Picture this:  four
teenage girls seated at the dining room table to a feast of their favorite
foods including sushi, cheese and crackers, pizza, strawberries, mini-cupcakes,
and  lemon bars.  This is the scene I came home to last night
after work.  Being a negligent working
mother with no food in the fridge for her poor starving children, my husband decided
to pick up our daughters and three friends from school and take them food
shopping before heading home.  Later,
when I asked him what it was like to go shopping with five girls, he responded,
"Oh, I just let them do their thing and pick whatever they
wanted."  Clearly.   And for
the first time, my husband, surely in an attempt to avoid the wrath of Tired
Mommy, called me beforehand so that I could text him my own shopping list.

And that's how I came to find a fresh loaf of sourdough bread
on the kitchen counter this morning.  Next
to my Friday night glass of wine, the opportunity to sit down and have a cup of
coffee with sourdough toast on a Saturday morning is one of my favorite simple
pleasures.  And buttered sourdough bread
is the icing on the cake; I mean, the butter on the toast.   That
is, until I opened the butter dish to find it littered with crumbs from someone's
last indulgence in the butter world.  I
lost my appetite.  I would buy  my own butter dish.  I'd write my name on it with black permanent
marker and hide it in the back of the fridge. 
And then I laughed.  How
ridiculous it is to complain about crumbs in the butter dish when there is so
much greater joy and sadness  in the
world?!

 And so, with the
sounds of last night's joyful noise of teenagers feasting in my dining room,
telling ghost stories and laughing until midnight, I sat down to write my top
ten list of a working mother's pet peeves:

1. Crumbs in the butter dish

2. Toothpaste globs in the sink.

3. Shopping for party favors on your lunch hour.

4. Being woken up in the middle of night to the sound of
"Mooooommmmyyyyy."

5. Dirty fingerprints on the walls.

6. Finally cleaning your desk at the office, only to find a
cluttered kitchen table at home.

7. Cleaning outdoor furniture.

8. The irresistible temptation to check work email at night,
or on vacation, or both.

9. Not being able to find a good song on the radio during
your commute, the most peaceful time in each day.

10. Sunday night that comes too soon.