I kinda battled with myself as to whether I should write this post – but in the end, it came down to this: I’m a writer [in the loose sense of the term], and I needed to get my thoughts and feelings down in words.

I think Jenny on the Spot said it best in her ‘Daily Shot‘ from yesterday, [and I'm paraphrasing here] ‘sometimes, our lives aren’t always sparkles and ponies, sometimes we’re in a funky mood and come off as Debbie Downers’. As a blogger, I struggle with how much of that I should write about. How much whining can my readers handle before they start rolling their eyes? How much complaining about my ‘hard life’ until someone starts lecturing me about the people in the world that REALLY have it hard? How do you stay REAL, without coming off like an asshole?

It’s a fine line.

Last weekend the boys and I drove up my my grandparent’s house in Eastern Oklahoma. It’s the same little town and little house I’ve been visiting them at for the past 25 years. When I was moving around the world with my military family, it was one of the only places that I felt was constant. It was ‘home’, but not really. It’s hard to explain how neat it was to see my little boys run around the house that I once ran around with my cousins in. That might not seem like a big deal to someone whose parents are still living in the house they grew up in – but for me it’s surreal. At one point, the Froggy followed me in to the bathroom and I thought, ‘wow … I remember following my mom into this bathroom when I was 5 or 6 and bugging her … now I’m the parent’.

It kinda blew my mind.

That being said, it was a really hard weekend. Neither of the boys felt really good – they’re both battling coughs and allergies right now. They were in a weird place, they didn’t sleep well, they definitely didn’t nap and therefore were cranky little dudes for the whole weekend. The 3.5 hour drive up there and back weren’t much better either. There were temper tantrums, back-talking, arguments – and all the while, I just want to enjoy [and more importantly I wanted THEM to enjoy] hanging out at this very special place with my grandparents.

I came home on Sunday evening cranky. Defeated. Stressed out. There were more fits. More bedtime issues. My general ‘give a shit’ meter was completely on empty – all I wanted to do was to fall into bed and pretend like my children weren’t screaming one bedroom over from mine. I was more than a little happy to send them off to school the next morning.

And then I turned on the television yesterday afternoon.

Do you think any of those kiddos trapped under rubble were sent to school by angry, stressed-out parents? I do. I bet there were parents that dropped them off at school and either drove home or drove to work and sighed in relief. Who were thankful for a few precious hours of no whining, no arguing, no tattling … a few precious hours of adult interaction, or alone time. And then Mother Nature dropped a huge fucking ball of insanity onto their town, and into their lives. As I was working from home yesterday afternoon and watching the news coverage, all I could think about was picking up my babies and holding them tight … and feeling so guilty about shuffling them half-heatedly out the door that morning.

This whole ‘parenting’ thing is an emotional roller coaster of insanity. It’s filled with hills of guilt and love and stress and sorrow. Loops of craziness and spirals of giggles and sometimes tunnels of despair. The whole, ‘take time for yourself, but don’t ever take a second with your babies for granted’ thing has me confused 98 percent of the time. I guess all we can do, is the best we can do … and the same holds true with blogging or writing, right?

RIGHT?