Stress and Ice Cream

I just polished off the tail end of a carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream, the green kind, which, for the record, is the kind I don't even like. When I go for mint chocolate chip, it's the white kind, the natural kind, the Breyers kind. The green stuff? Blech.

This is where I go when I am stressed. To the green stuff.

And these days, it seems to be the only way I know that whole stress thing is even happening.

The single mother of three (amazing, gorgeous, fabulous) kids, who is working her backside off, who is managing budgets and bank accounts and groceries and home repairs and a dog who won't stop barking (but is well loved all the same), who is fighting for (and sometimes against) her tweenager with Asperger's Syndrome, who is mothering a sometimes sad and angry tweenish nine-year-old and a sometimes sad and angry five-year-old who wants his mommy all the time and only gets her sometimes.

Oh, wait, that wasn't a complete sentence.

I think the stress just lives here. It lives here in the loud and the barking and the rarely ever leaving my house. It lives in the bad grammar and the dirty dishes and the kids chewing with their mouths open. It's so present I don't notice it until something happens to make it bigger.

It got bigger. It got bigger because the au pair we've lived with and loved for 18 months had to move on into her own life. And because the new au pair arrived (although I'm sure, now that we've made it through the first week, that we will come to love him, too).

Transitions suck. And kids - especially the little ones - don't really understand good-bye.

They do understand ice cream.

Too bad I'm not sharing.