Inside Out.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Matt Damon. He never fails to entertain, he’s devoted to his wife and family, and he managed to be in the right line when adequate doses of smarts, personality, wit and physical appeal were handed out.

He also happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to my late husband. They run and walk the same way, their knees bend inward in the same way, they’re built the same way and they look the same way. And their escapades are expensive, frustrating and inconvenient.

Thing 1 (whispering in the dark movie theatre): “Look {Thing 2}. It’s going to be just like watching Dad get rescued from Mars!”
Me (whispering back): “Your Dad wouldn’t have lasted a single day on Mars.”

He wouldn’t. He wasn’t able to science the shit out of anything, he misplaced everything and when he entered a kitchen mayhem ensued. And, despite the fact that he’s been gone these seven years, he managed to embed at least one of these things into the genetic makeup of his son.

Team Manager: “He left them in Flagstaff.”

For the past four hours, I have been the NASA of hockey moms, trying to rescue two stranded and very expensive hockey helmets across two hours of curvy, hilly highway, heavy rain and snow against a quickly approaching deadline.

On a day where I’ve also caught a whiff of an entire community’s waste, missed another important milestone in their childhood because I simply couldn’t make things work, drove 75 minutes to arrive at an appointment 45 minutes late and fell on my ass in the pouring rain.

Following a weekend where I spilled a can of cold soup down my arms, fell asleep holding a cup of hot tea, found a cockroach in my purse, wrestled the 10-foot tree to the ground and cracked my thumb down its center.

Days like this are like storm clouds. I can see them gathering on the horizon, bits and pieces piling on top of each other with nothing to slow them down until they erupt and that quiet calm begins again. And yet they aren’t the mess they used to be … I manage to navigate them with a semblance of dignity. Humor. Calm.

And my underwear inside out.