I must start this blog post (after I finish rebooting my Blackberry) with a complaint. I hate this entire situation, and I’ve been hiding from it and being very counter-confrontational and putting off and putting off doing the timeline—complete with videos and Tweets and scanned police reports–because I just hate this.

It’s like I have a second part-time job, in addition to all my other freelance and volunteer things. I don’t like calling contractors and cops and lawyers and having weird conversations with the parent coordinator, Janet Jenkins at Daisy’s high school. “Will this mysterious legal thing we’re talking about prevent me from being the PTA treasurer?” I finally asked, kind of hoping the answer would be “yes, it will. Sign out of QuickBooks now and never sign back in again. No, never do math again. You are banished from math.”

Sadly the answer was No, and then this afternoon, the mysterious conversation was illuminated by the presence of our third CPS social worker. That was the mysterious conversation with Ms. Jenkins! Maggie had called CPS again or emailed and cc-ed our daughters’ school. She was upping the stakes bigtime! I don’t know why. I did say “Fuck You” when the kids and I had to bike past her to get to our house.

“No one talk to her, not one word,” I’d hissed at Daisy and Wyatt as we biked up. Calvin, who gets very chest-puffy when she’s around, was at the deli buying cilantro and avocado and some fruit, and some cookies and probably beer.

And there she was, right in the middle of the foot of the alley, hulking away in her dirty clothes. She did a little wave gesture, an after you hand thing for the kids, and to me she flipped the bird.

“Fuck you,” I said and then pedaled really fast. She’s bigger than me. I told the kids what she did and what I said and at first they were all, “great job!” and then they were all, “you told us not to say a word.”

So maybe the CPS call with the up-sell of the high school email was retaliation for that Fuck you? Can I take full credit?

Back to today: I really liked this CPS social worker. She was very relaxed and let us show her all our letter about our last CPS case being closed. She took Daisy first for the interview, so I went back downstairs to work on my Timeline of madness, and I grabbed a beer. I was about to start dinner when CPS came and I had decided that a 6:30 glass of wine was good to start cooking with, but you can’t just pour a glass of wine when the CPS social worker shows up unexpecxtedly. The Budweiser was my consolation, and I went back to my file threshing.

I am doing the punishing work of reviewing all the media Maggie has accumulated and combing through her tedious Twitter feed. Oh Paul McCartney, shan’t you join Maggie in her new inflatable hot tub, which we have christened “the shit tub.”

And that is the worst part of all of this, beyond the beer drinking while waiting for my CPS interview, past the flood damage, steps beyond the file massaging and tagging I did all day and much of last week. It’s the meanness of all of it, that our family can just erupt in mean jokes about Maggie. It is hilarious—the flip flop in the fridge with the kimchi will always make me smile—but then I just feel angry and sad.

As I sat and pondered her fourth Instgram account and checked the captions for anything libelous about us, Wyatt came down and fetched me, and in his infinite 13-year-old wisdom advised me to lose the beer. I set it on the stove and had a nice talk with the social worker, showed her the house and the neighbors garbage back “yard.”

I think today is over. CPS has knocked on our door before, once at 4 AM and also at 11PM but hopefully tonight is quiet.