Photo by Arwan Sutanto on Unsplash
At 9:37 p.m. last night, I was looking up the best way to clean red food coloring out of carpet. An hour before that I was feeling like super mom. Dinner was done and cleaned up, and after putting my infant daughter to bed, I tucked in my five-year-old son and waited. Ten minutes passed and all was quiet in the house.
I ran a hot bath, poured a glass of wine, and lit a candle. But I made the mistake of letting my guard down. Without thinking, I started to unwind, sure that all was well, but I forgot one thing. I hadn’t peaked in to make sure my son was asleep. The thought was alarming at first, but everything was quiet, so I continued, deciding to check in on him when I was done.
There he was, standing in his room next to his bed, playing on his tablet everything perfectly fine. Except he was pink.
Not like pink like flushed from being warm but pink like covered in red food dye. There apparently wasn’t enough to turn him blood red, which is what I thought it was at first. Instead, he was like a bubble gum pink color in spots from his beautiful blonde hair to his pale feet. My eyes took in the sight of his new coloring confused until I saw the carpet.
While my son was a glaring pink color the carpet of his bedroom floor was the color nightmares are made of, a deep crimson.
Do you know the best way to get red food coloring out of carpet? Yeah, well neither does the internet. Everyone has a different answer. One would think that we would have put all our mom brains together and came up with the one, very best way to get red stains out of light-colored carpet, but we haven’t done that yet. Who even has time for that.
I scrolled through the search results on the first page, looking for the best results that included things I already had at home while rocking my almost nine-month-old sleeping daughter in the other arm. My son was sitting in the bath, crying. There had been yelling. I was mad, at him, but mostly at myself.
The Struggle is Really Real
They say that some days you’re going to feel like a failure as a parent. There will be days when no one listens to you, everyone’s running around naked, and cold cereal is served for dinner. If you’re reading this and you have never had one of those days, then you’re not human or maybe not a parent, because any parent I know has had a day where you sit down on the couch and you are grateful your kids made it through the day alive.