Never.

One of my sisters recently asked if my other sisters and I ever have those days where we fail miserably as wives, mothers, human beings.

Never.

My Day: It’s on the internet, so you know it has to be true.

I wake up at 5:00 every morning to exercise, because otherwise I just don’t feel like my day will go well. I never hit the snooze button 12 times, wake up late and set off a chain reaction of familial lateness. Never.

After I exercise, I shower. I would never think of going three days without showering. And I’d certainly never use hand sanitizer on a scrap of toilet paper as a substitute for showering. I get dressed and do my hair. Then I do my makeup, spending extra time to contour my face so that I look like a completely different person in just the right light and a person who obviously does her makeup without the benefit mirrors in every other light.

Then my children wake up. Never grumpy. The Beast happily eats whatever I put in front of him. Never throws a fit of rage because I bought the Rice Krispies made with brown rice instead of the good ones in the blue box. He sits sweetly at the table, quietly eating his breakfast. His perfectly sane little brain never says things like, “I just imagined that Snap, Crackle and Pop rose up out of my bowl and tried to kill me.” Never.

Then The Good One comes into the kitchen, dressed and ready to go to school. He makes his breakfast and never says to me, “What’s for breakfast?” as if I’m a short-order cook at Denny’s and as if he’s not 12 freaking years old. He never makes faces and complains if the toast I make crosses ever so slightly from a pale tan color into a more light brown category. I assure you, there is a difference.

After Virginia Slims Man and The Good One leave for work and school, The Beast and I immediately start our day. I make beds, wipe sinks and do laundry. I never let the laundry sit in the washing machine for three days until it smells like a fetid cloth diaper that was used to clean up goats milk and allowed to dry under a pile of wet towels used to dry a dog that rolled in the carcass of a dead squirrel whose last meal was a pack of stink bugs.

I never ever leave clothes in the dryer for so long that the only way to get the wrinkles out is to rewash them or give them to GoodWill and let them deal with it. I certainly never sit on the couch in my robe, shopping on Zulily and Amazon for two hours while The Beast plays Legos.

Then The Beast and I play and play and play some more. There’s nothing better than playing Hot Wheels/Star Wars/Lego/Cowboy war for hours and hours. I never sit down on the couch and fall asleep while he watches TV. Never.

Then we get snacky. The Beast eats ripe, organic fruit. Never goldfish or pretzels, because wheat, I understand, is the devil. I eat raw almonds, because if they aren’t raw and unsalted I might as well be eating petrified rodent stool. And based on every health article I’ve ever read, if I snack on raw almonds I will look like that famous actress that was on the cover of that fitness magazine, completely unphotoshopped, who insisted that she owed her perfect physique to raw almonds and two gallons of filtered lemon water a day.

Then we do arts and crafts. There’s usually glue and glitter and vinegar and baking soda volcanoes and paint. Oh, there’s paint everywhere. But the ungodly mess and the house that smells like salad dressing are so worth the 20 minutes that The Beast found it fascinating.

Then it’s lunch time. Lunch is always a salad for me. Never Oreos, potato chips and liquor-filled chocolate. And my salad is made with kale and spinach, organic always. Because if I’m using romaine lettuce in my salads, or, God forbid, iceberg, I might as well pour salad dressing on my neighbor’s pesticide-treated lawn and eat that instead.

After lunch, I start prepping for dinner with the meat that I absolutely never forget to take out of the freezer. The meat is always farm-raised and hormone-free. I’m pretty certain that the cows had daily massages by certified bovine massage therapists to guarantee cows that are sufficiently relaxed before slaughter as well as meat that is pre-tenderized.

Then we drive to pick up The Good One from school. The Beast never pretends to shoot every person in every car we pass. And The Beast, frustrated from having to wait a brief eternity for The Good One to run back into the school to grab a notebook he forgot, never yells, “What the hell!” as The Good One jumps into the van. He certainly never says that in front of all of the students waiting to be picked up.

The drive home is always peaceful. The boys never start picking on each other within three seconds of getting in the van. They never say things like, “You’re a big giant fart stain,” or “You smell like an armpit.” I never scream, “So help me God, if you two don’t stop fighting, I’m just going to let you beat the crap out of each other and the winner gets to be the boss forever!”

Then we get home and The Good One has a healthy snack. Again, none of Satan’s grain. He eats fruit or the aforementioned raw, saltless, not-quite-crunchy nuts.

Then I help him with homework. I never say things like, “How the hell did you get that so wrong?” or “On what planet is a comma an appropriate way to end a sentence?” I certainly never say, “How the f %*^ did you get a 38 on a test? Was it written in a foreign language?”

Then I finish preparing dinner. Never chicken nuggets from the freezer. Never macaroni and cheese. Certainly never fast food. I’d rather decapitate my own dog and eat her than feed my children fast food.

Then Virginia Slims Man calls to tell me he’ll be home in 15 minutes. I never tear around the house, folding and putting away the laundry that is now piled higher than I am tall, cleaning off tables, screaming at the kids to pick up their crap so that it doesn’t look like I’ve been sitting on the couch shopping on Amazon all day.

We eat a quiet, candlelit meal as a family. There is never a single complaint about what I have made for dinner. There is no abject refusal to try the asparagus. No one ever says, “This dinner is stupid.”

After dinner, I happily clean up the kitchen while listening to music. I never leave dishes in my sink overnight. Virginia Slims Man gives The Beast a bath. The Beast goes quickly and quietly to bed with nothing more than a book and a goodnight kiss. He never screams about not being tired. He never does acrobatic flips off of his bed. He stays in his bed all night long. He never comes into our bed in the middle of the night. He certainly never wakes up right next to my face and says, “You stink so bad in the morning.”

The Good One gets ready for bed and never remembers at 9:00 p.m. that he has an art project due the next day that he hasn’t started and forgot the sheet with the instructions so could I just email the teacher the night before it’s due to ask her what the assignment is. Never.

Then VSM and I walk hand-in-hand to the bedroom, where we make sweet, slow passionate love by candlelight, never by the light of ESPN or Celebrity Apprentice. I never say things like, “Can you please be quick because I want to watch Brooklyn 99?” or “I don’t bend that way!” And he never says things like, “You’re hurting my stomach,” or “This would go a lot quicker if you actually moved.”

Thanks to all of the early morning exercise I do and all of the raw almonds I eat, I’m built like a supermodel, so there’s never a mid-passion realization that the things that are shaking were never meant to shake so violently. There is never an unfortunate rippling of skin or folding of superfluous flesh.

Afterward, we sip champagne and talk about current events and government and religion and books. He never says, “Can you please get off of me, I need to pee?” I never say, “You need to leave because I’m watching Brooklyn 99 in here, so you have to watch your stupid stuff in the living room.”

Then we snuggle, resting comfortably in each other’s arms. As we fall asleep, Virginia Slims Man never snores so loudly that he could resurrect the dead. And I never look ridiculous because of the mouth guard I wear to stop me from grinding my teeth into nubs.

That, in a raw, unsalted nutshell, is my day.

If your day isn’t like that, you obviously aren’t reading a sufficient number of blogs by people like me telling you all of the things that we do better than you.

As an alternative, if you don’t have enough time to read blogs, you could check your Facebook friends’ status updates. Those people are usually pretty perfect, too.

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