This post is long and tells the story of my last 2 days, which were equally as long

Don’t you love how life keeps you on your toes? That’s sarcasm. I hate it.

The last 48 hours have tested my patience and ability to cope with shit going wrong. Heads up… I’m not good at it.

On the mental stability front, I have good days and bad days. I feel like a broken record and sort of like a failure that I just can’t kick this, but putting on a show and pretending everything is just fine is not my strong suit.

I have days when I just can’t seem to keep up, where I escape to the TV and it takes everything to not breakdown and cry. Those days where my brain just won’t shut off, what ifs win over rational thinking and nothing I do is good enough. But I do have good days. Days when I don’t feel so weighted down by my thoughts and worries and feel like I can actually function. When brushing my teeth and putting on deodorant aren’t chores that drain me.

Tuesday was a good day. I put on pants without an elastic waist- button and zipper. Our tax refund had been deposited and I was feeling like I could breathe. I got my haircut, brought the dog to the groomer and made a dentist appointment for the whole family. I couldn’t be stopped. I was getting shit done. My biggest worry besides the regular I need to find a way to make more money, I’d like to lose weight, and what’s for dinner was finding a suitable costume for my daughter’s musical. I was going about my business, attempting to dye white fabric blue in my washing machine.

Then life decided to kick my ass in the dirt and see what I was made of.

As if the Universe had a direct line into my bank account balance and it wanted to get its hands on my small cushion, my washing machine stopped working. Specifically, stopped draining while full of blue dye water, thus spewing  blue dirty broken machine bit water all over my laundry room.

I composed myself, cleaned up the mess and handled the situation.

(see: called my dad and asked if he knew anything about fixing washing machines. Which he did not. Which, if you know my dad, means that he would come over and try and figure it out, get totally pissed off and frustrated while cursing, slamming tools and yelling about what a piece of shit my washing machine was and that they just don’t make them like they used to.)

He got it to drain and, even though it was making an odd squeally sound and my gut knew that it was on its last leg, we called it “fixed enough” and hoped for a little more life out of it.

I went to run some errands and came home to a dark living room and a TV that wouldn’t turn on. Surprisingly, I was still in a good, I can handle this state of mind. I went down to check the fuse box. Flipped a switch and everything was good. Full well knowing and ignoring that there was likely an underlining reason that the circuit went out. But at that point, I just wanted my TV on.

After dinner, the circuit blew again. Seemed that I couldn’t keep ignoring why it was happening. We went to investigate. Only to find that our sump pump had stopped working and must have been blowing the circuit. Water and electricity are stupid together.

It was too late to do anything at that point, so I went to get kids ready for bed. As I was tucking in the 7 year old, she was burning up with a fever. So yay! Dosed her up and hoped she would sleep it off. Got the baby down and hoped for a night of thoughtless television to unwind from a day of stress and impending repairs that I would have to address the next day.

The baby decided otherwise. Every hour, he decided otherwise.

Then at 2am, I heard the seven year old crying. In the hallway. Surrounded by a trail of puke en route to the toilet (which, by the way, was the ONLY place where throw up was NOT.) My husband beat me to her. And stepped in it. WIPED IT OFF WITH A TOWEL AND WALKED BACK TO BED. I get gaggy and urgently want to disinfect his foot just typing that.

I lead her to the toilet and round up an arsenal of bleach, paper towels, wipes and trash bags. I bring several loads of gross laundry to a questionable washing machine and hope that it can just work for even ONE load.  It starts up and seems to go good, so I go check on her and finish infusing my house with bleach.

After I’ve bathed her, and got her settled back into bed, nursed the baby from his hourly waking, I go and check on the laundry. The wash machine filled up with water, and did its job, all but the draining. Which means splashy, vomity, water everywhere.

At this point, I am a zombie. A zombie cleaning up chunky water, high from bleach brain, and still scarred by the germs that are inevitably  on my husband’s foot still,  and thus on my bedding. I couldn’t decide whether I had more of an urge to kill him in his sleep or scrub his foot.

My second wind kicks in, in the form of OCD-time to shop online for a new washing machine and sump pump at 4:00am. I read reviews and make my purchases for the next hour. At 5:40am, I finally fall asleep on the couch. At 6:30, my 17 year old jars me as he’s getting ready for school to tell me she’s throwing up again. She was in the bathroom this time, it was all good, and hell, I had 50 minutes of sleep, what else does one need?

She is able to fall back to sleep as do I. Only to be woken up by my 12 year old twenty minutes later to inform me that she missed her bus.  I was pretty incoherent, at this point, but think I told her something to the effect of “arsh goeh shkkooot”, which was my way of telling her I would bring her later when I could lift my head.

I had 40 minutes more of sleep before the baby was up for the day. As you may or may not know, babies awake for the day wait for no one. So I was up.

I brought my 11 year old to her school, and was one minute late for drop off. So I had to go inside and sign her in. In my pajama pants, sweatshirt with bleach stains and black dress shoes (the only shoes I could find- later come to find out that my tennis shoes were in the basement from when I was inspecting the sump pump) but at least I was wearing shoes. At this point, it was all about the small victories.

I dropped off my other daughter and went home. While the little ones slept, you’d think I would catch up on sleep. You’d think wrong. I called to organized delivery of the washing machine and had to empty out the basin, cup by cup.  My dad came to help out and installed the new sump pump and before noon, I had already blown through almost $700.

Since I had nothing else going on, my husband called me from work and asked me to fax some paperwork. I called him a bunch of expletives and told him his foot was still gross.

Before I knew it, my kids were getting home from school. I thought I could grab an hour nap before I picked up the last one at 4:00pm. Just then my 12 year old comes down and tells me the dog peed ON HER BED. This is not the first time. Which leads me to believe that she was not following the correct directions I was giving her for cleaning it when it happened and that the dog had claimed her bed as his toilet. (cue me throwing up in my mind.) I stripped her bed. I ripped off the covering on her mattress. Brought it downstairs to soak it and spray stuff on it so the dog would not smell it anymore as his own and set it outside to air out.

So much for my hour nap.

I went to pick up my daughter from school and showed up at my mom’s house with trash bags full of puke and dog pee infested clothes. I’m a great daughter.

About 10 pm, my husband got home from work, he worked all day, both days and missed all the fun. My daughter was still getting sick. He came to tell me that he lost his wallet and we needed to call and cancel his bank card.  This morning I told him how lucky he was that I didn’t kill him in his sleep.