What could be worse than suffering from PMS?  Suffering from someone else’s PMS, that’s what.   PMS is like a rabid puppy.  It seeks to destroy everything it touches, leaving a war torn trail of shredded shoes and underwear in its wake, but it likes company.  In fact, it likes company so damn much, it recruits friends.  How do I know this?  Because women living or working in close proximity to one another always seem to cycle together.  We don’t understand it, we don’t really like it, but we have absolutely no way to control it. 

It sneaks up on us like the scary, badass ninja it is.

So imagine my horror, as I begin the tenuous climb down from the crumbling ledge of my own terrifying brand of PMS, and I find myself stepping onto a window washer’s unsteady platform, hanging precariously over the edge on a windy, rainy day with two teenage girls and their very own vats of simmering, frothing PMS.  I have nowhere to turn…nowhere to run.  I am trapped, and ready to chew off my own arm just to escape.

That’s when I get the text from my daughter, just moments after finally falling asleep last night.  “Mom, it’s an emergency…bring (insert feminine hygiene product here).”

There is nothing like discovering at five o’clock in the morning that you have exactly three items left in the box and three women in desperate need.  Sure, enough to go around, but these things must be immediately replenished!  This is no joke!

So I’m standing in the line at the grocery store this morning (after getting way too few hours of sleep…WAY TOO FEW!) and on the conveyor belt…gliding ever closer to the pubescent boy ringing up my items…I have a bag of tortilla chips, one can of chili, two boxes of ice cream sandwiches, a bag of shredded cheese, three boxes of tampons, four boxes of pads, and one milky way candy bar.  The kid looks at me funny.  You know that look?  The one teenage boys seem to sport all the time…like they can sniff out sex in a dirty trash can.  He scans my stuff, he glances at me, then he cracks this little grin.  Like he knows something about me from my groceries.  So I shrug, knock over the tower of feminine hygiene products with a flick of my wrist and I say it… “I’d like three seats for the apocalypse please.” 

Yeah, he doesn’t laugh.  He clearly doesn’t have sisters, or a girlfriend.  And quite possibly his mother has done him a great disservice by not teaching him about the dangers of a PMSing female.  He didn’t get it.  Oh, but he will.  He will get it one day very soon.  And when he does, he’s going to suddenly burst out laughing, and his friends will all ask him, “what’s so funny, Jimmy?”  And he’s going to look at them and say, “Three seats for the apocalypse…I totally get it.”

Until the next time…I’ll be hiding in my room until the scary part is over!