It’s amazing that Smalls and my other half know who the hell I am in the morning. Sometimes I’m convinced that my extreme morning ugly will cause my child nightmares. I don’t even want to go into how pissed I am that my husband wakes up every morning looking all scruffy and sexy and I’m just a big pile of heinous.
For almost a year, Smalls told me I smelled every single morning. What a way to greet the day. Thanks kid. Now, I don’t smell particularly gross, but at the time I think this was her way of letting me know about my morning identity crisis. I would put her to bed all lovely with my eyebrows penciled in, my face all one color, my hair soft and straight, wearing a moderately put together outfit, and I would kiss her goodnight.
The next morning, she would wake me up with some ridiculously loud theme song on the TV. Usually it was something horrible like Teletubbies, but now that she’s figured out how to work the big TV in the living room, she shuts my door, blares Scooby Doo and goes to town with her own breakfast. So she’s either in my room or at her own party when I greet her and man, am I a doozy. I look like the tooth fairy’s evil twin, the Fug Fairy, came and tried to suffocate me with ugly. I have partial eyebrows, a splotchy red face, greasy 90’s grunge hair, half an outfit, and, of course, a few red bumps on my face. At what point do the evil teenage years end because my face is holding on for dear life and I am sooooo ready to move on.
So this is how I say good morning to the two most important people in my life. Bless them or some crap like that because I seriously have no idea how they put up with me looking so craptastic. If I wasn’t so vain, when Smalls gets older I would use my Fug Fairy visits to torture her into submission. Oh, you don’t want to get out of bed this morning? Well, I guess I’ll just take you to school without my face on and then I’ll sit back and watch the ridicule. But I would never, ever do that. My lack of natural beauty would be exposed and I can’t go around letting other people know I’m such a good liar. If I did that, they would start questioning what else I’m so good at hiding. Like maybe liking them.
Last night we got our new soccer schedule in ALL CAPS. My daughter’s new coach was obviously screaming at me to get with it and say goodbye to summer.





Store signs should now say: no shirt, no shoes, no kids with leashes. 
Nora Ephron 



