Actual Things: Unmarried Dot Com

Dear friends,

I’ve had a cold so long I can barely remember what it’s like to not have a cold. As I was lying in bed last night still hacking after a second dose of Nyquil and some good old fashioned night soup*, I started to get really fed up. (*Night soup is that thing where you are so desperate to stop coughing you get up at 1am, make soup to eat in bed, spill some of it on yourself and then pray you don’t die of an accidental cold med overdose leaving your children to find your puffy-faced body in a bed full of used tissues in the morning.) I decided to refocus on tranquility by saying all my thank you prayers. Since I’ve been Catholic most of my life I have a habit of ending my prayers with the sign of the cross, only last night instead of the traditional “Amen” I realized I accidentally ended my prayer with, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and The Holy Spirit, Dot Com.”

“So there I was, wheeze-laughing in the dark in m’soup-stained tank top…“

This brings me to my second actual thing. I overslept. Which means my kids overslept. Which means we had approximately 9 minutes for a 12 minute drive. By some miracle of traffic patterns, we coasted up to the door with about 15 seconds to spare as I tossed backpacks into the backseat like they were life jackets on a sinking ship. As I watched my sweet blonde cherubs head for the front door I rolled down the window and started shouting things like, “LET’S MOVE! LOOK ALIVE! I WANNA SEE KNEES TO CHEST!” It really put a pep in their step and I’m thinking that maybe I should start wearing a coach whistle to drop off.

It’s a good thing I’m such a natural motivator because kids can be so inconsiderate, am I right? Like, I didn’t leave the house bra-less in a soup-stained tank top and accelerate through four yellow lights for you to mosey in 20 seconds after the bell and make me look like a bad mom.

Thirdly, and this is a biggie: I got unmarried a while ago. For months now I’ve mulled over when and how to share this information publicly, but the more I thought about it, the more all of your comments over the past years came flooding back and reminded me that I should just keep it real. It wasn’t in the plan for the original fairy tale ending, but I still got a lot of fairy tale moments over the years that can never be undone.

So I’m back to writing. As a single mom, I assure you I have a backlog of material to share with you. If you’re reading this, please know that I appreciate you. I hope you’ll forgive my absence and come back with all of your hilarious feedback I treasure so much.

And those are the actual things.

Love, Emily

 

Alternate Titles:

Working On My Night Soup

Accelerating Through Yellow Lights: A Philosophy For Life

Unmarried With Children

Fairy Tale Middles

I want to sneak in a HUGE thank you shout out to the many, many supportive women friends who have been true bright spots through this cloudy, unpredictable season of my life. Here are a few of them:

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Last Monday.

Today was the last Monday morning of preschool for my four year old Savvy. The idea of the last beginning is hitting me harder than the actual ending of preschool. To say I have “mixed feelings” is, well, just a polite way of saying I have voices in my head, but thanks to the movie Inside Out, we’ve mostly normalized it.

Inside my brain:

KC Live: The Show Goes On

So you know when you have that feeling like there’s something looming in the back of your brain you keep meaning to follow up on but you don’t? And it turns out to be that you’re supposed to be on live television in less than 24 hours? That was my Tuesday afternoon.

For one thing, I had no segment prepared. For another thing, not to get into details, but  I’d spent the past 48 hours depression-eating chinese food and chocolate ice cream and I wasn’t in the ol’ razzle-dazzle frame of mind. To say I was disheveled and bloated is a given, but it was so bad that after I put on my Spanx in the morning, my 4 year old poked my stomach and said “Why do you have a baby in your tummy?” And I sweetly told her it was just an IUD in a bunch of Hyvee Chinese and Haagen-Dazs, then I stuffed her Elsa lunchbox full of loose kale and black jelly beans and sent her off to Preschool.

Holy Mother

You know what’s “fun” about living with chronic anxiety? Sometimes the fear that looms ever-present in the back of my mind numbs me to my socially-acceptable feelings of anxiety. Avery’s first day of Kindergarten has been vague and looming. Her friends’ mothers have been getting teary-eyed, saying how just yesterday they were babies. I would nod as they lamented, but inside the feelings weren’t mutual. It crept up on me when the first day of school arrived and I looked in the mirror and saw myself, AND the mother of a kindergartner.

It’s like when you’re bending over the sink to wash your face at night and you feel vaguely vulnerable but when you look up there is another face behind you in the mirror and in a split second you go from anticipation to startled panic. (Side note: that actually happened to me recently and like the calm, quick-witted woman I am, I reacted by falling to the ground silent and breathless as if I’d been shot. If it would have been an attacker, he probably would have paused to laugh. Which also brings to mind the question, why don’t high schools offer Self Defense classes?)