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Alamb

Author/Television Reporter

Amanda Lamb is a professional television journalist and author. She covers murder trials by day and reads Dora the Explorer to her children at night. Somewhere in between all of that she writes about those parenting moments that catch each us off-guard in a crazy, chaotic, and wonderful way. Aman...

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Running on Empty

Amanda Lamb

We’ve all had those days, those days that either make us or break us.  I had one the other day that almost broke me.  In fact, I had to get some distance from it before I could write about it with a sense of humor.

It started with the smelly water.  Apparently a construction crew working in the neighborhood ruptured our water line earlier in the week sending silt and other pollution down the line.  I missed the chaos because as usual I was working late.  In the middle of the night I filled up my water bottle from the sink in the dark.  I noticed that it smelled a little fishy, but I was too tired and too thirsty to care.  When I awoke in the morning and looked over at the half empty bottle of water on my nightstand I noticed that the water was BROWN.  Yuk....

It was pouring rain when I went out to get the newspaper in my Crocs and fuzzy blue robe covered with soot smudges from bending down and trying to turn on the gas logs.  I grabbed the only umbrella I could find- the frog umbrella.  Any fantasies of being “cool” left my psyche years ago.

After our morning routine I hurriedly got the girls into the car.  I managed to keep them dry, but I was of course soaked after leaning into the car to fasten seat belts.  We were rushing to my girlfriend’s house because my older daughter had a day off of school and she was going for a play date.  I called my friend to tell her we were on the way and her husband told me their younger child was very sick and that it probably wasn’t a good idea to bring my daughter.  I hung up the phone with tears in my eyes and then I noticed the red light telling me my gas tank was empty- not you-can-go-a-few-more-miles-empty, but  you’re-about-to-run-out-of-gas empty.  The red light mocked me saying: “Why have you have been ignoring me for so long?”

I got to daycare to drop my youngest off, still not sure what I was going to do with my older daughter.  The preschool teacher greeted me with:  “Where is your white t-shirt?”  Apparently they were doing a class project and every child had one but my daughter.  The teacher told me she sent multiple notes home about the shirt.  I remembered to bring in the frigging letter-of-the week though, somehow I missed the shirt thing.  No one’s perfect, certainly not me, nowhere close.

My friend ended up calling back and despite being up all night with a sick child told me she understood my predicament and would be happy to take my daughter.  Good friends like this are hard to come by.  My husband left his office and went to Wal-Mart, got a shirt and dropped it by the preschool.  The clincher, I found a gas station just in time not far from my friend’s house. 

I got a full tank again and I’m going to try and keep it that way...