Oh So Tired

...hey, I kind of like it when the font is screaming at you, it makes it look like I've gone insane!!!!...

We had a playdate here yesterday. "Playdate." The first hundred times I used that word I said it smirking, my fingers making little quotation marks in the air to show how dumb and corny I thought it was. Now it's part of my vocabulary, said more with a shudder of horror than with amusement. The mother was very nice, and thoughtfully injected her daughter with a triple dose of speed and amphetamines before she dropped the kid off, just to ensure we'd all have a really good visit. I shall be sure to return the favour the next time I dump High Intensity off at her place. It's really great the way mothers look out for each other these days.

Actually, it was a relatively short playdate, lasting only about an hour. They spent the majority of the time eating a box of these weird sausage casing-enclosed popsicles I picked up in Chinatown, which I threw at them about 15 minutes into the date because they were already screaming at each other and I just WASN'T IN THE MOOD. And don't you all be thinking to yourself, "And she calls herself a TEACHER????" I teach civilized TEENAGERS not wild pre-school animals, OK? Anyway, they split the box, and when the mother came to pick up her kid I was lying limply on the front steps and the two of them were chasing each other around the pine tree in hyper-crazy circles. The lawn was strewn with what looked like hundreds of used condoms, foreshadowing, perhaps, the parties they'll be having ten years from now. "They're Chinese popsicle wrappers," I explained, but I think the mother thought I was speaking euphemistically because she gave me a funny look. Hopefully she now thinks I'm crazy and incompetent and won't entrust the care of her daughter to me again. Ha, who am I kidding? She'd do anything for an hour's free time, she doesn't care what psycho is taking care of her kid. I know this to be true, because I feel the same way.

Mental fatigue is wearing me down. As she grows older, Baby Fangs is getting more and more pissy about being left alone on the floor with a bottle of Windex for company. High Intensity is always demanding, and while part of me, I can assure you, treasures this time I have with her, part of me is always screaming inwardly, "GIVE ME A BREAK ALREADY!! I JUST WANT HALF AN HOUR TO MYSELF!! IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?" And everything, everything that I do occurs in these horrible, monotonous, frustrating cycles that I can't seem to break free of. Cycles like:

-The Cleaning Cycle-

1. Tidy room
2. Tidy another room
3. Return to first room and tidy again
4. Bang head against door
5. Repeat

-The Personal Hygiene Cycle-

1. Wash and put on clean(ish) clothes
2. Bravely endure puking and/or diaper malfunctioning and/or crazy crafting-experiment- gone-awry scenario
3. Moan a bit
4. Repeat

-The High Intensity Cycle-

1. Hear screams
2. Calmly deal with it
3. Hear more screams
4. Less calmly deal with it
5. Hear hysterical "Old Porky is off to the Vienna Sausage Factory" type screams
6. Snap
7. Room banishment/sobbing
8. Repeat

-The Brain-Numbing, Don't-Have-to-Think, Cheezy 70's Music Cycle-

1. Play Doctor Hook's Greatest Hits CD
2. Feel pathetic
3. Reminisce about good-bye party in S. Korea when forced by lovely post office students to get on stage and perform karaoke version of Sharing the Night Together (oooh-yah, all right) without being allowed to get mercifully drunk first
4. Quiver with embarrassment
5. Watch with fondness as High Intensity gets down to Sexy Eyes
6. Realize she's going to be like those losers in junior high who were into Elvis because that's all their parents listened to
7. Feel guilt
8. Repeat

Actually, it's this last cycle that really gets me down. Listening to crap because it's all my poor overloaded brain can deal with means that I'm really in a bad place. But lucky for me, I have a daughter who is not completely unsympathetic to my situation. The other day I was in her room and we were drawing together, and suddenly I closed my eyes and rested my head on her bed. She looked up from what she was doing and stared at me with a concerned expression. "Do you feel," she asked curiously, "like a dog? A dog on a scale that's about to die?"

"Yes, exactly like that."

"I thought so," she said, and let me rest quietly for at least two minutes.

It was a nice break.