Stormy weather.

Nobody ever feels fully prepared for parenthood, primarily because nobody else adequately prepares you for it. If any of us felt like we’d been sufficiently prepped and advised on being parents, the human race would die out swiftly and quickly, the current population of women would perform immediate mass hysterectomies and the whole world would be left to be repopulated solely by the Duggars.

One’s level of parental preparation, however, hits an all-time low during thunderstorm time. I don’t care who you are; I don’t care if you’re the Christ of Childcare. You’re never adequately prepped to deal with a terrified child. And since I’m never sufficiently prepared for anything, this pretty much means thunderstorm night is an inevitable shitshow in my house.

It started with a dream, you see. A dream to move my three-year-old into a twin sized bed. So one day, after raiding my parents’ house and taking my childhood bed, I set up a twin sized bed for her. And all was magical until ten minutes later when she began to jump on the bed and the quarter-century old box spring gave out, leaving it about half an inch narrower than the frame itself. Because I’m resourceful (read: broke/lazy), I managed to carefully balance the box spring on the frame, and told E that if she jumped on the bed again, I’d fucking kill her be very upset. Made a mental note to pick up some wood, or something, from Lowe’s and fix it. Somehow. Probably.

Two weeks later and I still hadn’t gone to Lowe’s, 1.) because I work, asshole, and 2.) I’m lazy, so her bed continued to be a careful testament to physics and deep rooted fear of being fucking killed disappointing me, as it stayed intact.

She was fast asleep when the thunderstorm hit; this was also a night when the magical Lovey Fairy visited our house. What, you’ve never heard of the Lovey Fairy? Well, the Lovey Fairy comes and visits at night sometimes, and takes beloved, worn out, threadbare, fucking disgusting, heavily loved loveys, like E’s Sophie Bear, and fixes them. She also leaves them smelling magically of Tide and Downy fabric softener. And, because she lives deep under the ocean, sometimes Sophie Bear is still wet after the Lovey Fairy fixes her (which has nothing to do with the fact that Mommy ran out of quarters for the apartment complex dryer and may have, in fact, stood in the living room twirling Sophie like a helicopter for five minutes and then gave up).



So the thunderstorm rolled in, waking up my soundly slumbering babe, and upon realizing that Sophie Bear had been taken by the malicious and conniving Lovey Fairy – who at that point was going all Betsy Ross on Sophie Bear while drinking a lot of wine – lost her proverbial shit. Sophie was missing an arm at this point, but desperate times call for desperate measures, so I brought the temporarily one-armed Sophie Bear in to my hysterical daughter to try to convince her that she wasn’t going to die by any hand but mine anytime soon.

I handed her Sophie and attempted to soothe her, which quieted her for about 30 seconds before she began screaming bloody murder upon discovering Sophie was missing an arm. Now completely distraught over the storm and armless Sophie Bear, she would not be quieted by any of my methods. So I did the only thing I could think of in that moment, which actually didn’t involve much thought or else I wouldn’t have done it, and that was to get in bed and snuggle her to sleep.

And so I climbed into the bed and wrapped her into my arms, shushing her and holding her and Sophie Bear and listening to the cat yowling ominously from underneath the bed. The storm was raging on outside but we had just quieted down and the worst had passed when…

CRACK-THUD.

The bed fell off the frame under my unbearable adult weight, and there I laid, in a twin-sized bed with a hysterical three-year-old who, in the course of about ten minutes, had been terrified by a storm, saw her beloved Sophie Bear missing a vital limb, and then survived a bed breaking with her gigantic mother’s fat ass in the bed with her while the cat yowled from her box spring prison (at least that was verification that we hadn’t killed the cat).

And so we laid there on the bed, half on the frame, half off, the cat yowling, my daughter sniffling, the storm raging, and all the while, I just wondered how I might be able to get up to drink another glass of wine.