A Mom Tried To Take A Day Off And The Universe Laughed At Her
She was supposed to get the day all to herself while her husband stayed home with the kids.
It’s pretty universally known that most moms don’t get a “day off” from parenting, no matter how hard they might try. In general, even when moms are working and the kids are at school, their minds are going a mile a minute with the exhaustive mental load and invisible labor that comes with having kids.
However, once in a blue moon, a mom might get a day or evening to just reconnect with themselves and get a freaking break. One mom’s attempt to have a “day off” from being a mom was infiltrated rather quickly by a combination of her husband’s utter incompetence and maybe some bad luck, too.
Katrina Grillo, aka @katrinagrillo, posted a TikTok where she vented about how her “day off” from being a mom went totally haywire after her husband was left in charge of their two children.
“So today is supposed to be my day off from parenting. I’m supposed to have the whole day to myself to do whatever I want,” Grillo begins. “This morning, I took myself out to breakfast. I have a spa appointment this afternoon.”
After her nice morning alone, she says that she headed back to the house to grab a few things before enjoying the rest her day. Her husband was at home with their kids — a four-year-old and a one-year-old.
Within minutes, she realized that her one-year-old son had gotten into some medicine on her husband’s watch. That’s right. She came home from her “day off” and discovered her son in a dangerous situation, not her husband who was supposed to be taking care of the kids solo for the day.
“In the five minutes I was in the house, I saw that my one-year-old had gotten into the linen closet and gotten into a jar of Vicks VapoRub ,” she says with irritation in her voice. “We had no idea if he has ate any of it or how much.”
Despite this mishap, Grillo still decides that she’s going to enjoy her spa afternoon and packs up her things to leave, once again putting the household duties in dad’s hands.
“I told my husband to call the pediatrician ... They told him to call Poison Control, and after I left the house, he calls me and says that Poison Control told him to take [their son] directly to the ER,” she explains.
Offering to give him a hand, she asks if she should come home to help. He declines her help. That is, until he calls her again.
“Two minutes later, he calls me back to tell me that the four-year-old has locked him out of the house,” she says. You can hear the exhaustion in her voice.
Needless to say, other TikTok users had thoughts for Grillo on this frustrating story centered around her husband’s inability to look after the kids for a mere few hours. One user questioned why the parent who is not the default parent just doesn’t seem to get the job done. “Why is it so common for the other parent to just ... not parent as well?” they asked.
Others show sympathy for Grillo and the fact that her “day off” was a total bust, but reminding her that she still needs time to herself. “You deserve a day. Take 10. Just not this day. Don’t give him *this* day and say he’s not cut out for it.”
One user suggested, “Just keep trying until he figures it out.”
Others had less sympathetic approaches to dealing with her husband’s incompetence. “Divorce :),” one TikTok user wrote in the comments — which also happens to have the most “likes” of any other comment on the video.
After receiving a remarkable amount of traction from her first video — garnering over 880k views and over 114k likes — Grillo posted an update.
“First of all, the one-year-old is totally fine,” she starts off.
After being deemed safe to go home after some observation at the ER, Grillo’s husband took their son back to the house so that Grillo could finally enjoy her “day off.” “
“I went out for the rest of my day because if my husband had been gone for the day, y’know he normally goes snowboarding for a whole day, he’s not going to drive 2-3 hours home ... so I wasn’t going to stop my day either,” she explains. “It was a really nice day, and everyone was fine.”
When she asked her husband why the one-year-old even had the opportunity to get into the closet to grab the VapoRub, he told her that he assumed everything was fine because the baby was being “quiet.”
Of course, any mom knows that when the kids are being quiet is when to be the most concerned that they’re getting into something they shouldn’t be.
Once again, Grillo’s comment section was flooded with users who could not believe she was tolerating being married but basically operating as a solo parent.
“I would’ve lost it. I had this same issues with my husband. I looked at him said “we can get divorce if I am going to be single parent,” one user wrote.
Let’s just hope this was a learning experience for dad and mom will actually get another (uninterrupted) day off with no ER trips or panicked phone calls from her husband.
