T.G.I.M.

It's Sunday afternoon and I look like something the cat dragged in. I am wearing a t-shirt three sizes too big, a hoodie sweatshirt and black yoga pants that have been washed 79 times too many to still be identified as black. My hair is knotted up in back and my bangs - which I foolishly cut myself about a month ago in a fit of impatience and knowing it would be at least two weeks before I could get into my stylist - are in desperate need of a shampoo. My eyes are smudged with Saturday's makeup and my chin is in the midst of a five-alarm breakout, the likes of which I haven't seen for 20 years. I look worse than one of Stacy and Clinton's befores and even though it's Sunday I feel like I'm letting myself go.

But I'm tired. I've been up too late all week. And I'm going crazy. My kids are actually making me go crazy.

It all started out sort of okay. Grace got on her new bike to go pick up the mail, a small voyage of independence and pride. The baby napped. Lauren watched a movie. When Grace got back she brought the mail upstairs to the baby's room, where I was, I don't know.... doing baby stuff. In a flurry of nonstop, excited chatter she dumped the mail on the bedroom floor, sorting it into piles and opening "two things from Auntie Meg, mommy!" Then she ran out of the room, on to the next thing, and the mail was left behind. But now I know what I was doing - feeding the baby via her G-tube while she slept so that she doesn't miss a meal, or the calories that go with it. They measure these things like Nazis and while I may not get everything right, this is one that counts so here I am.

Hours later my nerves are frayed by a nuclear meltdown over a t-shirt for this picture:

repeated refrains of "I'm huuunnngryyyy," even though they eat like birds no matter what I put in front of them, fights about whose Littlest Pet Shop Bobbleheaded Freaks are whose and way too much TV. Oh yeah, and after the baby had diarrhea I got her all naked for a bath and she peed on me between the changing table and the tub. Of course.

And this was just Sunday afternoon, an improvement over Saturday if that's possible.

Now I'm in the bathroom with my littlest peanut in the tub and Grace comes in to tell me something. I listen. Then calmly ask her to please get the mail out of the baby's room and take that, and her backpack, downstairs. Put the mail on the table. Backpack by the front door.

She says, "no."

No? No!? What? Are you freaking kidding me?

I went all the way to the edge of crazy in that minute, telling her in a voice just short of a yell that she had better get the mail off the floor and down to the kitchen this minute and she'd better not come back into that bathroom because I. have. had. enough.

Fast forward to nearly dinnertime. I'm in a clean outfit that is just a variation on the previous one minus the baby pee. My hair is still gross. My heels are starting to look like I've walked a thousand miles barefoot. My acne is still happening. But thankfully the older girls are outside playing together peacefully. I see them from the upstairs porch, rounding the fence at the end of the driveway to play under the neighbor's tree, creating an imaginary world that is theirs alone. The sunlight is golden and warm, the breeze just a whisper in the leaves. The house is quiet and I can take a deep breath.

I look out over the liquid blue of the lake and I fantasize about my desk at work. My newly re-potted plant with the pretty blue ceramic pot on a tray that is too big, but that I will fill with beach stones. I imagine the pink ceramic jar that holds the oil that smells like Valencia oranges, and how it has a lovely relief pattern that reminds me of octopus tentacles, but not in a creepy way - more of a life-is-a-circle-that-never-ends way, and my jar of beach glass.

I think about how tomorrow I will have freshly shaved legs, clean hair, nice make-up, clothes that fit and don't make me look like a before. At work I will be productive. Check things off my list. Talk to adults who make their own lunches. Have a chai first thing in the morning. On Monday I will return to a neat, relatively tidy world populated by mostly rational people. And then I laugh at myself, because I also know that as much as I love work, love the problem solving, the creative energy, the shared humor and the desk that is mine alone, I will also spend my day thinking often of my kids and anticipating their sweet hugs, sweaty, baby-fatted hands in mine, their breathless stories of the day's adventures.

I know I'm not alone with this weekend craziness. I know other mothers are having this too. Personally, I think it's the adjustment into the rhythm of summer and the change in structure. My kids anticipate summer eagerly, but also mourn the loss of their school routine and teachers they love. They are settling into new daycare routines, different sleep schedules. And I am too.

Some days, especially in summer, I wish that I worked less. Or maybe I wish I didn't work at all. But this week... this week I am just feeling Thank God It's Monday.