An Open Letter To Myself In Twelve Years

Dear 45 year old Claire:

I assume you are reading this for one of the following reasons:

• Every woman in the house has PMS right now.
• Your daughter has a “boy issue” and has locked herself in her room after screaming how much she hates you.
• Your son and his friends just ate the dinner you prepared early, mistaking slow cooked ribs for his after school snack.
• One of the kids crashed the car.
• One of the kids crashed someone else’s car.
• The school found pot in the locker belonging to your child.
• You just found porn in the browser history of your laptop and your email is receiving non-stop unsolicited X-rated ads every hour.
• Nobody is listening to you.

Take heart. You have forgotten how far you’ve come. Consider this:

• Your back does not hurt from carrying an 18 pound sack of live water weight in and out of the car three times a day in ninety-degree-one-hundred-percent-humidity weather.
• You do not have poop on your clothes.
• You did not get pooped on in the middle of the grocery store, nor did you have to bathe any of your children at all today, let alone in a grocery store sink.
• You have not done anyone else’s laundry besides your own in several years.
• You have not been chasing down a smell in the house and you did not find a poopy diaper that had fallen behind the dryer two days ago.
• Though you may feel like you have been repeating yourself for the last few years, at least you can speak in more than three-word sentences, and you are no longer double checking to see that all of your children are wearing underwear.
• After cooking dinner, you got to sit down and eat without having to serve and cut three portions into teeny tiny pieces. You did not throw any leftovers into a blender. You don’t even have to deal with leftovers anymore!
• You did not miss that diaper sale last week at CVS.
• You went grocery shopping alone today. You heard yourself think. You enjoyed an entire cup of coffee before it got cold.
• You do not have poop on your clothes.