You.

You wake up.

Sometimes you don’t feel like getting up. But you do. And you hope that the children will stay asleep as long as possible. They will not.

You move on.

Sometimes you end up with a small child, or children sleeping next to you during the night. By sometimes, you mean “always.” And sometimes instead of being up at a stupidly early hour, that child is still beautifully sleeping, and you sneak out of bed in the hope that maybe you’ll have a few extra minutes solo to prep for the day and chug a cup of coffee without reheating, and you cross your fingers in the hope that if that young child wakes up while you’re in another room, that on this occasion they’ll cry loud enough upon awakening so you can rush in and get them before they try crawling off the bed unassisted. And of course it’s on that occasion that they choose to ninja-wake, and instead of hearing a cry of anguish at them waking up and you being gone, it’s a cry of anguish at them waking up and having fallen off the bed. For comparative persons, this would be roughly equivalent to an adult falling off a six- or seven-foot ledge. Anyway. At that point you just pray that the weekly training you’ve been giving them in how to safely dismount from high places paid off and that they’ll survive. So you’ve heard.

You make leftovers.

You used to like to cook and bake. Now, you get excited when there’s enough leftovers to reheat for lunch. Also, you get excited when the kids are in that magic window of time between independence and authority when you can order them to do stuff, like: Make brownies for dessert tonight.

You block out disgusting stuff.

You change a diaper. A horrific diaper. Then you calmly reach for your coffee mug and try to enjoy the brew, wiping the memory of what you just did as best you can manage. You try.

You take out your frustration with a book.

No, not Fahrenheit 450-style. You take out your frustration with a toddler being a beast by reminding yourself of your vow long ago to never hit a child, including your own child, and you take out your impatience with this angry child by reading a small stack of Dr. Seuss books to him, including one in French. And the super frustrating thing is that by the time you finish, his dirty sticky little body is entangled around yours and it’s made you forget you’re very irked with him.

You are doctor.

You glance furtively around to see if there is surveillance anywhere. Coast looks clear. You’re on your own property…but your CPR/First Aid certificate has expired, so it’s likely highly illegal for you to be treating your son after his bike accident in your driveway; an accident in which blood is gushing everywhere from gashes and rips all over his body. You can’t let the system stop you. You are a doctor. Otherwise, why would you have invested two hours of your life a decade ago going to med school to get that coveted diploma that says: you are a doctor? Technically it says “you passed your CPR/First Aid certification. The reality of course, is that You are a doctor, lapsed diploma or not, so you treat your son, damn the consequences. It’s the right thing, and thanks to you, he survives. You are truly a front line fellow.

You listen to the experts.

In this case, to your ten-year old son, and he reminds you again that the Washington Post is fairly well rated on media bias charts, though not quite as neutral or reliable as BBC or NPR. You’ve had many of these conversations, and you find yourself marveling at how much you’re learning about the news and the world from your son, and you start to wonder (again) if this is a good thing, but you’ve already been sucked up into (another) conversation about whether or not William Burr is one of the worst Attorney Generals ever (answer: he is). And I misspelled his name on purpose. You think about how exhausting it is to have some of the same types of conversations over and over again, and then you reality-check yourself with the reality that you’re going engaging in meaningful dialogues about politics with your ten-year old. And that’s kinda neat.

You figure it out.

You figure out how to get a sewing machine going again, while simultaneously holding a squirming infant who is eager to help troubleshoot. You do this because your 13-year old wants to sew a new mask. So you find a way. That is what you do. You find a way, or you make a way. When you have children who want to make, create, invent…you make a way for that to happen. So you fix a sewing machine with the help of an infant.

You drink.

That’s what front like warriors do when they come up for momentary breaths. They drink. They drink hard. You drink with your buddies and tell war stories.

So that’s what you do, especially if you have a buddy named Becca. You drink reality not away, but enough to give the recent bit a little bitta distance; decaf cuppa coffee in hand, sitting in rusty bistro chairs on the front porch in the dark by the light of the moon and telling tales of the beasts, the little beasts, the loud temperamental beasts and their big hearts and…maybe we should go wake them. Just for a few more minutes.

You live life hard. That’s what you do.