“There’s always a glitch in the morning.” That was a saying my mom had to explain the little snafus that seemed to happen every morning as we were all getting ready. It could be a missing shoe or a forgotten
“There’s always a glitch in the morning.”
That was a saying my mom had to explain the little snafus that seemed to happen every morning as we were all getting ready. It could be a missing shoe or a forgotten homework assignment (I need a diorama of a humpback whale, quick!), but the fact that some glitch would pop up was a given.
But we weren’t content to just leave it at that.
No, my mom and I came up with a story about a little monster named — you guessed it — the Glitch. As painstakingly portrayed by myself in marker, the Glitch was only a couple of inches tall, green, with pointy ears and a permanent scowl.
Just the type you’d expect to squirrel away a shoe somewhere out of spite.
I was reminded of the Glitch this week when I went to my parents’ house to clear some of my stuff out of my old room, which now belongs to my brother. The cleaning was long overdue, but in my defense I didn’t have space for those boxes until recently.
There, packed in a box with various old homework assignments and art projects, was the Glitch, scowl-y as ever. You see, I had made a book about the Glitch, illustrated and everything.
Seeing his scowl made me smile.
I found some other treasures to bring with me. There were my old diaries, sporadically written in with gaps of, oh, seven years between entries. There was a project on what I wanted to be when I grew up (a reporter, because “every day is different”). Various school photos where I am in various phases of being chubby-cheeked with a gap-tooth smile.
All told, when the day was done I had a big pile of clothes to go to Goodwill, several boxes of stuff from college I needed to go through, some old painting supplies and two paper grocery bags’ worth of school assignments, drawings and other memories I decided were important.
Everything else I put back in the boxes for my parents to dispose of or cherish, as they decided.
All except the Glitch.
Him I put at my mother’s place at the dining room table.
After all, there’s always a Glitch in the morning. But luckily for me, there was always a mom to take care of him, and us.
• Mommy Talk is an online parenting blog written by Racine, Wis. Journal Times reporters Bridget Thoreson, Janine Anderson and Marci Laehr Tenuta. Find it online at www.journaltimes.com/mom.
