The Anti-Midas Touch

Yesterday and today have been a bit clumsy. It seems everything I try to do somehow causes injury to myself or others.

My first clue that I was meant to stay in bed came immediately after I put my makeup on, when I emerged into the bedroom in the dark and walked across the floor to my closet. In an instant, I was tripping on something terribly painful and it was biting me! Could a jellyfish possibly survive on my bedroom floor this far from the coast???? I limped to the closet and turned on the light. I had tripped on Mabel’s chew bone. Hard, jagged, lethal…

The drama continued at work. In a public ladies’ room I always flush with my foot. But on this particular occasion, as I reached with my foot, my sandal got caught on the handle and I lost my balance. The shoe wasn’t about to turn loose from the toilet or my foot, and I toppled forward, slamming my head into the bathroom wall. FOOT STILL ATTACHED TO THE TOILET.

During the lunch hour, I decided to go bra shopping. You may feel this is TMI, and I would generally agree. However, this information is pertinent to the story. Any time you try on a bra you have to see how it is going to look under clothing. So, I had grabbed a tank top from the rack for this purpose. The bra had a huge theft deterrent device attached to the back of the strap and the tank top had a dangling tag at the back. As I tried to remove the tank, the hangy-tag got caught on the theft device on the way up. I couldn’t get the tank top off of my body! It was wrapped around my head, the strain forcing the theft device to imbed into my shoulder blade. Amid pain and confusion, I wiggled and struggled until I could see out from under the neck of the tank, and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Remember those cartoons where someone gets a frying pan smashed over the head, their neck disappears, and they wobble around bouncing off of walls until they spin and crash into the floor? That was me.

Then, last night when Dom and the kids came home I could hear Victoria crying. She immediately sought me out at the computer, and I could tell something was terribly wrong. Barely understandable, she cried out, “I busted my lip on Lucas’s head!!!” Sure enough, her top lip was swollen so that she resembled a duck-billed platypus. I reached for her and she threw herself into my arms. She was still standing by my chair when I decided to reposition myself in order to comfort her better. So I moved my chair and ROLLED ACROSS HER BARE TOE.

Bad mommy. Bad, bad mommy!

And the touch continues this morning. I was carrying a load of freshly folded towels up the stairs to where the kids were putting away clean clothes. The basket was piled high with my cushy clean towels, and I could barely see over the top of it. I definitely could not see the gate at the top of the stairs which was inappropriately closed. When I struck the gate with my legs, the basket of towels and the top half of my body tumbled over the top. Towels went everywhere. Fussing and growling, I opened the gate and stepped over all my strewn towels.

Then my offspring rescued me and broke the spell. Aaron and Victoria scooped down and began re-folding the towels. All the while, Aaron was explaining to me, “It’s okay, mommy. See, whenever something seems too big for you to do, we will always be there to help you. We may not be great folders, but you will never have to do it alone!”

Man, I love my kids!!