Often housebound (no, not me)

So today Amy asked me to juggle my lunch hour around a little bit to help her get the car for the afternoon. (We became a one-car family when we reprioritized life in general to keep Babe-O home with her mom during the day.)

I gave her a dirty look.  A lively discussion followed.

See, I've been running myself a little ragged lately and haven't had a lot of minutes to spare.  The lunch thing apparently added just enough stress to the week to get me miffed and I pissed and moaned for a while about burning the candle at both ends.

But that's not the moral of the story.  The moral of the story is that Amy was pissed too.  Because just like she doesn't know exactly what it's like to do all the stuff that I do all the time, I don't have a clue what it's like to be essentially a shut-in until 5 o'clock on weekdays.  

If Amy needs the car she needs to get me to finagle my schedule around and also has to taxi me back and forth to the office downtown.  Usually this takes a day or two's notice and some amount of bitching on my part.  Either way, it sucks and the bottom line is that she can't just jump in the car with the kiddo whenever she feels like it and take off for part of the day.  It's kind of like being 14 again, but with no bike.

Going forward, I'm trying to do a better job of remembering that Mom-O is chained pretty securely to the home front.  And yes, I might be ripping out my hair and growing an ulcer farm at the office all day long, but at least I'm out and about, typically on my own.

Here's to doing better in 2010.