had half days all week before spring break, Monday night school meeting, Tuesday night School meeting, Wednesday I’m sure there was something but I completely shut down Wednesday evenings, just to have one evening of downtime. Thursday I couldn’t quite get up the energy to actually physically go to work so I stayed in my jammies and took conference calls from home all day, until (queue scary music) my grandmother calls to inform me that we will be moving Easter dinner to my house because my aunt who recently had hip surgery had some sort of infection and would need to go back into the hospital to get it cleared up. Then when my husband gets home from work he tells me Tara – our older dog had a hard time getting up this morning and limped around for a little bit before he left for work. By the time the evening was over, the dog couldn’t walk, my aunt couldn’t walk and I was feeling rather helpless on all fronts. Friday morning starts out with a trip to the hospital for my aunt and off the Vet for us. Updates for both parties happened around the same time, Auntie is fine, just a superficial infection at the incision she won’t need to have the hip replaced again (not that I knew that was on the table until someone had mentioned it after the fact), the dog seems to have pulled a muscle or slipped a disc in her back and needs to be on “bed rest” for the next week, along with taking an anti-inflammatory. I thought about this after the fact – how do you put a dog on bed rest? It’s not like they realize that what they’re doing is what’s hurting them, they just know they’re hurt. Saturday rolls around and the dog is worse, mostly our fault, I figured since we didn’t take any walks or go to the dog park we were doing ok – another trip to the Vet and they stress that we’re going to need to keep her crated as much as possible for the next week and absolutely no playing with the puppy! By this time we’re exhausted, I have to get my house clean for 35 people the next morning and I’m thinking good God it never fails. Just once I would like to have a weekend that didn’t revolve around trying to catch up from things that didn’t get cared for over the week, or trying to find new ways to resolve some random problem. To make a long story longer, we did mange to get the house cleaned, My Aunt made it home from the hospital in time to celebrate Easter with us personally and after a week the dog is starting to move a little smoother. As I’m easing into the end of the week I’m hoping that maybe this weekend will be just a little bit slower, I’m not really expecting it but would love to be surprised by it.