Tipping point

Ok, so the thought that has been nagging away at me has, today, become a sentiment with a voice behind it. I'm looking forward to getting back to work. I think it was the moment when, after dropping off my poor overworked wife for what sure as hell looked to me like a luxurious on-call shift at her clinic, I schlepped the 4 kids home to discover that one had peed her pants in the van, another one had so pissed off her older sister by repeatedly kicking her in the knee during the two hour ride home from my sister's house that said older sister had scrambled out of the spawnhauler, spilling a half cup of hot chocolate on both her new (off-white) Christmas sweater and all of her new (and paid for by herself, so triply egregious) teddy bear shirt. While I scrambled to get clothes changed, read laundry labels, fill sinks with presoaks, carefully skirting around the pans of turtle food that are spread out to dry after being rescued from the tank yesterday after boy wonder poured about two lb of the stuff on the turtle's head, the same little precious boy wonder had stolen up the stairs to try to play marbles with his sister's newly acquired hermit crabs.

I stared down that nice bottle of 12 year old rum that sits mocking me on the counter, only because I knew I would soon have to go pick up my wife and rescue her, poor thing, from her nice, quiet office filled with chocolatey gifts from grateful patients. But once my love is safely home, that cork is history.

I wonder: is getting drunk on New Year's Eve such a cultural universal because it's the only way we can limp through the last few hours of 'freedom' before getting back to some semblance of real life?