If you give a mom a coffee

If you give a mom a coffee, she’ll want a donut to go with it.

So she’ll stop by this great bakery on the way to the kid’s school drop off, get the éclair instead, and eat it in four bites.  Stuffing her face with saturated fat and sugar will remind her that she’s fifteen pounds overweight. So she heads to the gym.

At the gym, she starts to run on the treadmill.  Running on the treadmill and staring at a wall covered in closed-captioned televisions annoys the fire out of her because she can’t hear a dang thing and has to keep up with all those words popping up after someone talks.  It’s distracting.

All that useless television that no one watches because people’s heads are buried in their iphones makes her think that her mind is just a collection of closed caption nonsense with words popping up after the thoughts have passed.  And when a mom starts to focus on distracting energy, she obviously thinks of her two-year-old son, who loves animals and trains and has an odd way of making her sit in a chair holding him for a solid hour just to hear him breathe and inhale the loveliness of his messy, sweaty toddler hair.

Sweat reminds her of the gym, where she is currently still residing, and she glances down and sees that she’s burned off only 92 calories.  Close enough.  She gets into her car that smells slightly of either vinegar or rotten milk and notices her kid’s spare clothes sitting on the front seat that were supposed to be sent to school for water day.  It’s a little red shirt from the Austin Zoo.  Which reminds her of the Austin Zoo.   It’s plainly written on the shirt, for heaven’s sake.  That’s just called reading.  But she’s famished and dehydrated and exhausted from trying to read all that closed captioning.  Cut her some slack.

So the next day mom hauls everyone to the small rescue zoo to see the prairie dogs and peacocks and ride the train.  As she’s passing by the grey wolves she thinks what a really strange zoo that has a hundred goats and a large potbelly pig with not one single zebra.  Of course zebras remind her of nothing, so she stares down at her bulging waistline and pats her children on the head.  She thinks she might hit the gym, but her son needs a nap so off they go for lunch and a big pile of laundry and she’s consumed with guilt over the fact that she paid a hundred bucks to the YMCA this month for a stupid 92 calories.

When she gets home, she notices that her husband hasn’t unloaded the dishwasher as promised.  She’s faced with a pile of dog vomit and her son has decided he’s rather not sleep but instead run around in concentric circles around the rug declaring to all who will listen that he’s batman.  She scratches her head at why all the magazines are not in their proper place but then realizes that the magazine rack has been converted to a trailer to be drug behind the rocking horse by one of her best winter scarves.  Her daughter is whining that she only likes mac-and-cheese and that she doesn’t like peanut butter and I could have sworn I told you that already, but the mom magically can’t hear any noise coming out of her daughter’s mouth and suddenly remembers there are dark chocolate oatmeal cookies in the pantry.  So she decides to let the house run amuck while she sits in the corner reading about Frank McCourt’s rotten life in Ireland.  And you know what happens when a momma starts eating cookies and reading a book.

She’ll most likely want a cup of coffee, a handful of Advil, and a babysitter to go along with it.