I have been counting down to this cruise for months  and not in a normal, healthy way. I mean the kind of countdown where every stressful thing gets met with “just make it to the cruise.” Customer being difficult? Cruise. Invoices piling up? Cruise. Laundry mountain threatening to become a geological landmark? Cruise. The cruise had stopped being a vacation and started being a personality trait.

I’d mentally packed three times. I knew which dresses I was taking. I’d planned my coffee strategy down to the deck chair. The girls had planned roughly seventeen hundred outfits and enough toys to survive a six-month expedition. Everything was ready.

Then Royal Caribbean called.

Now before anyone feels too sorry for me, they were actually incredibly fair about it, full refund plus future cruise credit, so financially we came out fine. Logically, I know that. Emotionally, my brain was already on the ship, eating unlimited soft serve and judging strangers’ Royal Up upgrades, standing on a balcony watching the ocean while Actual Jacqueline sat at her desk answering emails.

Honestly, the cancellation wasn’t even the hard part. Telling the kids was. You brace yourself for that conversation as a parent, you rehearse the speech, you prepare for tears, you imagine tiny broken hearts shattering on the kitchen floor. What I actually got was, “So can we get our birds sooner?”

Excuse me?

Apparently my children had already done the math. Cruise canceled means bird timeline accelerated. This wasn’t tragedy to them, it was opportunity. I swear they’re running a long-term operation, and the Pet Wars have entered a new phase that Kris and I are losing badly.

Then my dad called and if you’ve ever had one of those calls with a parent, you know the kind I mean. He didn’t exactly say goodbye, but he said enough that my heart started hurting anyway, the kind of conversation where you realize they’re carrying fears they don’t usually talk about. So I just listened, for a long time. And somewhere in there, without meaning to or volunteering for it, I took on some of that weight, the way you do. By the end he sounded lighter. More like himself. I’d carry that a thousand times over if it gave him some peace. But when I hung up, I was tired in a way sleep doesn’t actually fix.

Then life resumed its regularly scheduled chaos: a color guard leadership meeting, work, more work, bonus work, and then work that materialized after I’d already finished the first round of work. I looked up and it was nearly midnight. Again.

Meanwhile my CUPSHE order has vanished into the same void that ate all our socks, our Tupperware lids, and apparently my common sense. Tracking says delivered. The photo is not my house. At this point the company seems to want me to become my own private investigator, and honestly, if they need someone to track down D.B. Cooper next, I’m available.

And somehow, in the middle of all of it, there were still good moments. Harper spent part of the afternoon proudly dragging a package down the sidewalk like the world’s tiniest Amazon employee. Lynnlee would not stop talking about birds. The garden is thriving despite the fact that I left the drip irrigation running for what felt like nineteen years. A heron was parked by the pond looking far more relaxed than I have all week.

Standing there looking at all of it, I realized something: the cruise got canceled, the break I was counting on disappeared, and life just kept showing up anyway. Not the Instagram version. Not the polished one. The real one with the exhausted moms, missing packages, bird negotiations, emotional phone calls, gardens, herons, and little girls who find joy in absolutely everything.

Today that’s enough. 

Although if Royal Caribbean wants to hurry up and apply those future cruise credits, that would also be great, because I’ve still got fourteen days of exhaustion that were promised a balcony and unlimited dessert.