Long Days, Short Years, Stiff Drinks

This morning I noticed that I was very short tempered.  Tiny things that wouldn't normally bother me were making me red hot mad in an instant.  After snapping at the boys for a very minor infraction I stepped myself back.  Whoa, sister.  What's up? Then it hit me.  All at once.  It started as that familiar sweeping feeling of sadness that literally takes my breath away.  Then the sort of scratchy, antsy feeling inside my chest followed.  Like I wanted to run away but couldn't and it wouldn't help anyway. Ah.  It's Father's Day.  My first without one.  A father, I mean. Last Father's Day I gave him a really great insulated water bottle to take with him to the golf course.  So he could stay hydrated and healthy.  I'd been nagging him to drink more water.  Little did we know he was already sliding into stage four by then. Has it really been nearly a year since this all began? I've been ignoring it all week.  Set it aside to focus on th

By nature, I'm a high strung person.  As I've mentioned before, I yell a lot.  I'm fairly controlling and I want things to be just right and just right usually means my way.  I get totally bent out of shape when things don't go the way I planned.  And I do this all to myself.  No one puts more pressure on me than me.  I recognize these traits in myself (I refuse to call them flaws...they are beneficial when it comes to many enterprises) and I accept them.  Lucky for me, my family and friends seem to do the same.  My husband rolls with the tide of my crazitude and doesn't even resent me for it. Life with little kids is crazy stressful on its own.  They drive parents bananas with their constant and unceasing demand for care and attention and to rub salt into our already weeping wounds they turn it up a notch with messes upon messes and pushes of buttons and back talking and heart stopping risk taking and more and more and more and at the end of a normal day you