And Then I Hit the Brakes

A little advice from an experienced mom.

If you've had a really bad day and you are trying really hard to regroup, and your four year old is making that difficult by ignoring every directive you issue, especially the one about staying buckled in her booster seat while you are running 201 errands, and your twelve year old is devastated and thrashing around over Barcelona's loss to Real Madrid, and you've spent too much time trying way too hard to get people who are ignoring you to do stuff, and you're pretty sure you are PMS-ing because as hard as you try to control your rage response you have failed repeatedly and your throat is sore from speaking too forcefully (aka screaming), and if you planned the afternoon poorly and realized too late that everyone will have to be in the car between 4 and 7 instead of at home eating the meal you had planned, and then the traffic is terrible again so that you are sitting tensely in the driver's seat listening to bickering and worrying about arriving everywhere late, and if your six year old picks the car ride to become the third child to vomit since last Wednesday and then you almost joined her when you had to clean it up on a curb next to your son's soccer practice, and if the only receptacle you can find in the van for your little Barfer Babe to clutch until you can get her home is a (thank God, clean) pie plate, which by the way works fabulously when she throws up a second time as you are on your way to drop of the recovering Barcelona fan at his Shakespeare play rehearsal, and if you pull over quickly to dump out the pie tin so that all of the occupants of the car can once again breath, and if you need this last bit of the evening to go as smoothly as possible so that you can maybe, hopefully finally be home in 20 little minutes, my biggest piece of advice to you is this: Don't hit the brakes too hard. You will regret it.

Apparently, I'm still learning from my experiences.

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