Today I was not a good mom or a good daughter

I had a melt down with my nine year old this morning. Now she's off to school and I feel like crap about it. In retrospect, even though she managed to push EVERY SINGLE ONE of my buttons, the bottom line is I took my own lousy crap out on her, which is so not fair to do to a fourth grader. I did smooth things over and when I dropped her off at school, things were on a good note. 

The series of unfortunate events that led to my melt down:

After having my stellar two-mile run yesterday, the training plan called for a three-mile run today, which was whatever the opposite of stellar is and made me want to cry. Just could not find my groove and struggled for 35 minutes to run three crappy miles.

Because I was moving in slow motion, I got completely off schedule, and I had planned on being back in 30 minutes, and jumping right into the shower, then taking Carlie to her violin lesson. But I was 10 minutes late, and when I walked in the door I found her in the kitchen, with her MUDDY sneakers in the sink, scrubbing them with my kitchen sponge, splashing muddy water onto the clean casserole dish and pots stacked in the other side of the sink. UGH!

So now I am running late, I am in a bad mood, my clean dishes are muddy and my kid has no shoes to wear to school because SHE CAN'T FIND her other sneakers. The reason she can't find them? Because her closet is piled knee-high with shit. I tore through her closet looking for the sneakers, NOTHING. Checked every room of the house. NOTHING. Rummaged the Goodwill bag.  NOTHING.

I did not do the shoe searching quietly. I did it with lots of THIS IS JUST WHAT I NEED THIS MORNINGs, and HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO FIND ANYTHING IN THIS STYs, and YOU ARE MAKING MY HEAD EXPLODEs and YOU ARE TOO OLD TO LOSE YOUR SHOES!!s.  Lots of all of those. And maybe even also a THIS HAS RUINED MY ALREADY BAD DAY AND IT'S ONLY 7 AM. Maybe only one of those. But you get the idea.

Now I have no time left for a shower, Tim is heading out for work, and Carlie has no shoes. I throw her muddy and now soaking wet sneakers into the dryer, because mud-caked dry shoes are better than mud-caked wet shoes, Tim takes her to violin and I hop in the shower.

I hop out of the shower, truck it to violin and pick her up to take her to school. My dryer is full of dirt. The shoes still look like shit but at least are damp as opposed to wet. My mood has not improved a whit because I realize I FORGOT TO CALL MY DAD, who had a biopsy yesterday to determine what kind of cancer he has.

My dad called last week and said he had a PET scan that showed a malignancy in his lungs, his groin area and a tumor under his arm. He didn't have any other info at the time. He had a biopsy yesterday and was told it is sarcoma, but that is all of the info he has. I don't know what that means, medically speaking. What it means for me is that we know nothing about something that is huge, and I am, like, 3,000 miles away and unable to do anything about it. AND I AM MAKING THIS ABOUT ME, instead of about him, which is so wrong, but after the immediate oh-my-god-my-dad-is-sick reaction, my thoughts turned to airfare, and missed school, and missed work days and money and lack of money and started to spiral out of control until I had to STOP THINKING about it altogether and wait to get more info.

And because I am so good at PRETENDING BAD SHIT ISN'T HAPPENING, I stopped thinking about it and forgot to call him after his biopsy.

So I just got off the phone with him, and got the word "sarcoma" from him and now need to google that and find out what it means. And I need to figure out how exactly a household with two self-employed people manages a crisis like this, because in our world self-employed means, IF YOU DON'T WORK, YOU DON'T GET PAID, and we have, like, no fall back plan for situations that call for either Tim or I to take some time off and deal with shit like this. We talk ALL THE TIME about making a plan, but we never do it, and we talk ALL THE TIME about socking money away for this, but we never do it. And, again, yes, ALL ABOUT ME, which makes me feel like a shit.

It is gorgeous beyond words outside right now, and I am just going to go sit on my deck and soak up as much sun as I can before the sun goes away for the foreseeable future, which will be, like, any day now.