When Mommy Has Homework

And of course Mommy waits for the last possible minute because I am busy saving lives, one set of lungs at a time, for a gazillion hours a week. And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that this program I am in is definitely not for the faint of heart. As in a paper due every two days. Really, y'all, I'm not kidding. In APA format, please. Usually I manage to spit them out like crazy since I am the master of the last minute paper. When John was in school, this enabled me to be his enabler. He would wait until the last minute and I would feel bad for him and crank out a paper for him in addition to my 24 credit hours' worth of classes. And he would always get A's on my papers, and thus the bad behavior on his part was reinforced.

But these are my papers and no one is going to rescue me like I did John. And I most decidedly waited until the last minute this time. I had until 11:59 PM Colorado time to complete the paper, and I submitted it at 11:43. Well, the paper and the 2 ads I had to design for some unknown telecommunications company in North Carolina. Ask me what I know about telecomm and I will tell you I can log my ass onto the internet and hit "talk" on the cordless phone. Seriously. And I had to market a telecomm company that manages the telecomm expenses of multi-location national companies. Seriously. It is like a sick joke. And so I had to come up with this marketing plan.

Excuse me, what? A marketing plan? WTF is that?

And so I was perched at the kitchen table for hours, looking haggard in an old pair of scrubs and some reading glasses, main-lining coffee and muttering expletives under my breath in the hope that Evan, who was awake and in the adjacent room, would not hear me. And he kept coming into the room to show me something or other, or tell me some random fact he learned in school a week ago that just came to his 9-year-old brain. And I am trying to be Good Mom and act interested. I sincerely hope the "MMMM-Hmmmmm"s I kept offering up sounded like they came from the heart. I really do. But what I really wanted to say was, "Evan, Mommy has this insanely difficult farking marketing plan to write. Do you know what a marketing plan is????" But I didn't because I love him and cannot afford the extra therapy. But I must have had APA on the brain because one of the random facts he spewed in my direction was, "Mom, palm oil is killing the rainforests!" Or some shit like that. And I responded with, "That's interesting, Evan, can you cite your sources on that information?" To which John busted out laughing, asking me if I really asked that of our 9-year-old kid. And--surprise, surprise--my little smartass came back in the room and thrust his Time for Kids issue at me, exclaiming, "Here's my source, Mother." Ugh. What was supposed to happen was Evan was supposed to be stumped and try to figure out what in the hell I was asking of him. It was supposed to buy more silence, less interruptions, and at least get me through the SWOT analysis of the paper. This is what one gets when they raise a smart kid. Because then not only was he back at the kitchen table with me, but he had the magazine and he actually wanted me to read the oh-so-interesting article of how palm oil is going to kill off all of the rainforests. Seriously. So when I looked at him and said, "Yes, Evan, but how is TeleSource going to reach a bigger market segment to compete for a bigger piece of the telecommunication dollars pie???", his eyes glazed over and he finally left me alone.

And now I realized I never got a goodnight hug. But the damned paper was in on time.

This is what I get when I say I want it all. I get just that. And something or someone always suffers just a bit.