Jennifer and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Warning: This post is full of things you may not want to read about, like bugs and bodily fluids.  Continue at your own risk.

So yesterday was one of the worst days I’ve had so far this year.  Halfway through, I was crying on Cliff’s shoulder, basically telling him that I had reached my limit.  Then things got worse.  I have to start with a bit of explanation first, so you can understand my state of mind when the day started.

My current calling at church is the Relief Society Mid-week Meeting Committee Chairman, which is a fancy way of saying I’m in charge of the monthly Relief Society activity.  I like it and I’m good at planning parties, but it is also stressful for me because I want everyone to enjoy themselves.  This past month has been more stressful than usual because of the Super Saturday activity coming up in November.  This is a traditional yearly activity where the ladies come make crafts for a few hours on a Saturday.  This year we teamed up with another ward to make things more complicated and annoying (for me at least.)  Plus, although I like crafts, I don’t like unnecessary crafts (like house decorations) which are the typical crafts done at these things.  Thus finding crafts and planning crafts that I wouldn’t want to do goes against my “something for everyone” planning theory.  Also, I have to make sure every woman in the ward knows about it, which means announcing it 5 different times during the 3 hour church block.  This makes me stressed because interrupting + talking = anxiety.  In addition to this, yesterday I taught gospel essentials class for Cliff because he was teaching the High Priest’s group and teaching two lessons back to back sucks. 

Another giant source of anxiety for me right now is Cliff’s parents living with us.  I am generally an organized person and I like everything to have a place.  Everything in my home may not be in the correct place all the time, but everything HAS a place.  Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.  Cliff’s parents are daily bringing things back from their ruined house that don’t have a place yet in my house.  These unplaced things are piling up faster than I can find places for them, mostly because there are no places left!  Nine people in one house means that there is not enough space for things.  I am trying to accommodate as many things as I can, but it causes me anxiety to not have places for things.

Third thing: my Halloween costume.  I have been planning it for months and it is almost done, but Halloween is coming soon (and so are the parties) and I want it to be done but I only have a few hours here and there to finish.  I have 2 pieces left to make and although I could go without them if I needed to, I still want to include them.  This feels like a ticking clock in my head, counting down seconds and minutes and hours that I have left to finish.

So now you know the setting.  Stress about a major upcoming activity added to anxiety about things in my house plus time ticking away from my unfinished project.  Now add to that a cat that meows at 5 o’clock in the morning.  Breakdown coming up.

Yesterday morning, Cliff was away at an early meeting and I got the girls ready for church (9 o’clock church!) and the bags packed and I remembered the handouts and the lesson manual and the crafts and signup sheets.  I even pulled out a tablecloth for the craft display table (gold stars!) when Elizabeth reminded me that she was supposed to give a talk in Primary that day.  She also reminded me that as her substitute teacher, I was the one who had assigned it to her.  I basically handed her the chapter on prayer from the Gospel Principles book and told her to make it up herself.

We almost got to church on time.  We walked in as the congregation was singing the opening song.  I sent the kids in to sit with Cliff while I went to set up the craft display table.  So then I joined them and we sat in the sacrament meeting that I don’t remember very much of and Lexa was still complaining that her head was itchy (it had been itchy all week) and then for some reason I started checking heads and I found 2 tiny bugs in Ellowyn’s hair.  Then I found tiny white things in Catherine’s hair that I had to remove by sliding them down the length of the hair.  And I realized that it was probably lice and then it was definitely lice and then what should I do?  Probably should have taken them all home, but instead I sent them to class (yes, I am THAT person) and just continued through the motions of Sunday at church, teaching the class, making announcements, taking my crying child with me to Relief Society (because I had to make the announcements in nursery and there was no way I was getting out of there short of a complete breakdown from her.) 

After church, we gathered everyone and made it home.  While Cliff was making lunch, I was doing lice research online to make sure that’s what we really had and what to do about it.  Then after lunch I sent Cliff out to buy supplies (totally not repentant about that) and I started a more thorough head check.  Elizabeth was bug free as far as I could tell (and good thing because she would have hated it when I cut her hair) but I found adult lice and eggs on both Catherine and Lexa (yes, itchy-headed girl, no surprise you have lice.)  No sign on Genevieve and Elizabeth didn’t see anything on me.  So instead of putting together the second-to-last piece of my costume, I spent the day washing and combing hair.

For those of you familiar with this process, go ahead and skip this paragraph.  First is the lice-killing shampoo.  You rub it into dry hair and wait 10 minutes.  Then you wet the hair and massage your scalp like you’re using shampoo.  Then rinse.  Then put in the combing gel.  Then use the special comb to go through each section of the hair about 7 times each to comb out all the lice and nits and eggs you can get while your kid watches Power Rangers or Hey Jessie.  This takes about one hour.  At the end you will be sick of hair and lice and Power Rangers/Hey Jessie.  Now do it again for the second and again for the third child.

In the middle of the hair combing, I became aware of Wlima, Cliff’s mom, who was apparently feeling sick.  I watched him help her into our bathroom because all the hair combing was going on in the hall bathroom.  She was weak and shaking.  It looked like she had the chills. 

And don’t think that Cliff was idle all this time.  He was deconstructing the beds; taking all the blankets and sheets off, removing the approximately 1 million stuffed animals, spraying everything with the anti-lice spray, washing sheets and blankets and towels as we used them.  And helping his mom to the bathroom.  It was after the hair-combing and while making dinner that I became overwhelmed and cried on Cliff’s shoulder.  I was at my absolute limit and told him that I didn’t think I could handle anything else. (Cue the ominous music.)

Next was dinner which (thankfully) I had already planned and came together quickly.  All my daughters (except Elizabeth) actually tried it and three asked for more!  Thus uplifted and fortified, we attacked the laundry and hair-treating once more.  The three known cases were done, but we decided that the rest of us should use the lice-killing shampoo just in case. 

Elizabeth and I went upstairs to do hers, but Cliff’s mom was in the bathroom along with A VERY, VERY DISGUSTING SMELL.  The smell followed us into my room where we waited for the bathroom to be open.  When I went back in, I was greeted by a combination of diarrhea and vomit from the sink, across the floor to the toilet.  I went to check on Wilma and found her in the bedroom where there was still more bodily fluid damage to the bed.  Wilma was still very weak and shaky, having a hard time taking off the wet things.  Elizabeth and I helped her undress.  I pulled everything off the bed and I sent Elizabeth to rotate the laundry.  Elizabeth returned saying she was having trouble.  Upon further inspection, the washer had stopped part way through and everything inside was still sopping wet. 

I think it was at this point that I just decided to stop caring.  Of course the washing machine would break down with a giant pile of lice-infested, vomit and diarrhea-stained clothes and sheets.  Cliff and I began just staring at each other with each new thing.  Sink clogged with vomit? Sure.  Plunging the sink sprayed disgusting water all over the counter?  Yep.  At least we got the washing machine to continue.  At least we got the sink to start draining, albeit slowly.  It was like we were living in a comedy and the only thing that was missing was the laugh track.

I cleaned up the bathroom.  I helped Cliff’s mom into the shower.  I re-made her bed with clean sheets.  I Febreezed the whole room and hallway.  I helped her out of the shower and helped her get dressed.  I made sure to tell her to come get me in the night if she needed me and put her to bed.  Cliff put clean sheets on the kids’ beds.  We got everyone into pajamas and read scriptures and said prayers and I sent them up to brush their teeth.  I checked on my fantasy football team and of course they were losing.  I was going to take a look at how the presidential debate went and then decided that I absolutely could not handle looking at that pile of garbage after what I had already gone through.

I began to hear laughing noises upstairs.  Upon investigation, I found the girls in bed, laughing at Genevieve who had climbed into bed with Ellowyn.  I mock-scolded her which made her laugh which made everyone laugh harder which made me laugh.  So we did it a few more times, Genevieve climbing into Ellowyn’s bed, me scolding her and pulling her out, and then she would scramble in again.  It was riotously funny.

Then I pulled her out for real and put her to bed.  I helped Cliff with the lice-killing shampoo and then went to get some leftover ice cream cake because it was that kind of day.  As I was cutting it, the knife bent and broke because of course it did.  And then Cliff and I ate ice cream cake and watched Luke Cage and went to bed.  The one thing that I held on to which kept me going through the day was that in two weeks we will be in Disneyland.

And this time the cat didn’t meow at 5 o’clock in the morning.  It meowed at 3 o’clock in the morning.