THE FIVE STAGES OF EXHAUSTION
Stage 1: You wake up feeling tired.
You stumble around the house all day, misplace your keys, and go to bed early.
Stage 2: You wake up feeling lousy.
You stumble around, maybe drop a few things, and find it hard to finish sentences. You go to bed early.
Stage 3: You wake up feeling dead.
You fall asleep on the baby while you’re changing her. You give the kids cereal for supper because you’re too weak to lift a pound of chop meat. You go to bed late, because if you don’t get caught up on the housework, someone is going to arrest you.
Stage 4: You don’t wake up.
You walk around the house, make meals, drive to the library, and answer the phone, but you’re not really awake. But you dream that you are, and in your dream, you’re very tired. You go to bed, probably. Whatever.
Stage 5: You wake up feeling great!
Some of your noses are a little numb, and you keep forgetting where your feet feet, but you seem to have outlasted the need for sleep! You’re a champion! There are only a few problems:
~You make a tuna noodle casserole (ingredients: tuna, noodles) and forget to put in the noodles. Your only clue that something is awry is a nagging feeling that supper looks awfully low today.
~You ask your husband to pick up some cereal bowls, and carefully explain that they are to be not ceramic, and not glass, but a particular sort of smooth, non-porous material that is rigid like unto glass, and yet not so breakable. And he says, “yeah, I’m familiar with plastic.”
~You wander around the house searching for AA batteries. You spot a book of matches, and think, “That’ll work!”
~Your husband comments that your new yard has enough space to keep a horse, and you reply, “What we really need is one of those horses with horns. That gives milk.”
~You ask your mother, “Can the kids sleep at your house, or are the rooms too full of cheese?”
Everything in this post is true.
Being tired may not kill me, but no one else is safe.
