I’m home sick today.
Every time I’m home sick, I do the same thing. I think about all the errands I could get done. I get ready to do them. Then, I feel sick. I realize I’m home because I’m too sick to do anything. I feel annoyed that I don’t have time to do my errands. I watch movies to take my mind off things. Before I know it, it’s time to pick up my kids. I feel sad that my sick day was wasted.
I hate psychos.
I used to find psychos interesting. Then I found them tedious. Now I just hate them because they love me so much. They’re just like dogs, in that I secretly hate dogs but they still lick me all the time.
If you’re a psycho, don’t bother me. Don’t leave long, rambling messages on my answering machine. Don’t write me long, long emails about your violent or sexual thoughts. Don’t ask me for money on the street.
Psychos, leave me alone.
One difficult thing about being a single mom
is the fear. Normally I don’t go out at night with the kids unless my cousin or my boyfriend or some other adult is with us. Last night I had to take my kids somewhere at night, and it stressed me out a lot. I have an extreme fear of crime, you see.
I can spend a whole drive thinking about being mugged. If you were a crack-addled mugger desperate for crack money, wouldn’t you mug a single mom of three? She’d have her hands full with her purse, her keys, and a bag of groceries or something. She’d be distracted, yelling at her kids to stay close. You could just run right up, put the knife to her neck, make her give you everything because she’d be too scared to fight back and risk you hurting her kids. Or risk you killing her in front of her kids.
I think about that stuff while I’m driving with my kids at night, and I start getting worked up. I have a vivid imagination, and I can smell the sweat and piss on this guy’s clothes as I’m digging my nails into his neck, grinding his stomach between my knee and the dirt, biting his face or anything else in order to keep his hand down — his hand with the knife.
I’m thinking all this stuff and it’s giving me a headache and then one of my kids says “Mom” and I say, “Be quiet! Can’t you see that Mommy’s driving?! Be quiet so I can drive! Shit!”
Same thing when we drove home, even though there’d been nothing to fear but a bunch of Day of the Dead papier mache skeletons, and I’m not scared of those. When we got home, even though our apartment creeps me out sometimes because of the train tracks adjoining it and the occassional beer bottle on the ground… when we got home, I was glad we don’t live in a house on a dark street.
My friends keep saying I should get a house and quit throwing my money away on apartments. There’s this one house near my work that looks pretty cute and cosy, comfortable on a tree-lined street. But I realized last night that I’d hate to drive to that house alone at night with my kids. Because, if I were a crack addict, that’d be the house I’d pick to rob. You wouldn’t even have to break in. Just wait for the harried single mom to get home. She’ll be distracted by her arguing kids… by dragging the sleepy kid up the stairs. Just run up with your knife…
Our next place is going to be an apartment — bigger, higher, more protected, and way more expensive than this one. My friends think I’d be happier in a house. But they’ve never been single moms.
Also, in apartments, they spray for bugs.
