Guilt

Just to get it out of the way, my happy thought for the day is that my house is (almost) clean. Let's just ignore the fact that I was up until almost midnight last night scrubbing toilets and rinsing showers, OK? Focus on the positive, clean potties and showers.

Last night I was not a very good wife. M was in the city for what I thought was a business meeting. And I guess there was a meeting involved, at five, and then he met up with friends of ours for dinner and drinks. But I didn't know about that part until 10:15 or so when he called to see how the kids were doing. I had just crawled into bed after spending the day dealing with two over-tired, whining children, A was already showing signs of having a not very good night of sleep, and the cats were loudly expressing their displeasure over the closing of the cat door. Basically, I was not in grand mood.

So when I heard that he was out having spur of the moment fun instead of doing business deals like I thought he was, I burst into tears and whined "So nice that SOMEONE gets to have fun in this family." Then I felt guilty because really, it wasn't his fault that the kids were trying and the house was a wreak, and that I had done (literally) eight loads of laundry that still needed to be folded, and that I was PMSing and hungry and my favorite show hadn't recorded. But once the tears are out there, you really can't recover from that as hard as you try to insist that really, everything is fine and to go and have a good time.

Once he had assessed that I wasn't going to throw myself from the second floor window or ship the kids off to the circus, I was instructed to go to bed and he went on with his evening. But the guilt kicked in and I decided to scrub the house instead. Because, well, I don't know why, besides the fact that I was already feeling guilty about the fact that I am a horrid housewife, and while I couldn't do anything to fix my guilt trip of an outburst, I could at least get the house clean.

Of course we all know that with two kids and no school today, there will be no sign that the house was actually clean at midnight last night, but I swear, it was. If you sniff really deeply in the upstairs bath you can still smell the shower cleaner.