Like my infamous bike ride to Kmart under the ominous shadow of Hurricane Georges, today presented a dramatic and defining moment. A moment that illuminated who I am. We all know who I am already, so there’s no need to elaborate on terms.

To be completely real and forthcoming, I should start the story at yesterday. Yesterday was horrible. Horrible. There was no tragedy. There was no catastrophic health concern. Just a bad day that started with almost knocking myself out with an rogue extension cord (that’s not a typo) and ended with me crying on top of a crib mattress. In the middle was a very disgruntled kid who’d been promised a haircut that got axed from the schedule due to overcommitment. Oh, the consternation.

The crib mattress is not a literal crib, which is a relief to most of you reading here. There will be no fifth Snapp baby. I’m just way too old for that. It was a King pillowtop mattress flipped over on its head and we flipped it in hopes that sleeping on the firm side would help with neck and back pain. It didn’t work. And it was an awful lot like sleeping on a crib mattress made of plywood. And while that mattress situation wasn’t a problem and I was part of and on board with the experiment, I was in no mood for plywood. So I went to sleep last night crying like a baby and feeling about like one. Surely hormones were at play here. It wasn’t my finest moment.

At any rate, this morning I awakened fresher than yesterday and determined to right all the wrongs of the previous day. After exercising and getting several things done around the house, I came upstairs to deal with the king size bed. With the experiment having failed, we needed to flip the mattress back over to its normal state. Of course Todd had no inkling that I would attempt to do this on my own. But it was a task to be done and I hate leaving big things undone. Plus, I’m all about the challenge. ALL ABOUT IT. Nothing makes me want to do something more than seeing it as just on the edge of impossible.

I stripped the bed and threw everything extra out into the hall. I needed all the real estate I could get to manipulate the mattress and flip it back over. It took 152 trips back and forth across the room to even slide the mattress off the bed and onto the floor. What do they fill those things with? Lead? Dead bodies? Sheesh. After I managed to get the mattress partially off, I then somehow propped it upright against my dresser. At this point, i had it pointed in the right direction. All I had to do was bend and lift it back onto the bed. But I had to do this from the bottom. Gravity was going against me. I got on one corner and tugged with all my might. Every ounce of strength I had, I used. It hardly moved, but it did move just enough to give me hope and send me running to the other corner to try the same thing. I couldn’t get any movement from the other corner. Nothing. So I got the brainiac idea to sit on the box springs, right in the middle and try to lift it from there.Onto me.

After much scrapping and grunting and pulling, I got the mattress up onto my lap. And then I sat there. Under a mattress that weighed 800 pounds. Literally trapped under something heavy. I looked at my watch. It was 1:52 p.m. I was 20 minutes from needing to pick up my girls from school, drenched in sweat that is only appropriate in a gym setting, and trapped under a mattress of my own doing. My phone was downstairs, so there was no calling for help or a ride for the kids. I had to get out from under that bed.

At the end of an 8 minute struggle, the mattress was once against upright against my dresser and I did something I rarely do: I gave up. I was beaten. My son would be home at 3. He could get the job done.

I was feeling okay about the defeat and feeling like I had made a mature decision to quit while I was ahead when I realized that I had to quickly change clothes for the school pick up and every last thing I needed was in drawers that were trapped under that same leaden mattress. Sigh.

Here we go again. To get my clothes, I had to get down on the floor, crawl behind the mattress and smash my face up against the dresser. There was no being picky about what I pulled out. Whatever I could reach was what I wore.

The end of that matter was that my son came home and had surprisingly little trouble doing what had almost killed me. But one of those drawers I had pulled clothes out of was slightly open, got hit by the passing mattress, and now no longer closes.

But that’s okay. I can see what the problem is. The drawer pull is bent. It’s nothing a mallet won’t fix.

I’ll do that tomorrow.

#tooltime with Missy