No-Good-Very-Bad-Days

Some days you wake up and you might as well go back to bed. You just know it is going to be one of those Alexander-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-days kind of day. But you’re a grown up. You probably have a list of things that you need to do today, maybe an important meeting, maybe just a house that looks like a tornado walked through it, maybe you are providing childcare for someone else’s kid.

The no-good-very-bad-days don’t show up when you have space in your schedule. They don’t show up when you feel like everything in your world is going great. They don’t show up when you have nowhere you need to be, or no one you are responsible for.

No-good-very-bad-days show up when you are super busy. When you are so busy or there is so much that needs to be done, or you have had some very big changes in your life, that to add the shit frosting on top of the shit cake, here’s it is. A day that you just know isn’t going to be a good day.

Maybe you feel like you are starting to get sick. Maybe you are sick. Maybe your kids wake you up with them being sick. All over you. Or they are running fevers and put their hot bodies up against yours.

You’ve got two choices. You can get up and get this no-good-very-bad-day started, or you can try and get some extra sleep. Hit the snooze alarm a few times or just ignore it all together. I have done both, so absolutely no judgment here, regardless of your choice.

And throughout your no-good-very-bad-day you have choices. You can pretend that you have an assistant (or maybe you are lucky enough to actually have one) and cancel everything that is not super critical for you to do today.

You can call in sick. Play hokey. Decide to binge watch TV with your kids. (Secret from a summer of chicken pox, let each child pick one show and rotate and include yourself in the rotation so you can watch something that you have picked every now and then too.) At the very least you can prioritize what absolutely has to happen today and punt everything else.

Oh and give up on the meals. Pass them off to someone else, get someone else to cook, or decide that it’s going to be takeout tonight. Or cereal and milk or popcorn. Or if you absolutely can’t get out of cooking supper than make it breakfast. It’s usually super easy-going.

You can also decide to stack your day and try and get through those most important things first. Get that load of laundry started, get dinner in the crockpot, not stay in bed because your children are still asleep and get your work done early, or at least started on.

Try to laugh. On a no-good-very-bad-day, you might not want to wear your best clothes because you will be spilling stuff on it. Make sure your helmet is on and you’ve buckled your seat belt. Take some extra moments to breathe. Pass off as much as you can to someone else.

See if you can have a mommy play-date so someone else is helping watch your kids and you can compare your no-good-very-bad-day with another mom. Not in the competition sense, but in the we all have these happen from time to time sense. I have a friend who hangs out at the children section of her local library when as she puts it “needs adult supervision”. It can be helpful to just put your kids in a new safe environment which has extra adults who may be helping to keep an eye out on them.

It can also be helpful to just cancel everything and stay in bed. It’s not something we can always do, but it can help.

I often try and get the priorities done first so that I can later take a nap, an extended siesta or just curl up on the couch and read to my girls for a while on no-good-very-bad-days.

Oh and take your vitamins! They can’t hurt and will probably help. Go slow on the caffeine as getting super buzzed is not going to help and may contribute to the no-good-very-bad-day. And drink water. My go to solution for everything that ails you, go have a glass of water and then tell me how you feel. Of course, you may end up wearing it.

That’s okay. It’s only water. So it will be wet, and either cold or hot, but it shouldn’t destroy too much. I wouldn’t have any alcohol until you have reached the finish line of the day, see the above caffeine advice.

And maybe sit down and actually read about Alexander’s day, and see who had it worse. Your kids will probably enjoy listening to the classic. Hopefully, you didn’t have a dentist appointment, and maybe you really could move to Australia.

Of course my experience with Australian airports, I am not convinced you would actually have a better day there, but you never know. It might be better in Australia.

And tomorrow most certainly should be better, especially if you can go to bed early tonight. Because no-good-very-bad-days are exhausting.