I Snapped at My Kids Because of an Email - Here's What It Taught Me About Comparison
It Was Bedtime
It was bedtime. The kids know this time well — it is where they perform their best. Suddenly, they are hungry and thirsty, in the middle of an art project or make-believe. They are running on fumes, and so am I. Their fumes, however, are producing a Broadway play that needs popcorn and a water bottle with ice in it. I will be lucky if mine fumes get me through this nightly drama.
My kids are 2, 3, and 5. I think the ages alone paint the picture. We have one bathroom in our house and one electric toothbrush. There is a line to brush teeth, a line to the bathtub, and always a line at the toilet. After living around the world, one bathroom without cockroaches is a win in my book.
The Filipino Bath
Some nights, a full-on shower feels like too much. On those nights, we do what I call a Filipino bath. When I was a kid, my mom kept a blue bucket in our bathtub with a large pink cup inside it. She would fill it with warm water, stand us in the tub, pour water over our heads, soap us up, and pour water back over us until the suds were gone. I don’t even know how old we were when we stopped bathing like this. I have such a vivid memory of it. I call it a Filipino bath because when I visited my family in the Philippines, I saw children outside their homes, by the water spigot, a bucket always nearby. Moms crouching down, cup in hand, washing their children right there in the open air — just as my mom did her little Filipino babies in Kansas.
It was that kind of night.
The warnings start at 7:45. “Fifteen more minutes and we start Filipino baths.” The kids go about their business as if they didn’t hear a word.
The Email
Our art room holds three desks — one for the girls, its white top long buried under paint and dried hot glue, exactly what an art desk should look like. One long table against the wall where I’ve laid a tapestry from our travels, and that is where my laptop lives. The third is a wooden desk that my dad built for me during my senior year of college. That is where I paint.
Tonight, before the bedtime extravaganza fully swallowed me, I sat down at the long table and opened my laptop. I make journals for mothers. Not the kind you fill with grocery lists. Each prompt is intentional, each page designed to help a mother find a window back to herself. Orders come in one or two at a time on Etsy — small, steady, enough. But recently, out of nowhere, an order came in for over 100 journals for a local event. It was the kind of order that makes you feel like something is actually happening. Like the thing you are quietly building is starting to be seen. It had an event deadline, and all I wanted was for it to go smoothly.
There it was. The kind of email I have seen in so many different work lives. A problem. Printing was delayed. The journals were supposed to be out the door the following day and this email was telling me they weren’t. I was frantically writing to customer service when Esme burst into the room screaming. Aura had hit her. I said to Aura, without lifting my gaze from the computer, don’t hit, and continued writing. That made her cry, so now they are both wailing at my desk while I am doing my best to just finish this last sentence to customer service. Then baby Ivy, because her big sisters were crying, decided to join in. At this point, my face is hot, I have a pit in my stomach, and their cries can no longer be ignored. I stood up, let out an ughhh, got them into the Filipino bath, handed their dad the toothbrush, and went back to finish the email.
The Frantic Person
And that’s when I noticed her. This frantic person sitting at my desk. I remember her well. She was at all my other jobs. At times I thought those around me were the ones that contributed to my unhappiness of working for others, but no — it was her. This frantic woman. I thought I quit her and now here she is, at my own desk, in my own business. This is the person I never wanted to work with. The person who snaps at her kids because of an email.
Esme and The Good Egg
After I finished writing the email, I went to find the girls. We piled into bed the way we always do, a tangle of small bodies and blankets, and I said it immediately. Girls, I’m so sorry I yelled at you. I got upset about a work email. One of my shipments is running late, and I needed to sort it out. My oldest, Esme, looked at me and said, Mommy, you should have yelled at your computer, not us. Then she grabbed her pillow, smashed her face into it, and let out a muffled scream. Sometimes that helps, she said.
That night, we read The Good Egg. The Good Egg gets so stressed trying to be good — trying to make everyone around him good — that he starts to see cracks in his shell. So he leaves. He wanders. He walks and paints and sits quietly until he starts to feel like himself again. Then he goes back home. At the end, I told the girls: " This is mommy. They agreed, mostly because the egg wore glasses.
45 Degrees
The next morning, I took a walk. It was 45 degrees, but it felt more like 14. The day before had been 60, and my body hadn’t caught up yet. Perception isn’t absolute. It’s relational. We don’t experience things as they are — we experience them against whatever came just before.
That’s comparison. And it isn’t new, and it isn’t a flaw. Humans have always done this. Historically, it made sense — how much food does the tribe next to us have, what are they doing that we aren’t? Comparison drove survival. The reference points were real, proximate, and honest.
But somewhere, the reference points stopped being honest. Now we hold a small screen and measure our lives against ones that were lit and filtered and carefully arranged before we ever saw them. We compare our insides to other people’s outsides. Our bedtime chaos to a Pinterest graphic that says How to Put Your Kids to Bed in 5 Simple Steps. And our nervous systems are running the same ancient software — scanning, measuring, calibrating — against data that was never real to begin with.
The Only Mirror That Works
On the walk I thought about the email. I thought about the frantic person at the desk. And I realized that what had actually settled me — what had shifted something in my chest by the time I reached the end of the street — wasn’t a mindfulness practice or a deep breath or a reframe. It was a comparison. Just a different kind. I held last night up against an older version of myself. The one who would have stayed frantic. The one who wouldn’t have noticed the frantic person at all, let alone walked away from her. The one who definitely wouldn’t have apologized before the books.
Same instinct. Different reference point.
Nothing is ever quite as it seems, and I don’t think it’s because we’re broken or too online or not present enough. I think it’s because we are always, always measuring — and we rarely stop long enough to ask what we’re measuring against. Our mood, our history, our empty stomach, the way the light is sitting in the sky. The 60-degree day that came before.
The journals might not arrive in time. That might not resolve the easy way. But somewhere on that walk, I felt it settle — everything is going to work out fine. Not because the problem was solved. But because I’d found a reference point I could actually trust.
I already knew who I didn’t want to be. And last night, in the middle of the mess, I noticed her. That felt like enough.