Yikes, what massive mood swings I'm experiencing! Every month around this time I map out my future which includes getting a divorce, losing 50 pounds over night, wrapping up all unfinished craft projects, and leaving my children along the side of the road with a note attached saying "Take good care of these kids. Their mother has gone to seek herself and is positively sure that she will hate what she finds and therefore drown herself in booze and literary endeavors of the tangential sort and amass a pile of incomplete artisitic projects just as she did when she stayed where she was but is no longer because she couldn't take it!" I could leave the kids with my husband but I'm quite sure they'd have Laffy Taffy and sausages for dinner every night and wear their pajamas to school. I just couldn't take anymore embarrassment given the fact that everyone would already know I had left them.

My final resolution, as the hormones course through my bloodstream, is to become a happier person. As you can plainly see by my writing, it's not going so well. I don't know how many women experience extreme PMS. I'm of the Jekyll and Hyde sort. You wouldn't recognize me from one week to the next. It keeps things spicy but I often end up regretting things I say and do. It feels like it's out of my control. I can remember as a teen getting in huge arguments with my mother. As she cried, I sat there laughing out my cold, cruel heart, while she wrung her hands asking what was wrong with me. The following day was usually filled with heavy cramping and a copious amount of midol. Of course, while I'm doing all of these things I feel completely justified and don't understand why everyone else isn't seeing things my way. My reproductive system and I have been at odds from the day I caught my first glimpse of its bull shaped etchings on a projector in fifth grade. I knew then it was a force to be reckoned with and from that day forward it's reckoned it will f*ck with me royally!

Since having children everything has changed. My uterus and its shedding has gone from showing up early to the party to a premature exit, leaving me wondering when the next time is that I'll see my *friend*. While I've nursed each of my babies my period sneaks in at the most unexpected times always chortling with its abiltiy to ruin my brand new lacey Gap Body underwear that I went out of my way to buy to "make myself feel sexy." Because we all know that not showering for two days at a time, wearing pajamas with spit up on them, and having puffy eyes from endless crying is the sexiest thing there is and, as a woman, I really want to enhance that look.

So, at this time of the month anyone, I mean, the ONE who reads this blog will have to forgive me for the perceived insanity. Although, I won't argue with insanity because on a good day it will make me seem completely normal. It's just that my menstrual cycle really does something to me and compounded with having babies... I can't explain it or rationalize it, but it's real. I'm trying to keep trucking through it and not hurt anyone in the process. I feel that acknowledging it is a step in the right direction. The reality is that sooner, when my last baby turns four, or later, during menopause,  I will turn a corner and there, before my eyes, the world will rain lemon drops and lollipops. We'll all live happily ever after...

RIGHT?