How to make yourself crazy in eight easy steps

Things I've had to do or cope with in the last week that are a little crazy-making:
1. A father-in-law ends up in the hospital and every piece of news is a little worse than the piece we'd heard before.
2. Juggling three kids in soccer means trying to get them to 2-4 games/practices each per week. With only one car.
2. A daughter gets injured on the soccer field and has to get checked out at the sports injury clinic.
3. The sports injury clinic takes way too long, so I have to rush out of a management team meeting to relieve Marcel on parenting duty. Daughter ends up in a leg brace.
4. A six a.m. flight means that I have to climb into a cab at 4:30 in the morning. Yawn.
5. A poor choice in bed and breakfasts in Toronto means that I have to lie awake listening to the owners in a lovers' quarrel on either sides of a locked door for about an hour, when I've already been awake since 3:30 a.m.
6. The flight home the next day means that I climb out of the cab back at home at 12:00 a.m., after spending 11 hours at a film shoot. Plus the cab driver was rude and I was grouchy.
7. A major film shoot, that's a bigger investment than any project I've managed since I started in this job, is resting on my shoulders and I have to make all of the decisions and be prepared to justify them to staff and board.
8. The house is a mess because of all the juggling of soccer schedules and hospital visits and travel and we have an exchange student showing up in less than a week.

Not that I'm complaining - I have a good life all-in-all. But sometimes I reflect on what Linda Duxbury calls the "sandwich generation" (those people in the middle years of their lives who are coping with both ailing parents and dependent children) and I get a little stressed about coping with it all.

Remember back in junior high English classes when you had to write a "so much depends upon..." poem like The Red Wheelbarrow? Well, my whole life feels like a "so much depends upon" poem.

So much depends upon... the stressed out soccer mom who's also a manager who has to travel for her work in a non-profit organization.