My husband was gone before dawn, heading out of town for work.
It’s kind of like waking up to realize you’re on a bus with a bomb about to detonate and you have ONLY 45 MINUTES TO SAVE EVERYONE ONBOARD.
Cut the right wires!
After a speed-shower, I start by trying to dress my son who spends the next ten minutes fake crying and wiggling away from me half-naked.
I move on to my daughter, ignoring my son whining in the background for “daddy.”
She immediately starts to battle me over whether she can keep on her pink knee-high socks that she slept in, then arguing that pink LEGGINGS are NOT the same as TIGHTS and she wants the TIGHTS.
I go along with it.
Downstairs they both stoop down to pet our dog Frankie, who they hate 98% of the time.
Frankie lusting after the cereal.
Huck starts yelling at Alma, “MY DOG, MY DOG!”
I say, “He’s your dog, my dog, Alma’s dog, EVERYBODY’S DOG!!”
No makeup, no breakfast… I pour Golden Grahams into a couple of bowls for the kids and shove them out the front door.
In the car, my daughter reaches up to touch her headband and shrieks in horror.
“This isn’t the one with the flower!! This is Hello Kitty!! I wanted the one with the flower!!!”
She is literally hysterical.
I tell her there is no time to go back inside. I have buckled them both in. I can’t unload them and drag them inside because she suddenly despises Hello Kitty.
So, I tell her to stop crying, back out of the driveway and whip off down the road to try and reach daycare the second they open the doors. (they open at 7am, my work day starts at 7:30am… for every minute past 7am traffic increases exponentially by at least 5 minutes. I hate word problems, but you get it.)
As I peel out, I hear a strange scraping noise and the sound of plastic hitting pavement.
I watch in my rear view mirror as my daughter’s plastic bowl of cereal bounces down the road.
I left it on the roof of the car.
So, then she realizes the cereal is NOT in her lap and starts screaming about that.
I scream for Huck to share with her. He meekly hands her a single Golden Graham and she shouts through sobs, “I want my own bowl!”
I get her to be quiet in time for arriving at daycare moments later.
Rush them inside, rush back out, hop in the car, speed off only to be stopped immediately by dozens of drivers turning onto the next street to take their kids to high school.
I end up behind a school bus on Hillsborough Avenue that stops to pick up kids at least 6 times. Since when are bus stops lined up alongside a major thoroughfare??
I arrive at work ridiculously late.
Gas station shooting, students stabbed at school, Reeva Steenkamp’s bloodied head being compared to a watermelon.
Before I have even written a tease, I am already getting shit for the video that it will show. It’s not written. No instructions for editors. No video chosen. Yet, someone is already complaining.
Then it’s “You wrote the cars recalled were ‘produced.’ Don’t you mean manufactured?”
(AP wires said ‘produced’)
“You say the ‘mystery man.’ If the identity is a mystery, how do you know it’s a man?”
(the MAN went to the school to drop off the wallet but did not reveal his name)
“Is Obama presiding over the memorial service at Fort Hood?”
(No, it’s going to be someone even bigger! George Carlin’s ghost!)
I think I forgot to put on deodorant this morning.
If I die in some weird car wreck today, I am wearing Wonder Woman underwear.
I better be careful today or the ME will be joking about my stinky body and humiliating underthings.
And people wonder why I find it completely reasonable to have a glass or two of wine or a couple beers after work. Harumph.
Living The American Scream 
Susan Johnson-Smith
I drink wine every night. Some nights a lot of it. I don’t have kids. And you know what? I don’t care. Its my life and its not perfect. Perfection is boring.