Little Bug

There are is something rotting in the car somewhere, under all the toys and swimming gear and broken crayons and mashed up leaves and mud. I can’t smell it, but there are a hundred fruit flies zipping around in front of me like acid tracers when I drive A. to school, making me feel too trippy for 7:45 on a school day. He has a strep infection on his butt and another infection under his foreskin so we are treating both twice a day with antibiotics and chlorox/salt solutions. He has had every single thing a kid can have this year so peri-anal strep is not even a surprise. We are late for everything. A. is a collector of things. A strawberry container is his new storage box for his plastic fish. A to go container has become a take-along shipwreck scene (just add water and a ship). He cuts out all of the toys he wants from catalogs at school and brings them home, so there are hundreds of tiny colored pieces of paper all over the counter, along with the Christmas lists he has me write out daily. The latest list: plastic bones, battleship, a teddy bear with outstretched arms and a smiling face, a skull (the one in your head not a scar on your face). He makes me write this last part too so Santa knows that he doesn’t want a scar for Christmas. No wonder I am confused much of the time, and ineffective. Everything is kind of too much. Too much stuff, grime, ideas, questions, too much feeling my heart ready to burst wide open with love for all of it.