“I can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow for a rest” says Conservative Post reader, Dorothy Lyons.
It is 7pm on Easter Monday, and I am lying facedown on the living room carpet. Not because I’m engaging in some trendy wellness practice or mindful gratitude ritual. No. I’m here because I tripped over a half-melted chocolate bunny, slipped on a rogue Hot Wheels car, and decided not to get back up.
Some people dread going back to work after a long weekend. I, on the other hand, am polishing my ID badge with reverence and Googling “how to fake being locked in the office indefinitely.”
I have just survived four days of Easter, also known as the Great Domestic Olympics (minus medals, plus tantrums). Four days of entertaining kids, cousins, aunts, uncles, and at least one grandmother who brought her own Tupperware to take leftovers like she was raiding a medieval village.
Let us not forget the husband. Ah yes. The Love of My Life, The Keeper of the Remote, The Man Who Miraculously Avoided Doing Anything. His main contribution to the Easter effort was telling me, mid-chaos, “I think the dishwasher’s full.”
Reader, I resisted the urge to bury him with the leftover lamb shank and some symbolic rosemary.
At one point, I was in the kitchen preparing snacks while holding a baby that wasn’t mine, refereeing a Nerf war between two sugar-drenched nephews, and explaining to my brother’s toddler why we don’t put Cadbury Creme Eggs in the dog’s bowl.
I’m not proud of it but by about 5pm, I was 73% rosé and 27% passive-aggressive smiling.
The children, naturally, have eaten their weight in chocolate and are now operating solely on glucose and unholy energy. They have not blinked since Saturday. They speak only in squeals. One of them may be levitating.
Tonight, I peeled dried marshmallow off the ceiling and tried to remember if I’d always had that nervous eye twitch or if it’s new.
So yes, I’m thrilled—no, ecstatic—to be heading back to work tomorrow. Where the coffee is hot, the toilets are not sticky, and nobody will scream directly into my ear for fun.
I long for meetings. I crave email threads. I would sell my soul for a spreadsheet and some polite small talk about printer issues. Anything. Anything but another “family board game” that ends with someone crying and someone else hiding under the table with a packet of jelly beans.
As I stare into the abyss of my handbag, now containing a half-eaten chocolate bar and a lone sock, I know one thing:
I will show up to the office tomorrow. Hair unwashed, dignity questionable, and sanity frayed—but with a smile that says:
“I’m here. Please give me tasks that don’t scream, cry, or need reheating.”
Work, I missed you.
By Dorothy Lyons.
