I hear folks exclaiming mightily over the cooler fall weather. “It’s my favorite time of year,” I hear joyfully proclaimed by many to me. They must be out of their minds I wonder to myself.

Fall weather seems to be The Dying Season to me. Leaves shrivel and fall off the trees; frost takes my delicious vegetables, decimating my garden, burning the flowers, leaving a trail of destruction. Baseball season ends this month with the World Series, pools are closed down, and night comes way too early.

We shut the windows, drag out the extra clothes that weigh us down, and the kids start to crumble in preparation of Holiday Hell. Schools amp up their celebrations of each holiday, a good thing for regular kids, but my traumatized children have horrible memories of drunken birth family dysfunctional events that culminated in their removal and entrance into the foster care system.

I try my best to replace those sad memories with fun times, but the kids try even harder to ruin a good thing each year in an odd burst of emotional self-preservation that seems to make no sense.

Sometimes I can decently pull off Thanksgiving. Heck everyone likes to eat, but at times even my grown kids bring attitudes and grumblings to the party. One year I overheard a grown daughter sneeringly tell Grandma, “We don’t need to help in the kitchen. We have jobs.” Were they implying that I didn’t? Where’d this Cinderella ‘tude come from? Now we have divas?

If you can’t bring a decent attitude, don’t bother to come over. We’re overflowing enough with hatefulness as it is, why add yours to it?

For Halloween, we are blessed by our church having a huge festival that everyone looks forward to for the last twenty something years. We’ll get through October.

And then there’s Christmas, famously known as a commercial media buildup that inevitably lets down even normal folks more commonly known as the rash of suicides and early deaths that seem to peak in January.

Moms are always pressured during these months to provide for outrageous expectations, send food here and there, shop for presents that won’t replace the emptiness people feel on the inside, prove your love materialistically that won’t satisfy anyone’s hungers that were artificially amped up by Madison Avenue executives.

What’s a mama to do? Not normally this negative, I apologize for today’s apparent rant, but as I watch my kids escalate their behaviors all over the place, I’m attempting to funnel mine here into words rather than outbursts in response to the fury I see demonstrated all too often.

It’s best that I just keep smiling and attempting to maintain or model some semblance of normalcy each day.