Rabid Coyote vs. My Mom

Newsletter 2022-02-07

Like most stories about wild animals attacking my mom, this one starts with a blizzard. For a more reasonable person, the massive snow storm would have been an excuse to get out of work. For Mom, it was a chance to work more.

She’s always been that way. She currently has a full time position plus a grocery delivery job she does before and after work and then several shelf-stocking jobs she does at four in the morning before even God is awake. I’m probably forgetting several dozen side gigs, but it’s hard not to. Nobody, including my dad and the IRS, knows everything she does. Her income comes in on W2s and 1099s and cash-filled envelopes from shifty bread vendors in the middle of the night. The number of hours she works in a week is all of them. It’s a practice she picked up long ago while raising seven kids. She would earn negative money if she had to pay for daycare, so she strung together forty or fifty hours of “part time” jobs where she could drag her kids along until one of us (m…