“Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives (also known as Finagle’s corollary to Murphy’s Law) is usually rendered:

Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment

One variant (known as O’Toole’s Corollary of Finagle’s Law) favored among hackers is a takeoff on the second law of thermodynamics (also known as entropy):

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.” (Wikipedia, n.d.)

My life is currently defined by the second law of thermodynamics and all corollaries thereof. Whenever my husband goes on an extended absence, whether it’s a weekend away to visit his best friend, or like now, where he is on a job contract in another state, something inevitably goes horribly awry. It causes him to worry about whether the house will spontaneously combust the moment he sets foot outside of it.

When we moved into our new house in 2005, lunasdad spent the first weekend away visiting his best friend. It was intended as a reward for the grueling task of packing all of our stuff and shlepping it halfway across the state, while I curled into a ball and rocked back and forth in a useless heap in a corner of our apartment. However, the first night of his absence, I heard an odd sound coming from the basement. It was pouring rain outside and on a hunch, I followed the sound to the basement door.

Upon opening the door, it was immediately clear what the strange noise was: It was the sound of our basement sink overflowing with water and sewage from the storm drains. Rancid muck masquerading as “water” began collecting at an alarming rate, as our sink continued to gush an endless waterfall of unsavoriness. At this point, in a panic, I called lunasdad and shrilly asked him “What do I do??” I have always been a rent rat with landlords to make all the important calls. I had no idea how to handle a flood; we hadn’t even unpacked (and all of our boxes were in the basement). I certainly didn’t know any neighbors and we didn’t even have a phonebook. I had to call 411 and ask for the nearest emergency plumber, while standing knee high in water trying to save all of our worldly possessions. My son’s baby clothes were ruined. I was heartbroken.

Since then, lunasdad and I have come to the conclusion that I am cursed without him. He leaves and inevitably the children come down with strep, food poisoning, insomnia, and I-need-my-mouth-washed-out-with-soap-itis. A piece of the house falls off. We’ve come to half-expect it, and yet we’re still surprised when bad things happen.

This trip was to be no different. My friends think I live in a sitcom and they’d be right if it were funny! Since lunasdad is now 1000 miles away, I am responsible for the entire inner workings of our household. Additionally, it is also my task to catch up on some of the things we had to ignore in order to get lunasdad ready to go and out of the house. My first week saw the following general, daily task list:

1. wake at 7am
2. dress the children
3. breakfast
4. shower and dress while the kids eat
5. pack lunches and snacks
6. drop off the tank at school
7. drop off dog boy at daycare
8. go back home and walk the dogs (1 mile)
9. 9am start work
10. pick up the tank at 2:15 from school (except Tuesday and Thursdays are after school care)
11. back to work (I work 9a-6p)
12. start dinner around 5:00pm
13. walk dogs 5:30pm
14. pick up dog boy (and possibly the tank) from daycare
15. feed kids dinner
16. put them in the tub
17. bedtime for kids
18. clean up kitchen
19. feed dogs
20. homework
21. laundry
22. house projects
23. last potty break for the dogs for the night
24. bed (hopefully between 10p-11p)

As long as my day goes according to plan, I can fit in everything I need to do and have a very productive day without drama. While I am tired at the end of the day, I feel capable and generally self-satisfied. Finagle’s Law, however, states that this is simply not to last and O’Toole’s corollary pretty much states that the universe is laughing at me while I drift to hell in my handbasket.

Tuesday was like a champagne pyramid of Poorly Considered Choices. First, I forgot I scheduled a parent teacher conference for that morning. Second, I didn’t know that dog boy had run out of diapers and milk at daycare. Third, after forgetting about my first appointment with the tank’s teacher in the morning, and my Tuesday conference call, I scheduled a therapy appointment for that afternoon. Fourth, I was desperate for a trip to the grocery and had no choice but to do a shopping trip that day. Since I overbooked the early part of my day, it meant shopping at night. Fifth, for some reason, I turned down my neighbor and said “the kids will be fine coming with me to the market.”

So the day ended up looking like this: I had to get up with the kids, feed and dress them, pack snacks and lunch and dinner, drop the tank at school, run to the supermarket for diapers and milk for daycare, drop off dog boy, come back home and walk the dogs, go back to the tank’s school for his parent teacher conference, come home for my department meeting conference call, finish another stage of my project for work so I could make my deadline, go to my therapy appointment, walk the dogs, pick up the kids, feed them dinner, set them up to Skype with their dad (we did promise), THEN take them to the supermarket, come home, get them to bed, finish my Macroeconomics quiz and assignment, put away the groceries, take care of the dogs and cat before I could even so much as think about doing anything resembling breathe or relax.

But Finagle wasn’t done with me yet.

Because I kept them out late (even though they were well-behaved at the market itself), both children suffered from the nighttime angst of being overtired. A bit of Tylenol solved this issue for the tank, who has frequent complaints of pain in his legs (growing pains). However, because dog boy refused to eat his supper, and indeed fed it to the dogs, I had to crack open a snack at the store to keep him from completely melting down. That meant that he had Pirate’s Booty and milk for dinner. Combined with general fatigue, missing his dad, and post-nasal drip with a cough, it meant he was up seven times until about 3:30am, coughing, crying and screaming, vomiting, and eventually eating scrambled eggs, applesauce, and yogurt at 3 in the morning.

But wait. There’s more.

At about 2:45 am, Luna began snarling at my head and barking out the window; every shaft of hair on the ridge from her neck down her back became completely erect. I looked outside and all I could see was a dark blob of shadow. I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so I retrieved them and took a second look…only, it’s not a shadow at all, it’s a huge. black. bear. Having a field day in my garbage. Incongruously, dog boy chose that moment to wake up and ask for “cookies.”

These kinds of concerns don’t really exist in an urban environment. My fear of crime always led me to choose apartments above ground-level; the only wildlife with which I was concerned were cockroaches and the occasional errant mouse. At 2:45 in the morning, no mom wants to have to come face to face with a bear who is two feet from the kitchen door, chowing down on week old onion rings. With rising gall, I snatched up the high chair, installed my son in the office, the only downstairs room which does not face either the back yard or drive way, and which has both curtains and opaque windows. I risked a peek through the kitchen door window at the bear and confirmed that it was large, lumbering, and hungry, as well as way too close to my door and my charges, before I skittered away.

The end result was rather like adding insult to injury. Not only did I only get about 2 hours or interrupted sleep, I had to shovel up the mess that the bear made of my driveway and neighbor’s lawn. While shoveling, it began to snow. As I sniffled and tried to swallow around my sore throat, I knew I needed to take the boys to the doctor, only to find out that neither was really very sick at all, it was just post-nasal drip. Because of the timing of our appointment, it was too late to send either child to school or daycare, and then dog boy fell asleep in the car only to refuse his nap upon arriving at home. He spent most of the day screaming and I spent most of the day praying for strength. I worried I wasn’t strong enough to get through nine months without my husband, that I was going to trigger a bipolar mood swing, that I had made a terrible mistake and couldn’t do this. I kept reminding myself that not every day would be like this and the only way out was through.

So fuck you, Finagle. Perseverance pays off. Even though it was a miserable 24 hours, I ultimately did get to sleep Wednesday night for 8 uninterrupted hours. I submitted all of my schoolwork on time. I kept up with the dishes and I even managed to install both shades in the TV room on the windows that face the scary dark backyard and the neighbor’s house. I moved the garbage cans into the garage where the bear cannot get them, managed to remember to set out the recycling for the town to pick up so I wouldn’t need to make a trip to the recycling center, and got the trash set out for pick up as well. I’ve done several loads of laundry, my kids have been fed on time every night, bathed more often than ever before in their life, spoken to their dad every day, gotten to soccer practice as well as church service for Good Friday. I made all of my deadlines for work and I am still standing. So even if the perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum, the determination of a woman and mother trumps it all.

Happy Easter!

Reference:

Finagle’s Law. (n.d.) Retrieved on April 11, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finagle%27s_law