“Mom! Hungry!”
My kid peeked around the side of the big office chair in front of the computer to see if I heard her. I am not proud of what happened next. Not in the least.
See, my husband has been away for work for the past 2 ½ weeks and my tolerance is, well, not what it normally is. I keep telling myself that I could have a husband in the military, that I could be a single mom, etc etc and I know I really have nothing to complain about…but it doesn’t change the fact that the infrastructure in our house is built on having two parents. When we drop down to one things are a little stressful.
Anyway. I saw red. I had just had a loud-ish conversation with her teenaged sister (who had been home alone all day and amassed an impressive heap of dirty dishes, food wrappers, and apple cores beside the couch) about how this treating-me-like-the-hired-help thang wasn’t going to continue under any circumstances. I went off like a cannon.
“SERIOUSLY? You’re just going to shout “Hungry!” at me and expect me to jump up and fetch you a snack?!” I stood up and started stomping around, angry-cleaning and waving my arms and yelling and spluttering about how she and her sister were emphatically NOT going to treat me this way and if she thought that announcing that she’s hungry was going to get her the desired result she had another think coming. I went on and on – and I actually got a considerable amount of tidying up done as my tirade continued and I flung shit around. When the living room/dining room was clean and I came back down to earth from berserker-rage-orbit, I finished off with, “DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME??”
No response. Louder:
“SARAH! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME??”
Nothing.
I spun her chair around and was face to face with a perfectly calm, perfectly happy kid. Wearing headphones. The heavy-duty noise-cancelling fancy-schmancy headphones that are usually used for late-night video gaming. She hadn’t heard a word I said.
She looked up at me with her big innocent blue eyes and said, “Yes Mom? Did you say something?”
I sighed.
“What would you like for a snack?”
