July 9, 2010 | 2:05 am

PMS, it don’t stand for “Peeved Mother Suffering” for nothing

Posted by Chava Tombosky

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I’m totally okay with admitting that I have had a serious case of angry PMS for the past 6 days. Not only am I okay with admitting it, I have worked on getting help, and am ready to even accept the consequences of writing this quite opened essay about my nasty rage that arrives once a month in the form of an angry pitbull foaming at the mouth, snarling inside my body like a cryptic monster who has escaped the dwellings of her nasty dark dungeon.  Of course I’m writing this with the hopes that other women will come forward and admit they too receive an unwelcome visitor that arrives in the shape of some ugly incoherent crazed step twin just as hopeless and maleficent as mine is.  This essay is riding on pure validation.

Normally my kids are happy, my husband is whistling and our home is filled with birds that sing and fluffy white mice who dance ballet numbers. For a good part of the month, you can call me Snow White. But when PMS hits, it’s like the sun sets leaving in its wake a nasty, angry,  obsessive, female who can’t get enough salty crunchy or gooey chocolatey calories inside her mouth more scary looking than the Evil Queen.  Not even the Evil Queen herself can bear to look in the mirror this time of month. I swear there are words that leave my body I never even knew I was capable of uttering.  Everyone knows this other female exists. They all fear her. They all loathe her.  Even I can’t stand her.  Everything suffers when she comes to town. My relationships, my cooking, even my writing suffers when this choleric wench arrives for her visit. Everything I write is filled with critical adjectives and dark nonsensical humor that looks more like an angry rant written by Tova Reich. There’s a perfectly good reason why I haven’t written an essay in the past week. (well I did, but it was scary and non-coherent, like a Coen Brothers script on steroids. I may post it just to prove this other psychopath exists.)

Do you know what it’s like to have your blood boiling so much all you want to do is use a machete on every creature that comes your way? Do you know how hard it is not to picture yourself shooting every dog that barks with a BB gun? PMS is a very serious and awful Disease. (This term, disease, is casually used for people who like to hide behind their bad behavior with a medical phrase hoping it will get them off the hook of being a horrible human being. I am allowing myself the use of this pathetic cop out of an excuse term as well being that PMS is a qualified medical state of insanity.) But I am not gonna take it anymore. I’m taking vitamins for now on. I’m gonna exercise so hard that if it kills me, at least I’ll be dead and nice instead of alive and mean. I plan on beating the nasty out of me if I have to. And not just so that Snow White can live on and the Evil Queen will finally perish a swift convenient death, but so that I will have children who don’t roll their eyes at me, snarl rude comments or attack my parenting skills all because they’ve witnessed the uncontrollable evil beast that lives inside my body 6 days out of the month. You know you need to tackle PMS when your kid sends you an email that says “Please take a moment and listen to this”- a soundtrack of “If your happy and you know it clap your hands” plays. Now at first I was thinking how much I wanted to rip the computer out of the wall, hall it across the room, beat the living snot out of the singer who sang that song through the mp3 player, but then I came to, and realized the underlying message that resided within me was my kid was literally begging me through email to get happy.  (Don’t think I didn’t notice he was too afraid to tell me this message in person.)

It’s not like I enjoy these 6 days of hiatus with anger, rage, and an over all ill attitude towards anyone who says “Just look at the bright side,” but it is a chemistry inside me that I can’t control. I may not be able to control it coming, but I can control it leaving quickly.  And If I don’t take some serious proactive look at how to put down this beast, than I am seriously afraid that one day I will be driving on the 405 in bumper to bumper traffic and as some little Nissan tries cutting me off to get two inches closer to an exit she is not entitled to, I will open my door, haul a huge axe towards her sedan and split her transmission in half while listening to that song “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands” plays on the radio. Not that I’ve ever been in that situation before and have ever thought of doing that, but I’m just saying, you never know what might happen if I don’t start taking vitamin B12.