I’m trying to take a shower. By myself.

My four-year-old and ten-month-old are in the bathroom. I have just finished bathing and dressing the ten-month-old.

Me: “Okay, [Four-Year-Old], take your brother outside now, please. I want to finish my shower.”

[Four-Year-Old] guides [Ten-Month-Old] out of the bathroom.

A few minutes pass.

Four-Year-Old: “C’mon, [Ten-Month-Old], let’s go!”

I hear the sounds of the deadbolt being thrown and the front door opening. I am currently drippy and not fit for public.

Me: “Oh, s***.”

Spouse: “No, no, no, no, no! It’s 9:00 pm! You’re not allowed outside alone, anyway! What are you doing?! Don’t you ever do that! Never! Not by yourself, not with your brother — never!”

[Four-Year-Old] begins to cry. I try to explain, hanging out of the bathroom door.

Me: “I’m so sorry, sweetie. I didn’t mean outside the house! I meant outside the bathroom!”

I’d moved in with a former roommate, but the lease was still under his name. After two months, the situation was untenable, so I moved out again. He had taken the lease on his own, so he had the income to support living alone, right?

That’s what I’d told my eighteen-year-old self. What I didn’t know is that I beat him out the door by a month. He even admitted that he’d planned to do a midnight move and stick me with an apartment that I couldn’t afford on my own.

I was once hanging out with a friend of mine who I met at my church. I brought up my recent fifth anniversary of working at one particular retail company because I had never spent five years in ONE job and was particularly proud of myself. I moved like twenty-five times in my first twenty years, so being ANYWHERE for a good amount of time was a big milestone for me.

Friend: “When are you going to get a real job?”

This was coming from a guy who attended college but depended on his mom to pay the rent for the house that he and his wife lived in. Being in retail, I was not anywhere close to being rich by any means, but my rent and bills were all being paid on time, I was not starving, and I was able to put a little something away for a rainy day.

Basically, his snide-toned question hurt me deep to the bone, and I realized he was not such a good friend as I thought.

Me: *Sarcastically* “As soon as you become enough of a man that your mom doesn’t have to pay your rent so you can get a real job and start paying it yourself.”

We never talked to each other after that. I haven’t seen him in three years, and I don’t care to do it, either. If a person like that doesn’t seem to appreciate the hard work that another does for a living and can’t even define it as a “real” job, especially when his own life isn’t that much better, there’s no need to be friends with such a person.

My friend dropped her phone in the toilet. Knowing her husband was handy, she asked him to see if he could fix her phone… except she didn’t want to admit what had happened, knowing he’d get mad. He opened up the phone.

Friend’s Husband: “Why are the internals wet?”

Friend: “My water bottle may have leaked on it.”

Not until he’d spent the whole day messing with the phone, likely touching stuff around the house, his face, etc., did she admit the truth. Let’s just say he wasn’t too happy with her.

Me: “Did you see that the city recovered forty-one million dollars in back taxes from the electric company?”

Son: “Now the electric company will charge us a ‘tax recovery fee.’”