Cheers

Sometimes my life feels like an unevenly written sit-com. I think if anyone could witness what happens once I pick up the kids from school, if anyone were to shadow me as a me-in-training, they'd either be astonished that I was sane or would be selling my life to a producer. Or both. But at least I would have someone else with whom I could laugh or cry or shake my head in amazement or hang my head in despair. Or drink.

At the moment, after my first day back to work in a week and my first day picking up kids from school in as long, I think I may not survive this parenting thing.

My eldest daughter now has a "boyfriend" (I'm putting it in quotes so it seems, to me anyway, less real). She has "kissed" him "a couple of times" but they're "taking it slow." She is 12 and a half. Almost.

Did you like the kissing? I want to know, hoping against hope that she did not.
She did, sorta. Did he? He seemed to, she says. "In fact, he just smiled afterwards, like he didn't have a care in the world."

I wish I could say the same of me.

It's not even 6pm. I'm having a glass of wine. It seems to have helped. I think this is a bad pattern. The wine-drinking and the boyfriend kissing. Both bad, so young in life.

I'm trying to slice garlic for dinner, now - after realizing that a head (not a clove, a head) of garlic was missing from the fridge and had been put in daughter #1's desk drawer for her private snacking (which may, actually, solve the boyfriend kissing problem). And daughter #2 tag-teams the pre-teen announcements with her own emergency:

"Mom, there's a big problem with my room." She looks like she may cry.

"What is it?" I ask, thinking maybe more plutonium has been found, like that last time.

"I don't have any hanging files."

This is what happens when you add hanging files to one daughter's desk and not the other's.

"Hmm. That is a problem," I agree (because the wine is already making me agreeable) "But," I explain, "We can't have hanging files until we find those 2 metal bars that go in the bottom desk drawer. You need those to hang the files on, and I have no idea where they are."

"Or," I stupidly muse out loud, "we could make something to go there and hold the files."

So for your entertainment, you can guess what I'll be doing after dinner:

a) sleeping, because I wake up at 3:45am every work day, and one glass of wine will knock me on my butt

b) figuring out a way to make faux hanging-file-bar-things, because it's only fair, and besides, my second daughter's problem is easier to face than my first daughter's latest development

c) offering more raw garlic to daughter #1

d) sending both kids to bed early so I can lose myself in an intellectually pointless episode of Friends. You know, the TV series that the rest of America watched 15 years ago

e) gloating over having written a blog post

f) all of the above

Cheers.