…and then came the locusts. Just kidding. No locusts in my story, though if I saw them appear in this Witness-Relocation-Program apartment building, I would just nod, “yes, of course, of course there are locusts.”
This weekend, we were visited by a 24-hour stomach bug that caused four out of five family members to throw up, in-laws, and a kind exterminator who said he was sad to inform me that he found bed bugs in the Twins’ room. Our landlord (whose job performance would never be mistaken as that of an overachiever), our charlatan day care center (who smiles to your face and apparently has an altogether different story once you leave, has assured us for weeks that the more than twenty pink and red welts Girl Twin woke up with every morning on her limbs, palms, head, and face for the past six weeks was not bed bugs. Um, yeah, you have no idea what you’re talking about), a random cast of others (um, I was quite short with a woman in a wheel chair protesting my supermarket who handed me a cartoon of the owner being a jerk to his employees as a reason to boycott the store. “Facts, woman. I need facts. Are you saying he’s an a-hole? I work with a-holes everyday. It’s part of life.” “Oh.”), and others (which I can’t get into in a public blog, but still mention) rotated as the target of Husband and my wrath. I don’t think any of these factors are a big deal alone, but they came upon a situation where we already feel constraints — fiscal, emotional, time, energy, etc. — so it felt like an onslaught and reminded us of the crisis time around when the Wonder Twins were born.
But the worst is already passing, the apartment’s been bug-bombed, we’re sweeping and unpacking. We will at some point find our socks and underwear in the sea of stuffed garbage bags in our living room, and more silver lining, what this all leaves in its wake is the motivation to get the hell out of dodge and do better for our kids.