Sometimes, you can wake up and just sort of know what kind of day it’s going to be. Good or bad, you just have a sense of it. When it happens like that, I can at least feel like I have a head start and can get ahead of it, if it feels like it’s going to be shitty.

This happens most often to me during the bleak of winter. I don’t do well when the sun isn’t around and the weather isn’t warm. So if I wake up and feel untested or sad or just bleh, I immediately take a look outside. Does everyone really hate me or is it just overcast? Most often than not, it’s the latter. Knowing how to navigate my moods and the weather has been an incredibly valuable skill.

But man…when I wake up happy and then have to get my girls up and they’re not also waking up happy? That’s when it gets weird.

My oldest is pretty easy to wake up and get moving. She just sort of…does.

The other one? It’s a landmine most days. Did she sleep well? Did she have weird dreams? Was she too hot? Too cold? Is the light too bright? Is her alarm too annoying?

Unless it’s literally Christmas morning, there’s no telling what she’s going to be like when she wakes up. I feel like I have to keep a running list of all the things I need to check and verify before waking her up. Like a damn plane captain. It’s exhausting. So if things go sideways, my day feels almost immediately ruined and I have a hard time coming back from it. It doesn’t matter if the sun is shining or it’s cloudy enough to summon a Cullen. A morning going sideways will inevitably send me spiraling.

The worst feeling in the world is knowing my kids headed off to school with me not at my best. Tears in the morning are the worst. Second only to fights over shoes and brushing teeth.

I see them for maybe 60minutes in the morning before they spend the next 8 hours at school and if things don’t go perfectly, I feel like a failure and spend the next several hours wondering how I can come back from it or how this will affect their psyche long term or how much therapy they’re going to need because we fought over socks that felt weird.

Being a mom is a never ending war of emotions and while most days, I feel at least marginally prepared for it, some days, I just need a cease fire and to sleep.