HEALTH & WELL BEING, MOMS
Linda Hill | VenusBlogs Contributor
Photo: Bruno Santos

Excuse me while I permit the other part of my brain to drift in favour of fantasy.

It’s a snow day and I’m faced with the prospect of keeping at home two children who are perpetually at odds with one another. My house simply isn’t big enough. No house could be. Allow me to paint for you a picture of my reality:

I’m sitting in my living room; the untidiness that envelopes me like a screaming banshee demanding attention probably takes more energy to ignore than to deal with. I know this in the logical part of my mind. That part just happens to be the one most bogged down with the fog of stress than the rest, much to the glee of my shame whenever someone shows up unexpectedly at my door and begs to come in out of the cold. I’m pulled from my mess-filled musing when my teenager thunders down the stairs like a herd of proverbial pachyderms. “Mom, what can I eat?” Without my having to answer he proceeds to stand in front of the open fridge door, leeching from my pocket money for electricity almost as fast as his voracious appetite costs me at the grocery store. And that’s fast.

Meanwhile, my four foot tall twelve-year-old little dynamo rambles on and on about how desperately he needs my help with his video game because it’s far too difficult — all in sign language, half of which I’m missing because it’s his first language and not mine. This pervades the next part of my brain — the one which must focus on whatever the immediate crisis is. And there’s always a crisis of some sort. Case in point. Teenager appears in the doorway of the living room, in the line of sight of my ever-attentive Deaf child. The eldest of the two is eating the very thing that the youngest had planned to take to school with him for lunch. Chaos ensues. The next thing I know I’m standing between them, talking in English to the teenager behind me about asking before taking and at the same time attempting to come up with an appropriate mime explaining how I will find something else for lunch now that half of the pizza has been consumed anyway, in a language I only half know. It isn’t until I realize, by the confused look on the face of my little guy, that I’ve inadvertently told him he can eat the cat for lunch that my brain goes into overdrive, overheats, and eventually shuts down. Then all I have left is…

I’m on a beach. Palm trees sway to my left and to my right in the breeze coming off the crystalline aquamarine sea and I look up from my cheesy romance novel to see a tanned, exquisitely formed male jogging towards me in a Speedo. I smile and he waves, appreciatively drinking in my fabulous bikini-clad bod. He slows as he reaches my lounger and I catch a close-up glimpse of his ripped abs before he kneels beside me and hands me a piña colada from out of the blue. I take a sip of the cool, refreshing alcoholic nectar while I admire the perfection of his strong jaw and his deep green eyes. He takes my face in his hands. His eyes closed and his lips curved into a smile, he moves toward me and I shudder as his warm, salty lips meet mine. I melt into his strong embrace…

“MOM! Get him away from me!”

It’s the one who speaks.

And so goes my snow day.

So if you see me staring out the window with a far off look and a smile on my face you’ll know it’s not the snow I’m seeing. It’s the white sandy beach I escape to with that other part of my brain.

Linda Hill enjoys a life of child rearing and freelance writing in small-town Southern Ontario, Canada. You can visit her blog at http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/ to read some of her works of fiction, poetry and more.