Two

It really was like some sort of slapstick set up.

As I held onto a red-faced, screaming child, Pete handed me a tray, the cat jumped over my shoulder, pushing the gate and the tray into me, causing the child to scream even more, and my final, frayed nerve to snap.

I was not in the mood for slapstick.

Those nerves are stretched taut like strings on a mandolin. My new First Nation name is Jumps-at-Loud-Noises, and my patience, what little of it I had, is fast approaching zero. I feel like one of those hysterical housewives often portrayed in popular culture who takes up drinking vodka from a white coffee mug, chain smoking and alternately weeping and yelling.

How do you discipline a two-year-old? They are basically sociopaths. They don't understand norms and expectations, and they are operating on pure, selfish desire. He doesn't care that we are telling him "no", he doesn't care that we don't want to be hit in the face. I stop him from sitting two inches from the television, he slaps me. It doesn't matter to him that I am hurt and mad.

He just got done pitching an Almighty Fit because his behavior resulted in being exiled from the kitchen. He said he wanted to help prepare his evening snack of plain yogurt and berries, but instead, he threw a goose magnet down the basement stairs and started destroying a birthday card that was on the refrigerator.

Glorious.

It's relatively silent at the moment, aside from neighborhood noise and the scraping of a spoon on the bottom of a plastic bowl.

And the pounding of a blood vessel right behind my eye.