A scene from this morning:

The baby opens her eyes and sits up.
 
"Cookie?"
"You want a cookie?"
"Yeah"  (that's a new one for her...she used to just nod)
"How about cheese?"
She starts to cry and points at the door.
 
I go get her string cheese and bring it to her.
"Here's some cheese sweetie"
"NO!"
"It's yummy" I hand it to her.
She throws it at me and has a complete meltdown.

Since her mouth is wide open as she screams, I manage to spy a teeny tooth peeking up in one of the four remaining toothless spots.

Baby Orajel to the rescue!

• No no no, the computer doesn't need ice-cream.
• That's yucky. That's where we put poop and pee-pee.
• The kitty doesn't like that.
• Just say "all done" when you're finished. Don't throw it.

• Do NOT put that in your mouth.
• No no NO! Don't TOUCH that!
• That hurts Mommy.
• Do you have poop in your pants?

Or good mommy, bad employee?

Seems like a pretty shitty deal if you have to choose. And choose we must.

If I were to give my job everything I'm capable of, to put every ounce of drive and passion and creative fire into my work...I'd never see my kids. If I drove my kids to every appointment, made healthy organic meals from local sources, stayed home every time someone runs a sliver of fever and gave all three of them my full attention the minute I walk through the door each night? I'd be shit-canned within a month.

Neither of those outcomes are acceptable, so I half-ass everything. Giving both my employer and my children the short end of the stick. Apparently this stick of mine has no long end.

My kids get ignored or put in front of Dora while I work on a PowerPoint deck or take a call from the office. My childfree coworkers watch me leave every day at five while they put one or two more hours in at the office. So everyone resents me, and I resent being resented.

What's the solution? Find a way to work from home? That doesn't solve the Oh Mom's on her laptop again issue. Get a job that doesn't require (or inspire) me to be "always on"? I can't raise kids on a retail salary--or whatever sort of job a person can just forget about between shifts.

It's frustrating because I don't see any way out. Except ceasing to care.

Nice Mommy won the week, but Mean Mommy reared her bitchy head a few times. Bad Mommy let the baby eat a whole bunch of chocolate chips, and had my mom take Kid 2 to the doctor because I couldn't miss more work.

The crimes this week:

• Threw my glasses in the toilet.
• Couldn't pay for their groceries and had to have Very Nice Mommy bail them out.
• Was home sick all week and: left mountains of used snotrags in the living room, took out what looks like every single DVD we own, didn't do the dishes.
• Dumped teriyaki on the floor

• Sat on my keyboard (which somehow changed the display settings)
• Used my phone to send this text message: "dpdleh::Hpdals"
• Cried and was cranky during video chat with Daddy in Afghanistan.
• Subjected the family to Barney
• May have bit someone at daycare...but didn't get caught. (there are a limited number of kids who would make teeny-tiny bite marks)
• Got poop on their feet.
• Subjected the family to D&D campaign babbling.
• Thought they had a midterm, but didn't.

• Disappeared my iPad charger
• Needed 3 reminders to do the dishes
• Covered herself in chocolate pudding (aka 'chockit')

• Drew on the sofa with a crayon
• Took every tissue out of a box of Kleenex and threw them on the floor
• Hit me in the face
• Ate a green crayon

Not a bad week, especially compared with last week!

Mean Mommy refuses to do the teens' laundry. Who will break first; me or them?

Nice Mommy let Kid 2 sleep in my bed and bit my tongue when she complained about the baby waking her up. Welcome to my world, dude.

Nice Mommy has issued two 'reminders' about the sink full of dirty dishes. No threats have been made...yet.

Nice Mommy didn't freak out when Kid 3 scribbled in an art book.

Nice Mommy refrained from deploying the words "lazy" and "ass" when rousting Kid 1 from his bed to unload the Amazon Fresh delivery.

Here are the atrocities committed in the last seven days by Kids 1, 2, and 3. See if you can match the miscreant to the misdeed.

• Pooped in the bathtub.
• Ate all the leftover pizza.
• Overslept.
• Bit me.
• Hoarded towels in their room.
• Lost their cellphone.
• Puked at school.
• Stole my sandwich.
• Absconded with my Uggs.
• Took everything out of my wallet.
• Broke a promise to do the dishes.
• Reneged on an agreement to watch the baby.
• Cost me 300 bucks in textbooks.
• Threw their dinner on the floor.
• Messed up my Zuma Blitz game.
• Put catsup in their hair.
• Lost the mailbox key.
• Stole my blanket.
• Threw my makeup on the floor.
• Left dirty socks in the living room.
• Wiped chocolate on the sofa.
• Left dirty dishes on the living room floor.
• Failed to put things in storage as agreed to.
• Didn't  warn Mommy that she was getting low on Diet Coke.
• Didn't clean the catbox.
• Downloaded something on their cellphone that cost 18 dollars, and disavows all knowledge of it.
• Fell out of bed.
• Stole my Popsicle.
• Waited until 10pm to start homework.
• Pulled my hair.
• Got up at 4am on a weekend.
• Slept until 6pm on a weekday.

These are my confessions.

1. When Kid 1 was 3 years old, his favorite movie was Jaws.
2. Kid 2 wouldn't eat vegetables for the first 5 years of her life. And I didn't make her eat them.
3. I give Kid 3 too many cookies because she does a cute happy dance when she sees me taking it out of the package. Note: All other "coo-coos' are inferior to Tim Tams.
4. I accepted my husband's marriage proposal before Kids 1 and 2 had met him. Luckily they adore him.
5. Even though I vowed not to, when Kid 3 needs something I completely tune out the teenagers...even if they're in the middle of a sentence.
6. Some days I'm just too tired to fight the "my tummy hurts can I stay home from school" battle, and let her stay home.
7. I haven't taken the baby to the dentist yet. (She's 19 months old)
8. I swear like a sailor. Apparently you're not supposed to do this in front of kids. Kid 1 curses, Kid 2 does not. I swore I heard Kid 3 say 'shit' the other day.
9. I'm a slob. After work and dinner etc I have approximately 90 minutes to hang out with the kids before the little one goes to bed. I don't spend it doing housework.
10.  I'm not a Tiger Mother. Kid 1 is smart enough for an Ivy League college. If I'd pushed him harder maybe he'd be at Harvard instead of Bellevue College. Kid 2 is an amazingly fast runner. I should have forced her to do track. Hopefully Kid 3 will not have to bear the brunt of my regrets with the first two.

Still, my kids are all pretty good. A bit lazy, yes. Sometimes they lie to me. But so far none of them have been brought home by the cops, gotten pregnant or impregnated anyone, and 1 out of 3 has graduated high school.

So perhaps I'm not that bad.

Mean Mommy told Kid 1 that my patience with him and his freeloading ways is very thin. The deal we made last summer when I let him come back home (I kicked him out for a week after his third stay-out-all-night-don't-call episode) was that if he wanted to live in my house and eat my food and use my internet bandwidth, he had to make my life better with him than without him. I wrote up a detailed contract which he agreed to abide by. At the VERY least, he is supposed to clean the catbox, take out the garbage, and do the recycling--on his own, without me reminding or nagging him.  It never happens. NEVER.

This morning I told him, "I love you very much, but I'm not a doormat."

He will shape up for a day or two and go back to his old ways. He goes to college full time and works part-time as a news writer for a website. How do I get him out of my house? Seriously. I need to know.

Nice Mommy cuddled on the couch for an hour with sick and weepy 15 year old Kid 2. She's worried about her grades. She went through a period earlier in the semester where she pretty much just blew off her homework. So she got a horrible progress report from school and had to do all the missing work. The semester is coming to an end now, and with only getting partial credit for late work, she doesn't think her grades will be 'good enough' for her dad.

She informed me that he told her if her grades didn't come up, he would sue me for custody.  To this I have a few responses:

a) It's MY fault that her grades are bad? How much oversight does he think a parent has over a ninth grader's homework?

b) What kind of piece of shit bullies and threatens his own daughter?

c) LMAO. Does he realize he's basically saying that living with him will be her punishment? Living with him is in fact quite punishing, which is why I left him. (Plus he's short).

Being afraid of her dad's reaction turned into she's not good enough for anything and the world was going to end last night there on the couch. I assured her that as long as she wants to live with me, she will. That people don't take children away from their mother unless they are drug addicts, prostitutes or abusive. We also made a plan to study crazy hard for her last two finals. I got the French handled, and my brother the Math/Computer Science major can help with Geometry.

Nice Mommy had a very difficult time trying not to turn into Mean Mommy and say horrible things about her father. Like the fact I wish he would evaporate from the face of the earth.

I was nice to Kid 3. She was happy and cute doing little dances around the living room and slept through the night. Which was fortunate because Kid 2's meltdown was uniterrupted.