There are days in motherhood when you look at the beautiful little people you created and feel truly overwhelmed by the privilege of raising them. Today was not one of those days. Today I stood in my bathroom wondering what level of criminal incompetence gets you snacks, clean sheets, and someone occasionally checking whether you’ve had enough water, because apparently that’s what we’re calling parenting now.

Here’s what happened.

Harper looked at her sister’s carefully painted Hobby Lobby masterpiece and decided it needed purple. A lot of purple. Purple across the face, purple across the flowers, purple in places purple had no business being. We’ve had the baby crayon incident. We’ve had the wall marker incident. This one buried them both.

Lynnlee was devastated, obviously, but grief only lasted about seventeen seconds before curdling into a full revenge campaign, because she is my child and we do not do things halfway.

I tried the emotionally mature parent routine first. Two wrongs don’t make a right, I said, which did not land. You cannot let your sister’s resin hamster out of its cage, I said, because the cats might eat it, which turned out to be exactly the outcome she was hoping for. No, you cannot rip the teddy bear’s head off, I said, and judging by her face, she thought that was precisely how payback worked.

So I pivoted to philosophy. Wouldn’t it feel better to move forward with grace and rise above this clearly life-altering trauma? No. We were not choosing grace today. We were choosing vengeance, and for the next hour she brought me a new proposal every few minutes, each one worse than the last, until I finally understood why governments have entire departments dedicated to conflict resolution.

No, you cannot hide your sister in the bunny cage until the spiders eat her.

Why not?

Because we pay a pest control company good money and the spiders here are not currently rated for that kind of work.

That is the sentence I said out loud, to a seven-year-old, as a real answer, on a Tuesday.

At some point Lynnlee informed me that everywhere she looked, she could see Harper, which was making the healing process very difficult. Have you tried closing your eyes, I offered. She did not appreciate the contribution.

By revenge plot seventeen or so, I’ll admit I’d started to come around to her way of thinking. I have been married to a man who put off getting a vasectomy for years. I had grievances of my own. I was mentally flipping through a decade of marriage like a lawyer reviewing discovery, quietly wondering if forgiveness was overrated, if maybe tonight the whole family should sit down and build vision boards dedicated entirely to revenge.

Then Harper climbed into my lap and hugged me so hard she practically melted into me, and because I’d complimented her headband earlier, she informed me I was the best mommy in the world. That was it. The purple vandal was fully forgiven. Five minutes later Lynnlee came over, unprompted, to tell me she’d cleaned her spot at the table without being asked, and my heart went right back to mush.

There they were. My babies. One had spent the afternoon war-gaming increasingly elaborate acts of vengeance against her own sister, and the other had committed what will live in family lore as The Purple Paint Incident, and now they were just sweet little kids again, wanting their mama. My sanity crawled back into my body, and I had one of those thoughts you’re supposed to have: someday nobody will destroy anybody’s Hobby Lobby painting, nobody will pitch me a resin-hamster-and-two-cats revenge plan, nobody will need me to rule on whether teddy bear decapitation counts as proportionate retaliation. Someday the house will be quiet and I’ll take a shower without interruption, and I’ll probably even miss this.

That thought carried me beautifully all the way to the shower.

I had hot water. I had shampoo. I had eleven glorious seconds where nobody needed anything from me. Then the door opened, because apparently a closed bathroom door is not a boundary in this house, it’s more of a decorative suggestion. Someone had a question. Someone had urgent information. Someone had a matter that could not, under any circumstances, wait until the conditioner was rinsed out.

By the time I got out and stood there wrapped in a towel staring at my own reflection, the gentle-parenting portion of the evening was officially over, and I started Googling. Nothing dangerous. Nothing actionable. Just the exhausted-mother equivalent of browsing vacation packages: what is the most minor thing you can do to get yourself a solid three-month insanity plea.

Because right then, three scheduled meals and someone else tracking my appointments did not sound like punishment. It sounded like concierge service. Do they hand out medication in little cups at set times? Because my children cannot locate a cup in this house, and they have lived here their entire lives.

Reality returned eventually. Psychiatric care is not a spa weekend. An insanity defense is not a mommy sabbatical. Prison does not, as far as I know, offer reward points. So I stayed home. I will keep teaching forgiveness and emotional regulation and the very specific lesson that we do not feed our siblings to spiders, and I will keep modeling grace even when my first instinct is to help storyboard the revenge plan.

Tomorrow the purple paint will probably come off. The teddy bear still has its head. The resin hamster remains safely incarcerated. Harper has not been eaten by spiders. Lynnlee has survived the single most devastating artistic betrayal of her young life. And I remain, for now, a free woman.

I love these kids more than anything on earth. I would die for them, walk through fire for them, move mountains for them.

I would also like, just once, to finish an entire shower without somebody opening the damn door.