Oh for crap’s sake!!!!

That’s it. Seriously. I resign. There will be a job posting for Mother Chaos up on Hot Jobs soon.

@*^&@in’ @*^&@ity @*^&@ @*^&@.

About fifteen minutes ago, I got a phone call from Boo Bug’s teacher. It’s the last day of school, and they hired a pair of clowns to come and entertain the children.

Why they had to pay extra for clowns when they have an entire school board already on the payroll is another topic for another day.

ANYWAY.

Turns out Boo Bug has decided that she is deathly afraid of clowns.

She is not actually afraid of them, by the way. She is just ever so much with the drama lately, and she wanted to just come home and start her summer vacation, so we drum up some dramatic exclamations and bingo. Teacher calls mom to come save her from the terrifying clowns.

So I get into the van FORTY MINUTES EARLY, on this, the ONLY DAY in OVER A MONTH when I have had even one (1) minute with no Denizens at all in the house.

You can imagine how I felt about giving up my forty minutes, people.

So I drive over to the school and HOT HOLY CRAP, it is a zoo. Classes are having parties, and my fellow parents are fat lazy beggars for whom a little walking would be a DAMNED GOOD THING, JUST SAYIN’ unwilling to park out on the street and walk a whole entire block to their parties, SO NATURALLY, they have just parked their cars in the dropoff lane and gone wherever they’ve gone.

It either tells you just how stressed out I am OR that my soul has become a shriveled blacken husk that I am hoping where they have gone is to H-E-L-L.

So here I am, stuck behind approximately forty-million other cars. Some are illegally parked. Some are idling because HELLO, the morning special needs preschool is getting out RIGHT NOW. This is tough, because the morning class seems to have the higher percentage of students with severe physical impairments – some of these kids can’t walk a block and need to be picked up RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF THE GATE – where the illegal parkers have chosen to leave their vehicles.

H-E-L-L, I mean it.

So I’m in line. I’m thinking calm, peaceful thoughts. I am reminding myself that it is an honor and a privilege to be a mother. I am telling myself that all the things I wanted to be doing right now, while important in their own way, are not mission-critical. I won’t be officially a working stiff until next week, so what I’m doing today in my precious time alone, sob sob is not as important as my sweet, wonderful, precious, couldn’t-be-replaced Boo Bug.

I am living in the Now!

I am accepting the Way Things Are!

I am opening the sliding door for Boo Bug, who is running to me with her backpack flopping behind her saying, “Sorry, mommy, from [sic] making you stop doing your stuff to come get me! But turns out that I don’t like clowns anymore!”

I tell her it’s OK. We talk about clowns, and why she really wanted to come home early because we both know that she knows they’re just people and IN FACT she knows one of the clowns from previous (fun) experiences SO! What’s actually going on here? (She was tired, she was unhappy, and she wanted to come home.)

We get home.

I walk back upstairs and start getting back to what I was doing.

The phone rings.

It’s the school secretary, who says, “OK, so, you do have Boo Bug, right?”

There was an awkward pause. And then I said, through gritted teeth and pronouncing each word very carefully…

“Are. You. Telling. Me. That. She. Just…LEFT?!”

Oh yes, she did. She saw the line of cars, made the logical assumption that our van would be one of them, slipped right out the door and ran for it.

Now, her teacher had said to me on the phone, “I will meet you out in front in about five minutes” when she called. I assumed that her teacher had been standing with her in the front, had seen my car waaaaaaaaaay back there, and had sent Boo Bug to me while she went back inside to tend to her over-sugared, clown-stimulated class of goblins kindergarteners.

No. She had taken Boo Bug to the office, and Boo Bug had taken it upon herself to just…leave.

Mercury in the water?
Stupid serum in the vaccinations?
Poor parenting?

Sigh.

OK. That’s it. My time is up. I must now leave to pick up Captain Adventure, followed by Eldest and Danger Mouse within twenty minutes of that.

Summer vacation begins now.

PRAY FOR ME.