Inadequacy is the new black

I don't often wallow in self-pity, and frankly, I wasn't feeling particularly wallow-y when I woke up this morning. Admittedly, there are times in my unemployed life when I'm stricken with panic attacks about my future and if I really have any skills at all or if I've been faking it all these years, but for the most part, they're fleeting moments. I'm usually able to convince myself that this is just an elongated blip in the road. That is, until this morning when I decided to pick up my alma mater's magazine. I always start off with the class notes to see if any of my friends have submitted any exciting news and then I'll skim for whatever seems interesting. In my current (somewhat fragile) condition, I should remember, however, that Wellesley College alums who make the magazine are generally not sitting around managing loads of laundry and summer-time activities with a 7-year-old. That doesn't mean there aren't Wellesley grads who are home with their kids and happy to be doing it, it just means they're not the cover story in our magazine. The cover story this time around is called, "Service & Sacrifice: Wellesley Women in the War Zone." Okay, seriously, how can I even hold a candle to women in the armed forces? How can I complain about my silly life when these women are on the battlefield? Fine, I'll compare myself to the other women in the magazine that I can "relate" to...like Madeleine Albright. See what I mean? Just when I began contemplating whether or not the glossy cover would catch fire, I came across an excerpt from one of the graduation speeches given by Kimberly Dozier, class of '87. She's a CBS News Correspondent who was severely injured in a roadside bombing in Baghdad in 2006 and nearly lost both her legs. Know what she had to say? She said, "…every time I ran into a wall, I had two choices on how to face it – hope or fear. You don't always choose what happens to you – or where you end up. But you can choose how you respond to it – and why you do what you do." That snapped me out of my self-pity party pretty quickly. How about you?

It's been one long day

The summer, that is. So far, all the rain in Boston combined with the daily challenge of entertaining a 7-year-old while simultaneously (1) pretending to look for a job, (2) paying attention to the card company, (3) and using exercise as a procrastination technique, I find that every day just blurs into the next, and not always in a good way. I've always considered myself a relatively calm person, however, I've been having these out-of-body experiences lately where I see myself starting to lose it, recognize the opportunity to stop the downward spiral, ignore that opportunity, and subsequently flail toward the Dark Side. Most of the time it's when my son decides it's in his best interest to test my limits by either mouthing off to me, demanding that I bring him something, insisting that I clean up his crap, or all of the above. I'm pretty sure he's under the impression that he won't suffer any consequences that will actually impact him in a negative way, so why not see what he can away with. I'm willing to admit my shortcomings as a parent and I often see how years of ineffective disciplinary tactics are now biting me in the butt, however, in my defense, the kid really knows how to wear me down. Anyway, I just thought I'd state, for the record, that I finally hit the wall yesterday afternoon and stooped to a new low. Granted, it was an effective low, but a low nonetheless: Soap in the mouth. It's one thing to mouth off at me, it's another thing to mouth off at me using my own (slightly profane) words. That's where I draw the line and pour on the liquid detergent. I almost had to wrestle him to the ground to get the job done, but fortunately I decided to employ a much more effective tool: the Daddy Threat. My son knows that more often than not, my threats are empty (until yesterday), but Daddy never fails on the follow through and that was enough for compliance. I'm not proud of myself...okay, I am a little proud of myself. Is that wrong?