I say that in my best Sophia Petrillo voice because my nanny loved The Golden Girls, and honestly the older I get, the more I realize Sophia was just a tiny Italian woman documenting chaos before blogging was invented. She would have been unstoppable with a WordPress account and a wifi connection. I think about Nanny every time I sit down to write, which is either deeply sentimental or a sign that I’ve fully lost it. Probably both.

So picture this. Saturday. I spent the entire day cleaning the pool and I don’t mean casually skimming a leaf or two and calling it good. I mean cleaning the pool. Brushing, vacuuming, testing, adjusting. At one point the water was so clear you could see every pebble on the bottom. If there had been buried treasure down there I’d have found it. If Jimmy Hoffa had been at the bottom, we’d have solved a national mystery.

The pool was beautiful. It looked like something out of a resort brochure.

Texas looked down at my hard work and said: “That’s adorable.” Then immediately sent a thunderstorm. Because apparently God likes a good joke too.

Now normally this wouldn’t have been a huge deal, except Kayson had a pool party Sunday morning and all the boy wanted to do was swim. So naturally I spent the entire evening obsessively checking weather apps. One said rain. One said no rain. One basically shrugged and said “Good luck.” I checked the radar so many times I feel like I should receive an honorary meteorology degree.

The storm passed. The pool survived. The party happened. The kids swam. Everyone had fun. Success.

The problem is that hosting a pool party requires approximately the same amount of energy as surviving a minor natural disaster, and by Sunday evening I was done. Completely done. Monday arrived before I had emotionally recovered, which felt deeply unfair.

Now let’s talk about Monday, because Monday isn’t a day. Monday is a personality disorder. Monday wakes up every single week and chooses violence. Suddenly there are emails, phone calls, invoices, questions, and problems. People upset about things that happened three weeks ago. People upset about things that haven’t happened yet. People upset about things they made up entirely in their own heads. And somehow, without fail, all roads lead to me.

By Monday afternoon I was texting my mom about my weekend, trying to explain how tired I was, how completely wrung out I had become. Unfortunately my fingers and my brain had apparently filed for divorce somewhere around noon, because instead of typing “exhausted” I typed:

Sexhausted.

Friends. I nearly threw my phone.

Now, my mother is cool. She wouldn’t have cared. But let me clarify something immediately I am absolutely not sexhausted. To be sexhausted, one must first participate in enough activities to become sexhausted, and at this stage of life that requires scheduling, coordination, communication, and at least three children accidentally falling asleep at the same time. Those conditions are rarer than a solar eclipse.

Between work, school, activities, pets, laundry, pool maintenance, and the approximately 84,000 times someone yells “Mom!” between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m., nobody around here is becoming sexhausted. We are lucky to become showered.

However. I do think my accidental word has potential, because there are levels here that deserve recognition.

There’s exhausted. There’s momhausted. There’s Mondayhausted. There’s pool-party exhausted. There’s Texas-after-a-thunderstorm exhausted. There’s business-owner exhausted, which is its own special category that comes with a side of inbox anxiety and the constant feeling that you forgot something important. And then, at the very top of the pyramid, there’s sexhausted…a mysterious and rarely observed condition that scientists believe may still exist somewhere in the wild. Much like Bigfoot and affordable groceries. Or children who put their own shoes on without being asked seventeen times.

Speaking of losing my mind, let’s discuss what happened to Kris.

Most exhausted people rest, take a nap, seek peace and quiet, maybe stare blankly at the wall for twenty minutes. I chose chaos. Kris had just gotten home, carrying the mail, walking innocently through the house, minding his own business, completely unaware that his wife had fully crossed over into feral territory.

I spotted an opportunity. And instead of acting like a mature forty-one-year-old woman, I hid around the corner. In silence. Waiting. Like a feral raccoon. Like a sleep-deprived woodland creature with poor impulse control and absolutely no regrets.

The second he rounded the corner I launched myself from the shadows. The man nearly left his body. Mail flew into the air. His entire nervous system rebooted. He flinched so hard I thought he might achieve flight. Then came the completely reasonable response: “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?” Followed immediately by “You psycho.”

Honestly? Fair.

I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe, which probably made me look even more unstable. But here’s the thing I think that’s motherhood and marriage or perhaps that’s life. You spend all day cleaning a pool and it rains. You spend all weekend on a party and then collapse. Monday arrives with fresh chaos. Your brain invents words. Your husband becomes an unsuspecting victim in your personal scare campaign. And somehow in the middle of all of it, you’re still laughing.

The pool will get dirty again. The emails will keep coming. The laundry will continue reproducing when nobody is looking. The kids will keep yelling “Mom.” And somewhere in my phone is a text message proving that exhaustion can accidentally create words that deserve their own dictionary entry.

Picture this: Royse City, 2026. None of us know what we’re doing. We’re all tired. We’re all a little weird. And apparently some of us are hiding around corners waiting to terrorize our spouses for entertainment.

Now. Before you go my nanny made the best potato salad you’ve ever put in your mouth. The kind that showed up at every cookout, every birthday, every Sunday after church without anyone asking because nobody had to ask. My mom picked up the recipe after we lost her and kept it alive, and somewhere along the way I got my hands on it and made it mine. A little tweak here, a little more of this, a little less of that, you know how it goes with the recipes that matter. This Sunday’s recipe page has my version waiting for you, and if you’ve been following along you already know a real cookbook is coming. The kind built around the recipes that hold memories and the stories behind them. This potato salad has a whole chapter in it. Stay tuned.