please tell the therapist it was the ice cream’s fault

Oh you guys it’s just SO hard to be a grown up sometimes – is it not?

The floor is always dirty … like grit crunching under your feet dirty.  And sure I have five kids at home and one dog, but there used to be eight of us here and triple the number of dogs and it feels like the crud level has just surpassed any sort of acceptable limit and how on earth can a person control it all every single day?

It’s always after midnight when I feel most compelled to eat copious amounts of crunchy food or homemade ice cream (or both) and it’s always bright daylight when I look at myself and feel super annoyed that forty-two doesn’t look like twenty-two and why doesn’t self-control really get all that much easier with age?

Every day – like three times at least – all the mouths and all the bellies in this home would like to receive sustenance.  And we aren’t even talking about overly picky kids who live here.  They just want to eat.  It’s like this endless rotation.  Well.  Yes.  That’s exactly what it is.

The hard questions come right around 11 pm when one sweet-eyed divinely made small human pulls me close and whispers a deep thought into my ear.  A heavy thought.  A question my anxiously-awaiting-the-time-I-can-type-and-eat-the-leftover-ice-cream brain is not geared to Answering The Hard Questions.

I recognize it as my privilege as well as my job but I’m all tongue tied and I leave the conversation pretty certain I’ve ruined them on that topic forever and in the future they’ll recall the day and what I said and how it broke them or sent them in some crazy cakes direction and one day they’ll be thirty and they’ll be telling some therapist from a sofa or some friend over the phone all about it and it was all because there was cookies and cream ice cream left downstairs.