How appropriate that today’s foster care awareness month writing prompt is Married Parenting. Today was not my most shining moment. Today, I lost my sh*t on my husband. And he lost his too. In front of our kids. And our foster kid. And our neighbors probably.

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday, and it was also a Tuesday, which is our busiest day of the week right now. I didn’t even get to see my little birthday girl until 7:20 at night, other than for a few moments when she woke up. I was hauling a teenager to the other end of town to and from wrestling practice, then taking one of her friends home whose parents couldn’t get there to pick her up. I missed my son’s baseball game completely, I fed everyone cold chik-fil-a, and I took not quite baked all the way chocolate chip cookies to my daughter’s baseball game to celebrate her birthday. To be honest, I felt like a grade-A, first class loser of a mom yesterday. There just wasn’t enough of me to go around, and I wasn’t able to be in three places at once like I needed to be.

This morning was more of the same. Teenager had a dentist appt at 7 am, right at the time I need to get my other daughter to school. Hubs and I decided to do a divide and conquer situation, where he took our girl and I took our teen to the dentist.

I was carrying fifteen arm loads of things down to the car, loading unwilling kids and trying to convince them to get their shoes on, trying to convince my sensory sensitive kid who cannot handle change that it was going to be just fine for daddy to drop her off at school…. when my husband got in his car.

And he didn’t see the plate of eggs and bowl of dry Rice Krispies cereal that was sitting on the arm rest between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat.

I was already in my car about to pull out, when I looked over to see him throwing up his hands in disgust. I looked in the back seat to see my already-on-the-edge daughter in tears because her breakfast was now all over the floor.

He ran up to get her more cereal, while I hugged her and tried to calm her down (knowing that school drop off was not going to go over well at ALL if I couldn’t do some damage control before they left). Meanwhile, I’m thinking that we are going to be late for the dentist, and I can feel the teenager’s anxiety rising all the way from the other car. We got the situation under control and I pulled out with the first car load of kids.

We weren’t two seconds down the road when my phone rang. It was my husband.

I could hear the frustration in his voice as he asked what was the latest that our daughter could be dropped off at school. In my mind, I concluded that he was going to be too late for bus duty at his school now, and that he was going to have to take her with him and drop her off at school after. I interrupted him and told him to just catch up to my car and give her back to me, and that I would figure it out. We both got short with each other. He didn’t need me to rescue him, he just needed to know if he had time to stop at Chick-fil-a to get her a different breakfast. We both said words in angry voices and then I felt too frustrated and my brain started shutting down and I hung up on him. Not my finest moment.

Fast forward a few hours later.

We all had a chance to calm down. We both apologized. Neither of us meant to hurt the other. We were both feeling inadequate and stretched too thin for the amount of things we needed to do.

This is parenting. This is parenting when you do foster care. This is just life in general.

We aren’t always on the same page. We fight and we hurt each other’s feelings. We don’t always agree on discipline or how to spend our money or what to eat for dinner.

Sometimes breakfasts get spilled and people are late for school and sometimes we say things that we don’t mean.

But we are family. And as a couple, we are a team.

I will always say that the number one thing you need to be successful as a foster parent is support. If you’re married, and you’re parenting together, you need to be on the same team. You don’t always have to agree, and you don’t always have to get along. But you do have to be on the same team, cheering for one another, supporting one another, and at the very least being willing to say I’m sorry pretty often.