Mama Needs a Break

Now, I love summer as much as the next girl, but in most respects . . . nothing really changes for me. I still have to be up at 5:00 a.m. on weekdays. I still have to make the kid's lunch every day. I am still obligated to drop her off at day camp every morning and pick her up again on my way home from work. I have to feed the dogs, do the laundry, go to work, buy groceries, pay bills, clean the house, pick up poop, and so on it goes. The only thing that really changes is that we do funner stuff on the weekends and I walk the dogs a lot more.

I am having a particularly unfun kind of week. I most definitely dropped my daughter off for day camp yesterday with my zipper firmly in the down position. Then today we got almost all the way there and I remembered that the thermos in her lunch bag was . . . empty. She likes the crispy tenders from Gardein (they are meatless) and yeah, I forgot to cook them this morning and actually put them in her lunch. So, we stopped at a convenience store and she picked out a salad (which she agreed to eat as long as ranch dressing was part of the equation). Seriously, though, I think I might be losing it. I need a vacation like I don't know what.

Next Saturday, the kid boards a plane to go out east and visit her grandfather at the beach. I know this sounds terrible, but I'm sort of looking forward to it. I love my daughter to pieces but I could go for a few days where I don't have to yell, "PLEASE GET DRESSED!" fifty times every morning. A little break from picking up shoes that are, inexplicably, in the middle of the living room floor. A respite from the nightly "but I can't sleep!" which then leads to a brutal morning the next day.

For adoptive moms, I think there is an unspoken sentiment that we should never express frustration with being a parent. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I love being a mom. No one knows better than I do how precious a gift I've been given. However, that doesn't mean I don't want an occasional day without running the washing machine.

And so, I shall drop her off at the airport and will try to hide the little skip in my step. No doubt, as I drive home in silence, I'll start to miss her desperately. But, I've got plans! I'm planning to clean out her room while she's gone. I purged a lot of stuff while she was in Oklahoma last summer but the little hoarder has managed to accumulate a lot more junk since then.

While she's gone . . . I'm sure that one minute I'll revel in the beauty of watching TV without hearing Katy Perry songs ("Baby, you're a fiiiiiire wooork . . . ") floating down the hallway and the next minute I'll wonder how I'm going to make it a whole week without my little sidekick (although sometimes I think it's more like I'm her sidekick).


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