I’m no stranger to the pet peeve. In fact, I have lots of them. I mean, all you have to do is follow me on Twitter for a few days and I’ll tell you a thing or two about cereal chewers and automatic faucets and sticky things. You could even say that the phrase pet peeve is, um, a pet peeve of mine. I’m a complex curmudgeon, what can I say.
But there’s this thing.
And it annoys me.
To no end.
To paint a picture for you, I’ll tell you this. My children are 14 (gahhhhh). 12 and 9. They can be left on their own for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s a luxury gift that parents get to receive for putting in all of the not-able-to-turn-your-back years; those years where everything needs to be childproofed and you have to figure out how to use those damn baby gates.
But when you wear the title of mama, your attention is needed basically every minute of every day. This doesn’t end when your children age. They need to just show you something or ask you a very important question about how hanging, drawing, and quartering works or they’ve answered the phone and it’s safta needing to know if you eat chicken now. They don’t care if you are in a post-shower towel or if you are mid-important-work-email or if you are watching the Bachelor and need to pay attention to what the crazy person is saying or if you’re on the phone and you’ve got your finger up in the universal symbol for “I’m on the phone don’t talk to me” wag.
Or if you are in the bathroom with the door closed.
It is without fail when I am in the bathroom with the door closed that someone is looking for me. Every time. Without fail. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing in there. And really, it’s the bathroom, I will spare you the specifics.
“MAMA! Where are you?”
Now, it’s not so much that my children (and often my husband) are looking for my whereabouts. I get it, I’m awesome and important and basically the family superhero.
So, I’m not actually (pet)peeved that they want me…It’s that now I’m required to…respond. From the bathroom.
“YES?” I say. Nay, scream.
Because you know that if you don’t answer the child (or husband) will continue to scream through the house to locate your exact location and demand to know why you’ve been so inconsiderate to not respond when you’ve been beckoned.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the bathroom…
…surrendering all shame for the rest of my days.” Said in my all-caps voice, but also with my WTF on.
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