The Monday-est Monday

Mommy woke up tired. An hour and twenty minutes after I should have gotten up tired. I willfully turned my alarm off and went back to sleep.

Today was the Monday-est Monday: My coffee needed a coffee, my to-do list is filing a restraining order, everything that could wobble, did. Employees, programming, HR, people — like someone tossed a bag of chaos into the air and we all waited to see where it landed.

Work felt like a glitchy video game where the NPCs have unionized. Employee problems? Check. Meetings that didn’t accomplish all we meeded it to? Also check. Programming decisions that make you question the general concept of logic? Absolutely. HR with its gentle, loving way of saying “no” to everything that would make life faster? Present and accounted for.

Midday: take my sister to the airport on my lunch break. Because of course I did. Because what’s a little domestic logistics between two scheduled breakdowns?

And then: “Here’s a fire. There’s a fire.” Not literal — at least not usually — but metaphorically speaking, alarms everywhere. Priorities on fire, calendars on fire, mental bandwidth on fire. You put out one flame and three more pop up like the world is playing a sick version of Whac-A-Mole.

I get home thinking maybe the home front will be my calm harbor. LOL. The kiddos are wild — a perfectly calibrated hurricane of energy, right when your battery hits 3%. Toys everywhere, two referees short, one toddler negotiating bedtime like it’s international diplomacy. Every quiet moment at home is immediately followed by a new emergency: spilled milk, sibling treaty violations, the classic “but I’m not tired” at 8:02 p.m.

And then there’s the small, irrational voice that lives in the corners of my brain: every morning I wake up and wonder, is today the day we go to the hospital? Part of me wanted my kids to grow up fearless — to go outside, to climb trees, to get messy and live big. And I meant it. But some days I stare at the swings and think maybe a little caution would have been helpful. A tiny, reasonable dose of fear would do Mommy’s anxiety a whole lot of good.

There’s also that weird parent paradox: I wanted brave kids and know I will miss the days when bravery was a scraped knee and not a phone call at 2 a.m. I question my life choices — loudly and often in the shower — because hindsight is 20/20 and also judgmental.

But here’s the weird part: even on the Monday-est Monday, between the fires and flights and frantic snack negotiations, there are tiny, ridiculous moments that somehow glue the day together. The kid who insists on holding your hand across the parking lot. The sibling that shares a crayon. The coworker who actually sends one helpful Slack message that saves your life. The sister who texts a selfie from the terminal and says, “Thanks for the ride.”

So we go to bed. We inhale, exhale, reboot. Tomorrow we will wake up, get dressed, drink lukewarm coffee, answer a million little and big questions, and do it all again — probably with slightly less coordination and slightly more love. Maybe that’s the point: the chaos stays, the small mercies multiply, and we somehow keep showing up.

Mommy is tired — but also still here. And if you see me tomorrow, I’ll probably be holding my coffee like a security blanket and whispering, “Let’s not start any literal fires today, okay?”