Fiction***Non-Fiction: Or How a Movie Collided With A Very Terrible Day

As it turns out, I am completely average in my angst.

I know this because Uma Thurman showed me so. I should say, Uma, playing a harried, blogging, trying-to-look ugly mom in the film Motherhood, showed me so. The actual Uma and I have never met, and though I am sure we would be fast friends, I think her fictional self is good enough for me. Or bad enough. Or just enough to remind me how petty and trite and normal all my deep, intensely important issues are.

***

Today was a very bad day in the House of Picket, or, maybe, it was the culmination of a bunch of bad days. Maybe it was just a typical day and it was I, Picket, who was very bad.

All I know is that somewhere between gagging over maggot-covered rotten fruit at the bottom of a trash can in the playroom and using change from the laundry room's piggy bank to pay for a diet coke and a new trash can, I managed to lose my last proverbial marble. Throw in a sneak-attack dinner guest and few thousand guiltless blinks from the eyes of my negligent fruit tossers and stinky life jacket throwers and I became a mother on fire so hot, I'm still stamping out embers. Might be stomping 'em out for days. Maybe weeks.

You know those nights when you lay in bed, cringing over that horrible thing you did or said or didn't do right for your kids (or your friend, or your neighbor, or your husband)? Your head's on the pillow, the night and lights gone black at last and the only sounds you hear are the wind or the rain or the breath of the people sleeping around you, and yet, you find yourself racing around that mistake, that hurt you might have caused, that trouble you didn't fix all the way? While slumber comes down on your house, you take careful hold of your pillow so that if you cry, your tears will be muffled, so that no one hears you, so that no one stirs, so that no one knows, and you promise, you swear, you will do better tomorrow? You know those nights?

Tonight, I didn't wait for bed; I sobbed on the couch in my kitchen in front of the TV.

***

I sobbed while Uma Thurman, pretending to be dowdy, pretending to be a struggling-writer blogging-mother-type, spoke words I think I may have spoken (or thought I was speaking; I am always more eloquent in my head than I am out loud) and which, in some form, I am pretty sure I have written. I know well the dirty sock, the brainless work, the bitter passage of time and all the metaphors to hold onto it -- been there, written it. It makes me incredibly sad to feel this typical -- which is really fucking ridiculous and also, a load of completely self-absorbed arrogance -- but that's not why I cried.

***

I wept because today I was not only nasty and fed-up, but I went silent. Silent. To my children.

I spoke to them -- but that's different. I told them to clear the plates and get their jammies on. I told them that I could not stand one toe outside of their beds, not one sound, not one peep tonight. I kissed each forehead and I walked away. No chat, no sweet good night words, just silence. I withheld my love on purpose -- kept them, these tiny people who by description and nature are supposed to make mistakes, at a distance from me. I punished them by not giving them me: the one person who could have fixed it all, the one who should have known better.

I think I thought I was making a point.

Maybe I did; I'm pretty sure it was the wrong one.

***

While Uma, playing the stressed-out-middle-class pissed-off-at-her-husband New Yorker, tried to run away to New Jersey, I got teary as I waited for her car to crash. I thought -- this will be the way this story becomes entirely different! The harried, dowdy, wannabe, ungrateful, hostile, disloyal writer-blogger-type dies in a fiery crash of her own making! I'm not even spoiling the ending when I tell you what you already know: the main character rarely ever dies. Especially if that main character is a mom.

I'm glad Uma lived, but not so much because it was she I loved in the movie. Her daughter, or the kid who played her daughter? Yeah. I loved her. Sometimes I wished Uma would stop taking pictures of her and stop writing about her and just hang out with her...

***

And... sigh. I could cry all night thinking about every stinking horrible potentially ruinous thing I have done, so instead I'll just focus on this one thing, this one night, this one day that was built by so many days. I'll think about it, mull it over, rationalize, analyze, weep and wish to wish it all away, and then, like always, I'll wipe my tears before anyone sees and move on.

The upside of crying it out before bed? New sheets stay clean and crisp, and the head meets the pillow as I guess it always should: unburdened for a while and waiting for a new day.

Tomorrow.

I swear I will do better tomorrow.