1. When your 3-year-old asks you for a drink, you reply, “Yes, that is a beautiful rocket ship you drew!”
  2. When you look at the stack of novels on your nightstand, you have a feeling they are something you maybe used to enjoy but you can no longer remember what, exactly, they are for.
  3. You take a shower not because you are dirty (which you are) but because you want a change of scenery.
  4. You believe that the Lego structure you built today with your 5-year-old is perhaps the best thing you have ever created in your life.
  5. You eat lunch at 10 a.m.
  6. Sentences can’t you coherent form.
  7. Just hanging in the bathroom.
  8. When, after two days snowed in with the children, your husband gets ready to leave for the city, you grab his lapels and tell him, “Just know that if you walk out that door, you can’t ever come back.”
  9. You feed your children muffins for breakfast, lunch, and “lunch dessert.”
  10. You have assigned characters and a backstory to the crocuses that popped up in your front yard just before the last snow. Stanley and Phyllis are a bickering couple who have just returned to New Jersey from their winter home in Tampa. Phyllis is like, “I told you we should have waited another couple of weeks, Stanley.” Stanley is doing his best.
  11. You ate an entire bag of Toll House Semi-Sweet Morsels.
  12. When a guy shows up to cut up the tree limb that fell on your driveway during the storm, you stand and watch with your face pressed up against the glass, and then you realize that the guy can totally see you and that you’re not wearing pants.
  13. You refuse to eat the pretend food your 3-year-old has painstakingly prepared for you, and then tell him, “Ha! Doesn’t feel so good, does it?”
  14. You start to worry that the dog is depressed.
  15. You stare into the dog’s eyes and tell her, “I just don’t know what to do anymore.” The dog replies, “Maybe start by putting on some pants.”

[This article was previously published here.]