My Day...

While not particularly eventful, this morning was a whirlwind of mostly subtle, but sometimes strong emotions and management of stressful situations. My son, Bryce, is a ten-year-old boy with an illness I wouldn’t wish on the likes of Hitler. Basically, think of the crucifixion tale of Jesus and then span it out over a nine-year period of relentless, bone warping torture and you have Bryce, sinless and sacrificing daily to nobody but himself. But I digress. The theme of the day was Bryce’s appointment at Children’s Hospital for a horrendous wound he developed while in the care—or lack there of—of his mother last summer. The appointment was set for three thirty. Now I work third shift and the game plan for days like today is to cram in as much sleep as possible before having to wake up for this non-normal occasion. The idea is to get enough that I won’t feel like an airheaded zombie behind the wheel of the forty-five minute drive, and to then cap it off with a nap upon our return before I have to head in to work. Suffice to say, things didn’t go as planned. The house was humid and uncomfortable, despite the sixty-one degree mark outside. Around eight o’clock, when I was in the process of readying to get in my six hour main chunk of sleep, a team of roofers showed up unexpected to pound on and replace the roof to the house we rent throughout the entire day and beyond the point that we left for the hospital. And as if that weren’t enough, our god-awful Old Testament fire and brimstone whip cracker of a landlord said he’d come by to “inspect the house” when the roofers came. This was supposed to happen last Monday, but it ended up raining all last week so it never did. Well one might ask why that’s such a bad thing. And to that, I’ll respond that this guy is an overbearing abusive jerk—to put it nicely—who happens to be rich and owns nice homes, which he rents out at a reasonable price—his one redeeming value, but possibly also his net to pull in fresh fodder. When Steve comes, if the smallest thing is out of order in the home then he begins his trademark berating of hundred decibel shout talking while questioning every aspect of your worth as a human being—and I’d argue, with good cause, showing his value for all to see. So instead of heading to sleep it became time to shift into clean mode. This wasn’t so difficult considering the caffeine I still had coursing through my veins. And, luckily, the place already looked pretty good for the most part. But, remember, I said even the smallest thing, and I meant it. A cobweb in the corner, a dust bunny tumble weeding on the floor, these are triggers waiting to happen for the toxic human being we have to answer to. So an hour of fine detailing turned my wife and I into perspiring messes, after I’d already taken a shower when returning home from work. It’s nine fifteen, and the counter’s tick, tick, ticking away. The difference between hell and reasonable comfort for the day is a pillow away. My nerves are still saying, “Go,” from the cleaning but my mind is pleading to wrap it up. But I need to wind down. So what do I do? Well I go on Reddit for a half hour, of course. What else would I do when there’s an infinitely better option on the table? Ten o’clock rolls around and I’m finally ready to call it quits. I do my before bed rituals, which costs me another ten minutes and then my noggin meets the cotton pillowcase. By this point, I bet you’ve forgotten about the roofers. I know I had. I’d tuned them out, for the most part, during the cleaning. But the thwack, thwack, thwack in quick succession with a three second gap in between it restarting was directly over the bed. It was at this point, as I waited to get drowsy enough to sleep in spite of the racket, that I forgave myself for blowing the time I did on Reddit. If I hadn’t, I would’ve just laid there for an additional forty-five minutes of unnecessary purgatory. Getting drowsy was made increasingly difficult by the notion that Steve, the landlord, could drop by for one of his illegal inspections any moment and, despite the house looking immaculate, would more than likely be shouting his disapproval that we have “too much stuff” and we’ll have to get rid of at least x amount of it if our family doesn’t want to get thrown out on our butts, as he has in the past. To put this to bed, pardon the pun, now’s the time to mention that Steve never showed. Great, right? Well, yes and no. While its advantageous that we wouldn’t have to deal with him in the immediate, he’s already ruined a substantial portion of my day. And now we’d have to deal with the tacked on stress of him just showing up and catching us off-guard some other day, only god knows when. Finally—despite the stress and the pounding and the pressing knowledge that I absolutely need to sleep, which always serves to make it tougher—it happens. I’m out cold. This is the moment where I realize that I’ve left a crucial variable out of this equation. Summer break. The kids are off school, and, therefore, are at home to shout their joys and their arguments, while inserting little impossible to plan for sabotages along their destructive paths. Super duper. If there were sarcasm font, this would be the part where I’d use it, and bold it, and highlight it just for good measure. One fifteen, an hour and fifteen minutes before I need to awake to leap into action for a task I can’t stand, the old child decides to open the bedroom door—just to make sure I’m sleeping well. No joke. Then, this is followed by a forgetting to re-close the door and a barrage of loud, “onto the next thing” dialog. I’m awake. The nail pounding that never really went away, but I slept to regardless, was very much a thing again. So, what to do? I lay there. Get drowsy again, I tell myself. It shouldn’t be hard considering my exhaustion is comparable to a man in a coma that is alerted to his situation and surroundings, a dormant, hellish form of existence. At least, that’s what I told myself. A half hour goes by before I have the strength to think that I should just get out of bed while I have some wits about me. If I’d fallen asleep for that last half hour I had it would be impossible to predict how “with it” I’d be, and, if I were a betting man I could only assume it would be exceedingly worse. I sat up, living the experience of what it might be like to attempt to function in an eight G environment. Blinking was agitating. That said, the chipper loaded questions thrown at me in quick succession from my wife played like a blaring alarm with a nail gun bass beat coming from above. To make a longer story short, I drove to the appointment on two hours of sleep, played with my giggly and adorable two month old daughter in the waiting and exam rooms while my wife did the bulk of the tougher stuff, and had to listen to my ex-wife for a near unbearable hour, as she decided to show up and insert herself into the roll of mommy that my wife has earned in her near constant absence. It’s funny, in a way that’s anything but actually funny, how raging narcissists can somehow make every conceivable topic point back to themselves. After that, we drove home through dense rush hour traffic. Along the way I realized that it was too late to get any more sleep in, so I picked up my stuff for work from home—my lunchbox and computer—and was out the driveway and off to work on my measly two hours of terrible sleep. Oh, coffee, how I love thee.