Honestly, I’m a glass-is-half-empty kind of person. I don’t want to be. I’m trying to change. For me it’s something that requires real effort, and of course I suspect that for others it comes easily and that only contributes to my frustration.

It’s evening, I have plans to help a friend with something tonight after the kids are in bed, and I’m on the verge of hyperventilating. Today I didn’t:

• pay the bills…
• balance my checkbook…
• call the lawnmower repair guy…
• write the letter I need to write to get my summer camp money refunded…
• fold the @&%#! laundry…
• receive my child support payment (3 days late, now)…
• remember to remind the Ex about the child support payment…
• manage to order that fan off of Amazon before it went out of stock…
• exercise…
• do my reading assignment for my small group study tomorrow…
• clean the crap out of the car that I keep meaning to clean.

That’s my glass, half-empty. But this is the New Me. No more woulda-coulda-shouldas for this girl, no sirree bob! But ya know, the New Me is in many ways remarkably like the Old Me (who wasn’t, in my humble opinion, such a bad sort; just a little more neurotic than necessary). Here’s the only way I know to make my glass half-full. Today I didn’t:

• swear when I took the bills out of the mailbox…
• spend any money…
• forget to shower…
• bite the Ex’s head off about the child support…
• so much as secretly fantasize about something large and heavy falling on the Ex…
• walk into anything…
• watch any TV…
• run the car into anything…
• harm either child, even when said children tracked mud through the house after I’d just asked them to take their shoes off…
• harm the child who came over for a playdate and peed all over my freshly cleaned bathroom…
• eat anything that was not more or less life-sustaining and appropriately caloric.

This is progress, right?