I was having a day and I’d only been home since three o’clock.

The witching hour came early. My girls were fighting and by five o’clock I found myself waiting for the hubby’s usual call to check in and discuss dinner, the usual. Everything seemed to be amplified a few notches as I had PMS, which at my house stands for Psycho Mom Syndrome.

The hubby got home from work a little early and I told him I needed to run to the grocery store for a few things. Translation: “I need to get out of this house so I can escape. And buy beer.” It’s pretty sad when you’re “only” with your kids from three o’clock on during the school week and your kids drive you crazy. Seriously, I don’t know how you full time SAHMs do it. Then again, PMS makes my short mama fuse even shorter.

As I was heading toward the checkout line, I heard a scream. Not just any scream either, y’all, but the scream of a child having an impressive meltdown. And then it happened again and again like clockwork every few seconds and then the screaming got closer and closer until I saw a mom pushing her son in a cart and realized he was just screaming for the hell of it, like he was being tasered every thirty seconds or being forced to eat canned beets. The mom had that beleaguered zombie mom look of resigned surrender that a weary mother has when she’s grocery shopping at 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, and would rather be on a Caribbean island with her own personal cabana boy, margarita fountain, endless supply of People magazines, and miracle drug that would guarantee she’d tan and never burn, or wrinkle, or develop cellulite or spider veins.

I gave the cashier “the look” and she gave me “the look” and I started emptying my cart as fast I could all the while thinking, “I came to the store to escape my kids, not be subjected to other kids … let me out of here, I need a beer!”