The Great Stock Market Crash of 2021

 People ask me “What is it like to be a mom of three boys?”

Some days, you watch the stock market rise and you watch the stock market fall.

Some days, you think about everything you just made in stocks going right out the window and taking a one-way ticket to the local Emergency Room.

Yesterday was the latter. Let me elaborate:

We play the stock market a little. We like to think that we’ve made semi-intelligent choices based on our current financial situation and appropriate research. Sometimes we’ve won big. A few months ago, in the middle of the pandemic, we were watching a pharma company’s stock rise almost unchecked. We knew that it was largely over-speculation, but hey– the numbers don’t lie and we were getting excited thinking about all the ways we could use it.

In June, the stocks were sky high and we thought, “Maybe we should cash out.” Dave reasoned (logically so), “If they are actually first in the vaccine race, the stocks are going to keep going up and we’ll be sad that we cashed out early.” I agreed. The next couple of days, we saw it take a nose dive as the FDA hit the skids on the trial. We drank our tears for breakfast.

Such is life with boys. Volatility is the name of the game.

When you think you’ve won, it’s a big, fat lie.

The other day, all boys were banished to their room for the main reason they were irritating the heck out of me and the noise was next level annoying.

My brother was coming over that night and he walked in the door. He played with Rachel, then the three of us started walking up the stairs to say “hi” to the bedroom inmates.

Unbeknownst to me, Dave had arrived home early. And by “early” I mean, before it had actually gotten dark. He had walked into the side alley where our garden was to start watering his plants.

Will & I climbed the stairs and we walked into the room. I assessed the situation with the beady eyes of a hawk, scanning for rodents about to become dinner.

Three boys froze and looked at me. I felt a cool breeze on my face and turned to look toward the window. It was wide open.

The screen in front of the window had a hole in it the size of my fist.

All three boys started in at once. “Mom! Mom! The screen already had a hole in it… we just made it bigger!,” said Sam. How helpful of him.

Josh threw TJ under the bus, per usual. “Mom! TJ was on top of the dresser throwing stuff out!”

“Are you guys actually kidding me right now?” …my favorite phrase uttered a million times daily. But of course, they are not. I just say that to raise awareness in the current company of their complete lack of intelligence and impending doom.

With a slack jaw, I looked out of the hole in the window and saw my blue-scrubbed husband in the alley holding up TJ’s stuffed bunny and bunch of other various and sundry pieces of paraphernalia from their room.

The look on his face was some horror mixed with disbelief. For being a less emotional person than myself, he truly nailed it on the expression.

Let me pause, dear reader and assure you that we saw a pile of cash in the ER and also broken little boys tied to gurneys. That moment was not funny. It was horrible and real.

Dave looked at me and said, “I walked in the side alley, saw the stuff, looked up and there was TJ pressed against the screen, held in his room by some flimsy metal mesh.”

Friends, these are not unsupervised children. Feral, yes. But still under constant supervision. Like wild animals caged at the zoo. And yet, right under my nose, they were about to kill themselves out of a two-story window.

Needless to say, that night, after a severe boy-gang chastising, Dave and I discussed options and “window locks” were the final conclusion.

I’d like to comfort myself and think, “that day was extraordinary” or “that day was special.” But I don’t have the luxury of fooling myself. It was simply a day ending in “y.”

We say a prayer and thank God He has an entire army of angels around our house. Because He knows we need them.

As for the stocks, that pharma company is now so low it’s laughable. But tomorrow may be a different story. Some people play stocks. Some people save for college. And some people have “window” insurance.

#boymomlife💙 #momof3boys #shenanigans #happystpattysday #leprechauns