runaway shopping carts

Hey Mer,

Ack! We’re way behind. The people—all ten people or so—must be wondering WHERE WE ARE?!? WHAT ARE WE DOING?!?! Well, people, here’s what I’m doing: very glamorous stuff. Probably the same stuff Kim Kardashian is doing.

Lots of it involves Miles’s vomit. Cleaning it off living room chairs, toddler beds, shag rugs (oh my word—shag rugs!!!), the kitchen tile. Putting lots more stuff into the washing machine. Doing laundry, laundry, laundry. Not the DRY CLEAN ONLY, though. Oh no, the thousands of expensive DRY CLEAN ONLY garments I own will go with the butler to the dry cleaning place later. He’ll meet up with the Kardashian butler, I’m sure, and they’ll have scones while they wait for the faux furs to be finished. (I have also been watching Downton Abbey, by the way. So sorry for that.)

The other thing I have been doing is freaking losing my mind. Two incidents made me realize this.

1. We have a mug of pens and pencils on the desk because that seems logical. What is a far, far cry from logical is the percentage of pens and pencils that can actually be used to write with. Why would one continue to house pens and pencils that do not work? That possibly have never worked? That must chant, “Hell no, we won’t… work!” (That rhyme did not materialize the way I’d hoped it would. And there’s absolutely no saving it.) This is not just in the mug either. Oh, no. The junk drawers are harborers of the same sort of useless fugitives. The pens are not even pretty pens. They aren’t pens I got on Etsy. I got them from the plumber six years ago or our stupid insurance agent. So I spent a many number of minutes searching for one that did.
2. At the grocery store, a mom came by with one of those behemoth race-car-carts. The kind they hire the engineering dropouts to design. The kind that are supposed to be helpful but are actually a huge pain in the ass, and my kid loves loves loves them so much that he decides on the way to the store whether he wants a red one like Lightening McQueen or a blue one like Daddy’s car and a lesser-known Cars 2 character, Raoul. It is of utmost importance that we find the one that he wants, which means that I end up hauling my 19-pound, 97^th percentile infant around the parking lot in her 75-pound carseat until we find the one that he wants. Either that or we have to do the temper tantrum thing, which I have no patience for these days. Anyway, Jesus was happy with me that day, so this sweet mom rolled right up to my car with this awesome red one. I put Miles in and went to get Genevieve out. But while I was doing that, that stupid race-car-cart started rolling away. The other mom helped me again. She retrieved my child from the jaws of death, or at least the jaws of running into a parked car. By now, I was feeling a little frazzled. She stood there and held the cart while I tried to jerry-rig a way for the infant seat to fit in the car-cart, because God knows that engineering dropout didn’t consider how a person might be able to fit two whole children in a seventeen foot cart with zero turning radius. I say thanks again and push back the hair that has fallen, always, into my face, even though it is supposed to be pulled back in my signature Kardashian-like ball of mess. I pull up my shirt back into place, because my nursing bra, which is the size of Georgia, is showing again. Then I drop my keys. And other mom has to pick them up for me.

Now, all of that may seem like lots of little things that are not a big deal. But hey, you’re the one who has been wondering where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, so please don’t blame me if all I can come up with are inane losing-my-mind stories. Every part of my day feels like I’m holding on to non-working writing instruments.

I was telling my friend Kristin about all of this, and she nodded and tried to tell me that that’s life when you have young kids. That you will get your mind back someday, maybe after they start going to school. But she’s usually combed her hair when she says things like this, so I’m not sure I can credit her as a reliable source.

No, I can credit her. And it’s lucky, I think, that all these moms who now have their stuff together are kind enough to chase after my runaway shopping carts.