Me: *sitting at my work computer on the couch, trying to actively participate in a Zoom meeting. My boss gives me the que to start rambling at length. The familiar pang of panic begins to coarse through my veins and I open my mouth to speak*

Ayanna: MOOOOOOOOOMMMMYYYYYY BRANDON CALLED ME ‘TURDS’! *begins wailing to the heavens*

Brandon: BUT, I ONLY CALLED HER ‘TURDS’ BECAUSE IT’S REALLY FUNNY!! *begins sobbing for his own reasons*

My boss: Tatiana? Do you need to step away for a moment?

Me: *opens my mouth to feign calmness and explain that no one is being murdered and there’s nothing to see here*

Brandon: MOMMMMMMMMYYYY! AYANNA JUST CALLED ME POOP BECAUSE I CALLED HER TURDS *continues to sob*

Me: “Do you mind if we reschedule?”

1. It’s probably good for his immune system.

This is the lie I tell myself when I catch Brandon eating things off of the floor. Especially after I don’t catch him quickly enough to smack it out of his hand before the mystery meat gets into his mouth.  DUDE, IF IT’S NEON PINK NUCLEAR WASTE  YOU’RE YEARNING FOR, I WILL GLADLY TAKE YOU TO GET A MCRIB, JUST STOP EATING OFF THE FLOOR FOR CHRIST’S SAKE.

I don’t know if it was deliberately to piss me off, but Brandon used to do something disgusting at least daily. Like the time he picked up a mostly empty water bottle in the park and drank the remaining sip of water. I almost dropped my other child while trying to helicopter-kick the bottle out of his hands, but I am no Jean-Claude Van Damme, so don’t expect angelic kung-fu twirl kicks out of me, I am massively uncoordinated.

2. One day, my children will willfully accept vegetables into their diet.

I don’t know how, but apparently it’s possible for children to thrive despite a complete lack of nutrition in their diets. Both of my kids always get a thumbs-up from the pediatrician, so I must be doing SOMETHING right. But it’s only a matter of time until Brandon’s next check up when the doctor comes into the examination room FROWNING while studying some results and says, “according to my calculations, Brandon’s blood type is just straight up cheese.” And then I’ll put my hands up in that “hey, don’t look at me” pose and then I’ll try to pass the blame onto my husband. I haven’t decided yet. He’s going to get me put on a bad parent watch list sooner or later.

3. One of these days, I’m going to cut back on coffee. And alcohol. And sarcasm.

But I think that might be a solid NO on halting the substance abuse.  I haven’t COMPLETELY lost my marbles. Yet. If it were not for this magical elixir called coffee, I would have to check myself into the nearest sanitarium to get the care I so desperately need.  If motherhood has shown me anything, it is the need to let go of being embarrassed by a chemical dependency.  I have degenerated from being the stately lady who sips artisan brewed coffee in her state of the art frappalattemochachocolotta machine, to just mainlining Folger’s freeze dried bullshit they call coffee with the nearest syringe. Oh? Is it already 5:00 am and I’ve ONLY been woken up by my children roughly 100 and 1 times last night? FANTASTIC. Let’s keep this pain-train going with a pot of the black stuff.

Oh, whats that? Is it only 4:35pm? If this was just one more time zone to the left, it would already be happy hour, and that’s all the flimsy excuse I’ll need to get started early!

4. I’m not going on Reddit anymore.

I was looking at the baby bumps subreddit the other day, and this particular new mom posted something that made me question my very SANITY. Allow me to paraphrase the whole thing badly: she was bemoaning the fact that her son needs his “alone time” to do the healthy things that healthy people do, like sleep.

SLEEP, YO.

She was whining about her son going to sleep because, she simply didn’t want him to. She even suggested waking him to play some more (what kind of self flagellating maniac WANTS to be in the company of a sleep deprived toddler?) At first, I was going to write the whole thing off as an exaggeration on her part.
HOWEVER, all these other moms started chiming in with responses like “oh, I know! I just hate putting little Cornelius down for bed because then I have no one to complain about my day with : (”
“Me too! I just LOOOVE chasing little Methuselah around for hours, making sure he doesn’t stick something metal into the nearest outlet! I’m soooo sad when it’s bedtime!!!”
And so on.
And I’m just sitting here stupefied like, ARE YOU BROADS CRAZY? AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE WHOSE FAVORITE TIME OF DAY IS WHEN MY KIDS GO TO BED FOR THE NIGHT?? After we put the kids in their beds for the night, my husband and I cartwheel into bed like, IT CROWD RERUNS HERE WE COME.

Toddlers are clumsy.

I am sympathetic to their struggle. Getting used to your expanding dimensions is awkward, and mastering your gait without looking like an alien’s impression of a human trying to walk is something you might struggle with well into adulthood.

So, every 10 goddamn minutes is beset with one of my kids suddenly toppling over nothing, arms and legs akimbo, all the way down, screaming bloody murder, the entire time, in super-slow-motion, until the inevitable face-plant. And I rarely see it coming, so all I can do is offer helpful pointers AFTER the fact like, “in the future, try not to do that” and “there’s a wall there” or “cartwheeling out of the bathtub is frowned upon.” My husband is comparatively clumsy, but instead of merely hurting himself, his brand of clumsy goes OUTWARD, like a fast and dramatic movie explosion, pulverizing everything within reach of the sonic boom. No, wait, that’s unfair to him. Maybe its more of an IMPLOSION, the way scientists describe a black-hole suddenly ripping through space and time, sucking anything not bolted down into its maw. Devoid of light. Consuming abstract concepts, like time itself. The sort of complete annihilation only gods are capable of. Or toddlers. And now I’ve forgotten what I was talking about.

One time, he was in the bathroom unrolling himself a few squares from the toilet paper roll, a routine gesture for the coordinated. He somehow managed to make the whole thing (toilet paper roll and the toilet paper roll holder thingy) come apart from itself in an awesome explosion, leaving fragments scattered about the bathroom floor. Fragments he did not bother to pick up. For, like, DAYS. I marked it on my calendar so I’d have extra ammo to pick a fight with him about it. After the third day of me stepping over the debris, I realized he could no longer SEE the destruction, which meant he had gotten used to it just lying on the floor. The wreckage had now just become part of the scenery for him. I resentfully put it back together for him. But more for myself. And not before I gave him a good TONGUE LASHING about how toilet paper goes on the toilet paper roll holder because that’s what it’s there for, it’s FUNCTIONAL and not just there for decoration, you don’t leave the roll on the windowsill when you have a capable toilet roll holder. Also, I stressed the importance of cleaning up after one’s self, especially when it’s the scene of a crime you’ve just committed.
“Why?” he said. “Leaving it on the windowsill is easier.”
“Getting it off the roller is just as easy,” I said. “And how did you even destroy the roller in the first place? You need less than an ounce of strength to unroll toilet paper. You are a BARBARIAN.”

There was another time when he managed to accidentally backward somersault off the edge of our bed, nearly kicking the TV over. I didn’t know it was possible to ACCIDENTALLY somersault, off of anything, ever. There was also the time he was opening a can of beans, and he had almost gotten the entire can open without incident. But LIKE MAGIC, he managed to spill half the canned beans onto the counter top, simultaneously slicing his nail bed on the edge of the can. This same incident also left permanent blood stains on our shower curtain after he ran into the bathroom for something to stop the bleeding. A shower curtain I chose for its bright and cheerful colors, now left looking like evidence from the scene of a gruesome murder, thanks to my husband.

Or the time he was innocently baking potato wedges in the oven when oil dripped onto the bottom and caught fire in our apartment. An alarming, decent-sized fire that filled the kitchen with smoke. He eventually put the fire out, but not before he somehow tore the blinds completely away from the kitchen window. His theory is that everything around him must be cheaply built, and I need to stop victim blaming.

Not to mention the numerous times I’ve asked him to bring me a glass of water, only for him to spill half the glass over everything on my nightstand. Okay, that only happened once, but it was riding on the back of him telling me he’d lost his wedding ring and it had been missing for DAYS. So, I was already in a foul mood when he spilled water all over my things.

Later, another set of window blinds fell under his sword. It happened as he was innocently trying to tiptoe his way around our bed so he wouldn’t wake our son during his nap. He’d almost made it around the bed, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to leave the room without making some colossal noise on his way out. Suddenly, he tripped over nothing, and almost fell through a window. Slamming a hand against the windowpane to catch himself, he cleanly sliced the blinds in half. For weeks afterwards, the blinds hung down both sides of the window like two permanently flaccid penises, and for WEEKS, because we were both too lazy to fix them. He was too lazy to take them down and replace them, and I was too lazy to nag him into taking them down and replacing them.

As of now, he is on his yearly hiking trip with his buddy, during which, they proceed on their annual death-march through the Appalachian mountains for weeks (or wherever the hell they are, I don’t even know where my husband is) possibly fighting off bloodthirsty Deliverance hillbillies (I’m racist) under the blazing June sun.

All I can do is sit and wait for his return, keeping my fingers crossed that he hasn’t accidentally cartwheeled himself off of a cliff. I’ll wait while simultaneously snatching my children by the back of their shirts so they don’t walk into the nearest wall, or moonwalk off the nearest flight of stairs.

Me trying to figure out what to cook for breakfast

I’m a stay-at-home mom, so it’s fair to say that every day of my life is comparable to the heartwarming Christmas movie, Die Hard.

I (naturally) am the hero John McClane, who is trapped in a claustrophobic gauntlet with morally bankrupt antagonists, and is just trying to escape with his life (and save the hostages, but who cares about that).

My son Brandon (obviously) is Hans Gruber, the criminal mastermind, whose motives are as treacherous as they are villainous, and only John can stop him. Where Hans Gruber wanted to kidnap and murder, Brandon wants to eat cat litter and throw things off of our 3rd floor balcony. And only I can stop him. But, am I trapped in here with HIM, or is he trapped in here with ME?

My daughter Ayanna is (clearly) Karl, the most loyal, bloodthirsty and adorable of all the henchmen. But she isn’t so much bloodthirsty as she is MILKthirsty, I don’t think I’ve ever met a hungrier person in my LIFE.

Our tiny apartment doesn’t have all the scope and grandeur of the Nakatomi plaza, but it’s just as claustrophobic when you’re locked in overnight with terrorists. Oops I mean, children.

My husband is Al, the beat cop who was not physically available to help John, but was the best damn moral support a hero could ask for. Moreover, Al was John’s only link to the world outside of the murder maze. They communicated via the world’s most powerful walkie-talkie, just like my husband and I, as I send him endless texts complaining about all the non-stop 80s action going on up in here and BEGGING him to bring me a bottle of wine when he gets off work.

While Hans and Karl were agents of chaos and mayhem, John was the custodian of order and justice. And it was in the keeping of order and justice that John was compelled to pick up the biggest machine gun he could find and dole out lots of justice with lots of bullets.

I (fortunately) don’t have a machine gun at my disposal, but what I DO have is a little tool called TIME-OUT, and I will use it on my little Hans Gruber every time he gets out of line. And I THINK it works. Sometimes.

In fact, we ACCIDENTALLY acted out a key scene from Die Hard the other day. It was the scene when Hans and Karl shoot out all the glass after realizing that John hadn’t been wearing shoes for the entire movie. Our crippled hero dragged himself and his shredded feet to temporary safety, and later, he nursed his wounds while Al regaled him with a tale of the time he accidentally shot a child. I similarly dragged my lower half to safety after I damn near broke a toe on the edge of a chair as my little versions of Hans and Karl screamed vaguely European baby gibberish at me. After I crawled army-style into the bathroom and kicked the door shut, I laid there texting my husband a stream of angry emojis and curse words until he got home from work.

And EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT. Brandon and I act out the final scene when Hans WOULDN’T LET GO of John’s wife’s wrist, and was dangling out of a billion-story-window, refusing to die, like a true gangsta. But in OUR version, it’s me trying to get my son to go the living hell to sleep at a decent hour before midnight. Because the closer it gets to midnight and he’s STILL awake, the more I feel like my parenting game is super ashy and needs some industrial strength lotion.

But even when you think Hans and his henchmen have been subdued, SURPRISE! Karl tears out of his body bag holding a machine gun (because they packed the gun INSIDE of the bag with him for some reason) and tries to murk John once and for all. Once I finally get my son to stop fighting it, and let the force (I mean the sleep) flow through him, Ayanna starts to stir, and she is ready to WRECK SHOP if I don’t do something about it immediately. So, I’m like, quick! Cram a boob in her mouth so she’ll shut up! And she usually settles down and finally, they are BOTH asleep. Then, my husband wraps a thermal army blanket around my shoulders, and tells me everything’s gonna be alright.

Because we’ve got to act out Die Hard all over again tomorrow.