My colleague Joann Weiner recently wrote a post on Politics Daily in which she described the blissful, stress-free summer week she just enjoyed in Washington, D.C., while her family was out of town. She exercised . . . she went out to dinner . . . she tried beer ice cream . . . she even — gasp — took time to smell the proverbial flowers.

I’m happy for Jo. Truly I am. It’s just that after I read her post, I took one look at the way I’ve spent the last seven days and thought: What’s wrong with this picture?

You see, I’m having a different sort of week. I call it a “Calgon” week.

Don’t remember Calgon? Among other things, it’s a line of bath and beauty products. When I was a kid, there was this marvelous commercial in which this harried housewife in a pink bathrobe stood in the middle of her kitchen overwhelmed by various demands: the kids . . . the dishes . . . the dinner . . . the telephone. She’d throw up her hands and shriek: “Calgon! Take Me Away!” and, presto! She was magically whisked into a soothing bubble bath.

Pink bathrobe notwithstanding, that shrieking lady in the kitchen pretty much captures how I’ve felt this past week. It’s a week that’s featured, in no particular order: a major schlep to and from son’s camp located in absurdly difficult-to-access section of North London (Remind me, again, why we decided not to get a car?), reduced work time due to said schlep, husband on deadline whose frazzled hair increasingly resembles Albert Einstein’s, acute case of hostess anxiety brought on by not having entertained in four years because we lived in a closet, but somehow managing to schedule two events at my new apartment in one week (Should we do Red? White? Fizzy? And what is a tapanade, anyway?). Oh yeah. And did I mention the pink eye that’s now making its way through the house?

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I’m was also over on Politics Daily this week talking about David Cameron’s revolutionary approach to ending big government in the U.K.

Image: Calgon, take me away! by yourFAVORITEmartian via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

There’s a scene in the movie “Fish Tank,” (often hailed as the U.K.’s answer to “Precious,”) in which the mother of the 15-year-old heroine tells her daughter that she’d intended to abort her.

It’s a difficult thing to listen to — and to watch the mixture of pain, anger and confusion that passes across the teenage daughter’s face. But one of the many things this brutally realistic film forces you to do is confront the question of what each of these female’s lives might have been like without the other.

In the Woman Up thread that’s coalescing around the issue of feminism and abortion and summarized by my colleague Bonnie Goldstein, some of my sister bloggers have described regret as a component of many abortion decisions. Joanne Weiner quotes President Obama saying something along the lines of “I know that many women today are still regretting that abortion they had 20 years ago.” My colleague Mary C. Curtis similarly notes that she’s heard plenty of regrets and one woman even say, “When I was on that table, I knew I would never let this happen again.”

I agree that there’s probably plenty of regret out there on the table (so to speak). But there are other ways in which regret enters into this equation that we talk about much less.

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Image: Pregnant Woman by Bete a Bon-Dieu via Flickr under a Creative Commons License