Just Call Me Mushy Brain

My brain is mush. It’s oatmeal that’s been left to harden in a cereal bowl. It’s a puddle after a big rainstorm and a jar of baby food—mashed peas probably. In fact, my brain is so tired that all I seem to be able to produce are metaphors describing it. I’m capable of incoherent babble and not much else. Tax season always does this to me and my children can’t quite figure out what’s wrong. I can’t follow the plot line of a half-hour sit-com or sing a bedtime song without lapsing into a tuneless hybrid humming mumbling thing.




I think my son is secretly hoping that I’ve become a zombie. Actually, he’s hoping I’ve become a trainable zombie. I caught him testing his theory yesterday when he tried to convince me that I had promised to take him shopping for new shoes. I had my purse on my shoulder before I realized that I had just bought him shoes the week before. I’m not sure why children with rapidly expanding feet need sixty-dollar shoes, but I’m pretty sure that historians will trace the price increase of shoes to the decline in the size of the average American family. He also tried to sneak off to school wearing jeans with huge holes in the knees—as if I wouldn’t notice that! (Truthfully, I didn’t notice until I was dropping him off at the school and I was running too late to take him back home and make him change.)

The zombie thing is working pretty well for him so far. I’ve agreed to watch brainless comedy movies and make pancakes for dinner—all at his suggestion. Truth is that I don’t really care. My brain is too tired to do battle. I’ll work on fixing meals that contain foods from the five-food-groups when I can remember what the five-food-groups are. In the meantime I’m counting on my husband to keep his head in the game—the only problem is that his head seems to be lost in the basketball games. It really is March madness!