Joy, much like shoving an angry chipmunk in your ear

There are some things we suffer, as parents. We bear up, bear with it, grin and grit our teeth and push on through, long after we thought we'd crumple to the ground, scraping our fingernails down our cheeks and groaning to Saint Rita* for mercy.

Hyperbole, perhaps.

But still. After four nights in a row of waking up every 40 minutes to the liquidy coughs, mucus-y eyes, and wails of a virus-stricken child, we're cashed out. Kaput. Mama's ears are ringing and her throat is sore. Dada's suffering from general malaise and has a short temper at the office.

This morning, yet another practice in "Letting Go." The outfit itself was blaspheme, pink velvet on lavendar on safari velour on Crocs.

And then there's this bike. A hand-me-down from Auntie's neighbor, its plastic casing cracked and faded, the wheels are intact and it steers OK. The whole thing is hollow, the plastic wheels and the body itself, so as it rolls along the sidewalk it becomes a mobile audio-torture device. A purple and pink torture device. It must break some noise ordinance or another, because over its cacophony you literally cannot hear another person shouting from two feet away. Go outside and scrape an empty paint bucket along the sidewalk, amplify it by several decibels, and you have Nora's bike.

It's craptastic, man! We hate it ... but Nora pink-puffy-heart L-O-V-E-S it. It makes her proud, it makes her fast, it's just a girl and her wheels, hitting the open sidewalk on a sunny day. (She refuses to try the pedals, still, but she's fast on her feet.) An 8-oz. hot chocolate of her very own could not tear her away from the coffee shop window as she stood guard against tricycle-thieving bandits and sniffing dogs.


*Saint Rita = the patron saint of parenthood and impossible causes. No kidding.