Tired Mom Diary – Chapter 1 – I Have Done Hard Things

It’s 6:10 on Saturday morning. I’m writing this in the downstairs bathroom with the fan on, because the fan makes it sound like I’m doing something nobody should interrupt. Nobody has interrupted yet. This is the longest I’ve been alone behind a closed door since June.

First week. Nothing happened. By the end of this it’s going to look like something did. It didn’t. It was a normal week. I’m very good at normal weeks.

On Monday my boss closed her office door. At our company that means either a layoff or a gift.

“I need a favour,” Diane said. She slid a folder across the desk like we were in a movie from 1994. Nobody uses folders anymore. The folder was a statement.

The folder was Gord.

Gord runs operations for a regional distribution company with forty trucks, three warehouses and, as far as anyone can tell, one feeling, which is suspicion. We’ve been trying to move them onto our system for eleven months. In that time Gord has gone through two of our account managers. One is on leave. The other sells real estate now and says she’s never been happier. She said that about the account too, in the beginning.

“Go-live is the first week of December,” Diane said. “Before the holidays. Obviously.”

I said yes before she finished the word obviously.

I was thrilled. I walked back to my desk like someone had handed me a puppy. Some women get that feeling from a bath. I get it from a man nobody else can handle and a date that can’t move. You know where you stand with Gord. He hates you. That’s a starting position, and you can work with a starting position.

At 10:40, in the middle of mapping Gord’s warehouses, I remembered the water bottle.

The purple one. On the counter next to the toaster, full, exactly where I’d put it so I wouldn’t forget it.

I texted Ben: water bottle on counter

she’ll drink from the fountain

she’s six, not a fern

Then, because he is who he is: want me to run it over? I’m on lunch at 12

I said no. Then I thought about her at the fountain, her little mouth on the metal thing every other kid in Grade 1 has licked, and I spent the next nine minutes not thinking about the fountain.

He ran it over. I didn’t ask him to. That’s the kind of man I married. The good kind. The kind who runs the water bottle over.

She drank from the fountain anyway. She told me at dinner. She said it tasted like a spoon.

Wednesday was my first call with Gord.

He opened with, “So you’re the new one.”

I said I was the last one.

The pause was long enough that I heard a truck backing up somewhere behind him. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Then he laughed. One syllable, like a door he hadn’t meant to open.

For forty minutes he told me everything wrong with our software, our company, our previous two people and the concept of the cloud, which he doesn’t trust because “where is it.” I took notes. I agreed where he was right, which was more often than my company would like. Where he wasn’t, I didn’t. Then I asked about the third warehouse, the one nobody had mentioned in eleven months of meeting notes, and he went quiet again. A different kind of quiet.

“Nobody’s asked about the north one,” he said.

“I’m asking.”

I love this part. It’s the moment a room that was pointed at you turns around and points at the problem with you.

Somewhere around minute twenty-six my phone lit up on the desk. Ben, from the grocery store. A photo: two tubs of yogurt side by side, a hand holding each. Same brand. Same strawberry.

which one

I looked at it for maybe a second while Gord explained what the cold does to forklift batteries.

left. right one is fruit on the bottom. she’ll say it’s lumpy and cry

thx

Gord never knew. Nobody on that call knew that for four seconds I was in the dairy aisle.

Thursday at 10:40 p.m., emptying the backpack, I found the form.

Farm field trip. Next Tuesday. Twelve dollars. Cash only, exact change, in an envelope with her name on it. Due Friday.

Who has cash? What year do they think it is?

My wallet had a Costco card, a gift card for a spa that closed in 2022, and a single American quarter from a trip I don’t remember. Ben’s wallet had a twenty.

So at 10:52 p.m. I drove to Shoppers and bought a pack of gum with a twenty so I’d get the right change. The cashier was nineteen, with a septum ring, and she looked at me like I was a small, sad documentary.

I don’t chew gum. I own gum now.

On the drive home, the way things arrive at eleven at night, I remembered that when Nora was born I wrote a thirty-sixty-ninety day plan. I’m not joking. It was on the fridge. Thirty days: establish feeding routine. Sixty days: sleep stabilized. Ninety days: return to baseline.

Baseline.

I laughed out loud at a red light, by myself, like a lunatic. I wrote that plan six years ago. I’m still waiting on the thirty days.

When I got in, Ben was asleep on the couch, and the TV was asking whether we were still watching. He’d rolled his sleeves up to do the dishes and never rolled them down. One of Nora’s hair elastics was around his wrist. I stood in the doorway holding an envelope marked NORA, FIELD TRIP and looked at his forearms longer than a woman holding that envelope should.

Then I remembered I hadn’t written her last name on it.

There are two Noras.

Friday was a good day.

The kickoff plan went to Gord at noon. At 4:51 p.m. he replied.

Fine.

One word, capital F, period.

It’s not approval. I know the difference. But I sat and looked at it the way you look at a first text from someone you like.

I pulled into the driveway at 5:38.

Turned the engine off.

Didn’t get out.

Nothing happened. I didn’t cry. I wasn’t on my phone. I didn’t have a thought I could tell you about.

The kitchen light was on. Through the window I could see Ben at the stove, and Nora sitting on the counter, which she isn’t allowed to do, swinging her feet and talking with both hands. That means it was a long story. Her stories don’t have ends. He was nodding at the pot.

It looked nice in there. It looked warm. I wanted to be in there.

I just didn’t want to go in yet.

In our car the radio keeps playing after the engine’s off, until you open the door. I’d never been grateful for that before. A song started as I turned onto our street and ended as I reached for the handle, so I know it was three minutes. I’ve heard that song a hundred times. I couldn’t tell you what it’s about.

At work, eventually, you go home. I’ve done it for twenty-five years. There’s a whole ritual: laptop closed, lights off, badge in the pocket. Somewhere around the parking lot, the job stays behind like a coat on a hook.

There is no going home from home.

Before I got out I checked the rearview mirror. Not for tears. There weren’t any. I was checking whether I looked like a woman who’d been sitting in her own driveway for three minutes.

I didn’t. I looked fine.

I got out. Walked up the steps. Looked for my keys, which were in my hand.

Opened the door.

“Mom?”