Mommy Has a Blue Face.

“Tell me you yell at them sometimes.”

Oh my great day. Yes. I yell at them sometimes. Sometimes they have earned my sharp response, my angry voice. Sometimes I’m tired or hungry or I just seriously have to pee and I can’t believe I can’t just get to the bathroom because this is happening right now. Such things make me irritable.

The other night, I decided to give myself a facial. I’ve always been charmed by these organic self indulgences, like in My Best Friend’s Wedding when Michael opens the hotel room door that Jules is resting against in her state of psychotic envy, and she falls backward into his room, and her entire face is purple with mud that is surely cleansing her every pore and giving her unknown softness.  Something about this charms me.

I smeared on a thick, sticky opaque mask. It started to harden, and it turned a brighter shade of blue as dried on my face. Tucker came into the bathroom and saw this statuesque version of his mom. He wouldn’t come any closer. “Mommy, you look so weird. You look, just, so scary.”

It’s a little creepy, buddy. I agree. Nobody is meant to have a plastic face.

He watched from the corner of my bathroom, looking at me only in the mirror, sort of hoping I’m sure that if he looked at me straight on he might actually recognize me, but he wasn’t willing to take the risk that this blue face might look back at him.

I was somewhere in the 15 minute wait before I could peel off my face, and suddenly someone needed something at the other end of the hallway. And that’s when I discovered that their bathroom is raging out of control, the toilet is clogged with Max’s poop that has been scooped off the floor with handfuls of toilet paper, and someone tried to solve it by pouring toilet bowl cleaner into the toilet, but now it’s just a mess of blue – sort of like my face. And all of the socks and all of the underwear are missing, along with all of the jeans and it will be 37 degrees in the morning. And then one of them held his innocent little middle finger and told me his friend told him it means the F-word: Fart. And Tyler has sold his toothbrush to Tucker for $1.

And I lost my mind, though not because any single one of these is worthy of losing my mind. But because suddenly my emotional grocery cart was top heavy.  There I was, screaming and shrieking with my blue, plastic face.

“Please tell me you yell at them sometimes.” True. I do.

And sometimes, they say to me, “Mommy, I will hug you good night when you don’t look like that, when you aren’t doing what you’re doing right now.”