Archive for the ‘Being a girl’ Category

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Staycation hangover.

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

I don’t know if it’s post-vacation (staycation!) hangover, or the beginning or middle or end of a flu bug, but man alive – last night was not a good sleep night. At all. In any sense.

On one hand, you had Buddy – all securely ensconced in our big bed, complete with feather duvet, microfleece sheets and a mountain of pillows. In this mountain of plushy joy, he spent the majority of the night tossing and turning and shivering. Poor lamb. He gets sick the least often of the lot of us, but when he does, it’s generally a lulu.

I, on the other hand, spent the night on the couch, with one pillow, one blanket and one annoyed kitty. There, I spent the bulk of the night tossing and turning and sweating. I have no real idea why. I suspect my temperature regulation skills are not at their peak right now, either. Here’s hoping I make it through the week without also getting sick. Really, it can only be one of us at a time. Isn’t that the rule?

Upshot and short summation: I’m ridiculously fucking tired. I’m also sad that my next day off of work isn’t until mid-February.

I’m also having some really unpleasant family drama. Given the incredibly confusing nature of my family tree*, you’d think this would be very normal for me. It’s not.

In four sentences: Mother moves back to town. Eldest daughter’s husband (of 20 years or so) feels threatened by their closeness. Drama of epic proportions ensues, including tug of war, emotional blackmail and massive controlling behaviour. For no appreciable reason I can fathom, this drama also keeps having my name brought into it – geebus, asshole, I haven’t spoken directly to you more than once in the last fifteen years – how much more distant do you want me to be?

And now, with my mother pouring her hurt feelings out in one ear, and my sister pretending everything is fine in the other – I’m trapped. Maybe I should increase my phone avoiding capacity. Become a true master, like Buddy.

Yeah. Good times.

*A fact for which my only defense rests in: well, at least it isn’t a straight stick.

Posted in Being a girl, Getting older, buddy, family | No Comments »

Why I hate sharing events with my ex

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Not because they were casually dressed, front and centre and holding a camera, whereas I haven’t showered today (thanks to my hot water tank for exploding last night), arrived just in time, looking harassed and stressed (because I am - work is insane right now), and parked myself in a chair in the corner.

Not because I didn’t have my Buddy there (thanks again to my hot water tank for exploding last night, requiring one member of our household to stay home and wait for nice fixit people), or any other stars-in-alignment rationale.

No, the reason I hate sharing events is because Rosebud always goes to ex and girlfriend first.

The thing is - I know *why* she does it. She doesn’t live with them, and only has one overnight with them a week. Therefore, they are the speshul parents - the ones whose attention she gets more rarely, and therefore, covets more.

They’re also the parents who don’t have to poke the child awake every morning, wrestle her into clothing, and shuffle her occasionally unwilling body off to school. They don’t have to fight with her about what’s appropriate and what isn’t. Or about what she can have and what she can’t. They can afford to indulge her every whim, because we’re there to do all the discipline.

So yeah - I know why I get to be second fiddle at shared events. I understand it, and can even appreciate that, on one level, this means that I’m such a constant in her life she doesn’t even think about it. I know that this means she feels secure and safe with my love.

But in no way does that make it suck less.

All that said - Juniper and I were able to watch the concert together, and appreciate the awesomeness of our youngest family member together. When she finally did run over to us, yelling “Group kiss, group kiss!”, my joy over being with my girls was pretty much complete.

My kids are pretty much awesome all over.

Posted in Being a girl, Juniper, Rant, Rosebud, buddy, divorce, family | 2 Comments »

Because it’s true.

Friday, November 27th, 2009

You know, it becomes more obvious on a daily basis how much my kitchen is my happy place. I love to bustle around it in, even (and perhaps especially) on a Friday night. I go there to put everything else in the world aside.

And it’s a mark of how often I’m in there, and how enthusiastic I am about the whole process of making food that nobody even comes in to check, regardless of how much hammering and thunking goes on. They’ll snoop about the food, but they never blink at the noise.

This is good, because I lost the head of my meat mallet whilst beating naked chicken thighs to a pulp. When I say lost, I mean propelled. And when I say propelled, I mean tossed upward.

Guess the reflexes haven’t quit on me just yet.

Posted in Being a girl, Happiness, Health, cooking, family | 2 Comments »

Better living through pharmaceuticals - reprise.

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

In the winter of 2007, I started taking anti-anxiety medication. After being on it for about six weeks, I wrote a post about it. This is an excerpt:

I’ve now realized that what I previously thought of as “managing”, was really cripplingly difficult and often left me with giant holes in my self-esteem.

Things would eat away at me for decades. Literally decades. I don’t think there’s an awkward incident in my entire life that I can’t catalogue for you.

And now? Well, I’m still me. I still worry. I still fret over things that I can’t control.

But the huge, massive, gargantuan, insane worries that I could never put down for a rest, no matter how much I wanted to - those are gone.

I still have bad days. But then I can get up off the couch and carry on with my evening.

Now,  I play more with the Rosebud. I worry less about every single thing she does or puts in her mouth. I can relax and laugh a bit.

So yeah - basically, what the hell was I waiting for all this time?


In July of this year, I went off the meds. I did so because I wanted to assess my mental state. I was operating with the theory that the bulk of my heightened anxiety was post-partum related.

Turns out, it was less post-partum and more parenthood. Or aging. Or something.

Bottom line is this: I quit taking the meds and now, I’m going back on them. I am, I realized, a better parent and a happier person when I don’t have the anxiety looming over me.

Even though I’m madly in love with my family, have a job where I’m valued, a home that I love and friends who care for me - I find that I can’t appreciate any of it when I’m constantly in a state of fear: Did I just say something horribly wrong? Was that chest pain a sign of a looming heart attack? What kind of asshole (read: me) shows up 15 minutes late to a meeting?

These thoughts? They’re fairly normal. But the difference between normal and me is that I think these thoughts for days and days and days after I may or may not have said the wrong thing, had a chest pain or missed a meeting. It doesn’t quit. I don’t quit.

As T-dot said so aptly “It seems like you’re doing okay, but you seem really tired from trying to keep it all together.”

She’s right. I’m tired. Time to avail myself, once again, of the miracles of modern medicine.

See you on the other side.

Posted in Being a girl, Getting older, Happiness, Health | 4 Comments »

Reclaiming my humanity

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Well, after magically waking up on Saturday morning in very little pain (from my back), and following that with both dancing and wearing of high heels, resulting in yet more MINIMAL PAIN, I am feeling most optimistic and generally perkier than I was last week.

This is good, because I could’ve brought rain to the desert with the giant cloud I was carting around.

I’m not going to start doing cartwheels or seeing if I can pretzel myself into interesting new shapes - I’m not crazy (much). I’ve been warned that the pain can be intermittent, but if that was an intermission, it couldn’t have come at a better time. My very own Halloween miracle.

Why was this timing so immensely awesome?

T-dot and her freshly minted husband got married on Saturday. It was an absolutely stunning event, and I think it was most definitely worth the effort T-dot put into it over the course of the last year. Her design sense, love for Halloween, and general happiness showed in every fine detail.

Wonderful.

Now, the reason I was in such need of a fully functioning spine? I had the daunting* task of giving the reading at the ceremony. Going up to speak during a person’s one and only special day creates an entirely different level of pressure.

What if I trip on the way up? What if I deliver the reading with so many verbal typos that it becomes virtually incomprehensible? What if I pass out? What if I deliver the whole thing in a nerve-wracked wisp of a voice? What if I just suck? I WILL RUIN THEIR WEDDING WITH MY FAIL!!!!

Suffice to say, I was seriously, deeply and incredibly happy to have gotten through the whole thing with a minimum of disaster, and may have enjoyed more than my fair share of wine in celebration of this fact. I am equally grateful that my dear friends asked me to perform this task, and that they didn’t ask me to read from the Bible (which would’ve resulted in Fire and Brimstone, if I so much as cracked open the tome).

It was a good time, with good people.

As my lovely (and utterly unnecessary) thank-you gift says: A friend is someone who knows everything about you, and loves you anyway.

Too true. I’m grateful for my friends.

*When I say daunting, please read this as TERRIFYING.

Posted in Being a girl, Happiness | No Comments »

Oh dear, sweet, shrieking neurosis.

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

As I mentioned in a previous post, I finally became enough of an adult to seek out a family doctor for Buddy and I. Recently, we went for our annual check ups. I say annual and try very hard not to laugh, because it’s been a lot more like DECADES since I’d been to a doctor for just a check-up.  It’s just one of those things I’ve let slide for a very long time. I’m not proud, but it is what it is, and you should really stop tutting me from over there because I can hear you from over here, okay?

I digress. Anyway, according to my doctor, things are generally good by me. I haven’t done all the ominous bloodwork as yet, but all the other tests checked out just fine.

Except one.

Scene: There I am, laying around his office with my shirt pulled up and my pants unbuttoned, so he can poke around my belly area. Fingers rummage around in my vital organs (through my skin, always a treat) and he says “cough”. So, I cough. He rummages around a bit more and then asks me to cough again.

I oblige.

Then (and I swear, I’m not making this up), he STUCK HIS FINGER IN MY BELLY BUTTON.

Yes, yes he did. And if you’d been in his waiting room, or even in that neighbourhood, you’d have heard my howl of protest. Not because I like being mean to my doctor, or howling randomly in doctor’s offices, but guys - he put his finger. In my belly button.

Just as I was recovering from this gross violation of my personal space and general mental health, he went in for the kill.

“Oh, it looks like you have an umbilical hernia. You’ll need to discuss it with a surgeon.”

(Please find the most vivid memory you have of a scream of horror, and place it here.)

If I haven’t already established this fact in the post, let me be clear. I hate, loathe, detest, abhor, despise and fear anything coming into contact with my belly button. I always have. I likely always will. It’s not even funny, or cute, or ticklish. It is HORRIFYING IN THE EXTREME to have anyone touch my button.

In short, the fates could NOT have found a more neat and tidy way to give me the single largest case of the wiggins EVER IN MY LIFE, even if they tried. Since yesterday, I’ve been working very hard to convince myself that keeping a hand on my stomach at all times will not actually prevent my belly button from bulging when I cough. And if I ever happened to feel it bulge, I might actually lose what remains of my rational mind when it comes to this subject.

So now I have to spend the next several months with my belly button neurosis at high alert, until the surgeon can meet with me and I can tell him that I CANNOT LIVE WITH A BULGY BELLY BUTTON. Further, that he has to FIX. MY BELLY BUTTON. Even if that means using KNIVES AND NEEDLES.

P.S. DO YOU SEE THE UPPER CASE LETTERS? IMAGINE THAT EVERY TIME I USE ALL UPPERCASE, IT IS BECAUSE I AM FFFFRRREAKING OUT, OKAY? BECAUSE I AM. REALLY.

Tags:
Posted in Being a girl, Getting older, Health | 2 Comments »

Blended family life is NOT painful.

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Have you ever gone into Google and typed the phrase “blended family”? If not, you really should. G’on, I’ll wait.

Now that you’ve done this, can you detect the thing that might have engendered my post title? Do you have any theories as to why it feels a lot like typing in “Dear Gawd, help us”? I mean, I think I actually heard Google say, “Bummer, dude” before it executed my search.

Why, for the love of all that is good and sensible in the world, does the phrase “blended family” result in websites offering workshops and classes and newsletters and faith-based guidance and statistics about how it takes seven years for a family to successfully blend?

Am I really the only person on the Internet talking about blended family life as a reality and not as a problem? I mean, hells - I love my girls - both of them. I love my husband, I love my cats and I even love my orange stepcat*. I don’t find our family life to be troubled or challenging. It’s not hard to love the daughter given to me by marriage. It’s not difficult to refer to them as sisters.

But when you look around to discuss it with others, you see that our society seems to hold this awful inherent assumption that somehow, somebody in the new dynamic is going to fail to bond. Or there’s a wicked stepmother who is merely going through the motions of family with a pimply faced and angry teenaged hosebeast, so she can get to the gooey centre of her desire - the eligible father.

Or a stepfather who would be as likely to walk around the stepchild pinned under the fallen bookcase as he would to lift said bookcase from the aforementioned stepchild’s diminutive frame.

I mean, obviously not all blendings are easy or even ultimately successful. But a 50 per cent divorce rate in a population means that there have to be at LEAST a good mittful of families who are blended and blended well. The odds are in favour of this, even with my questionable math skills.

And yet - the message is clear. “Blended? Limit your expectations for your future happiness as a family.”
Someone out there actually says this - LIMIT your expectations for success.

Way to set the bar, Internet. Thanks for making happiness feel like a freak of nature.

*No I don’t honestly call him my stepcat, even if he frequently behaves like he’s aspiring to red-headed stepchild status.

Posted in Being a girl, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, buddy, divorce, family, metablog | 7 Comments »

Don’t call me Speedy.

Monday, October 19th, 2009

I was at a party on Sunday. It wasn’t for candles, foodstuffs, cooking gadgetry, Tupperware, happysexyfuntime or anything else of this sort.

It was a toy party. A CHILDREN’S toy party.

Still and all, with Christmas coming up, I’m not going to miss an opportunity to shop whilst snacking and chatting, instead of shopping in a mall in the dead of pre-Christmas retail or the ‘net and its myriad stores that refuse to ship to Outer Mongolia (a.k.a. Canada).

So I went over to my friend’s place. The hostess, as it happens, is someone I’ve been acquainted with over the years. (Hey, we’re a reasonably small generation in a reasonably small city. It’s not like there are that many degrees of separation between any of us. Happily, we’re on the right side of Not Inbred, though I think it might be by a narrow margin in some cases).

Last time she saw me was pre-baby, pre-Buddy. Naturally, being the toy rep, the saleslady extraordinaire, she was immediately interested in ascertaining how big a mark I could be many kids I was shopping for.

Me: Two - Rosebud and Juniper.

Her: Oh, you have two kids?

Me: Yes - one I made and one I inherited, through marriage.

Her: So you’re already remarried?

Me: Yes.

Her: Well, that was fast.

In case anyone is wondering, “Well, that was fast” is not listed anywhere on the Miss Manners Spectrum of Congratulatory Phrases.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the time that Buddy and I have been together - those scant and measly not-quite-two years - people sure do like to have an opinion about how a relationship ought to proceed, particularly post-divorce.

According to the timeline written in the sky, I should’ve painted my skin with ash and shaved my head and mourned the demise of my marriage for a lot longer. Sex and the City informs us that the shelf-life for relationship grief is half the length of the relationship, which means that I should have been torturing myself for four years before I even considered dating another man.

Fortunately, as much as I’ve always enjoyed the TV show, Sex and the City is not my bible, so I don’t feel compelled to hang onto anger and/or grief for any circumscribed period of time.

But honestly, I’ve confronted this attitude (both subtly and directly) more times than I’d care to count. And it pisses me off.

Here’s the thing that I’d like everyone to *get*. I didn’t marry the next man who came along. It’s just that the next man who came along happened to be my soulmate. I didn’t marry him so that I didn’t have to be a single parent. I didn’t marry him on the rebound. I didn’t marry him because I didn’t think I could hack dating. (For the record, I’m a very good dater. I meet people easily and can usually find common ground with anyone.)

Here’s the flat truth: If anyone says to you ‘I’m really into you, but the timing sucks’, guess what? They’re not really all that into you. You know how I know this? I know this because if you happen to meet *your* person, the one single solitary soul in all the world who speaks to every part of who you are, well . . . the timing of that meeting won’t make a damn bit of difference to either party. You will move heaven and earth to be with your person and if you’re smart, you will do so immediately.

In the end, as much as it ticks me off to have people presume things about my life based on their own sense of appropriate timelines, (even though they have little to no frame of reference for how my first marriage ended, the fact that Buddy and I were already friends AND that when I was still married, I thought he was awesome enough to want to set him up with a girlfriend* of mine), I also know that it doesn’t make a difference. People will have to figure out, in time, that we are together because we belong together.

(And the sex is pretty great, too.)

*Dodged a bullet there, didn’t I?

Posted in Being a girl, Happiness, In the mother/stepmother 'hood, Rant, buddy, divorce | 5 Comments »

I need to hit the candy aisle before this burns a hole.

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Today is an historic day for me. For the first time in my adult life, I’m the proud owner of an allowance.

“An allowance, Wylie?”, you say. “Did your husband pat you on the head when he doled it out, too?”

You know? I’ll let you be snide about it - just this once. Because no, Mr. or Ms. Smartypants, with whom I am not having an imaginary conversation, so shaddup - he does not pat me on the head, because the allowance isn’t like that.

See, I have an ever-growing list of things I want/need, with a sideorder of all the nice shiny things I pass by whenever I happen to be in a place that houses and/or sells shiny things. Shiny things are good. Shiny things are fun. Everyone should have bits of shiny in their lives.

Here’s the thing. I don’t buy the shiny things I see, or if I do, I spend far too much time gnashing my teeth and donning my inner hair shirt. And then, I get mad at myself for feeling guilty, so I don’t buy the next shiny thing I see and covet.

Do you see how this might be a wee bit depressing? Do you see how I might go months and months without buying a new black sweater, to replace the one that got mysteriously shredded, like an object placed between Garfield and a tray of lasagna? Can I really justify taking food out of my own children’s mouths* to purchase a black sweater?

A couple of weeks ago, I announced to Buddy that I wanted an allowance. I wanted money that I could sit on, spend, secrete in a mattress, fritter away, impulse purchase or in any and all other ways not prohibited by law or my own moral compass - manage on my own.

As a good, sweet and sensible husband, he readily agreed to this plot.

So now I have an allowance. And no surprise, I immediately want to take my two dollars and head down to 7-11 and spend it all on the candy aisle, just like I dreamed of doing when I was a kid. Swedish fish for all!!!!

Who’s with me?

*Okay, honestly. We’re not that poor. It’s simply that this is the psychological barrier I confront when I’m spending communal money. It *feels* wrong to spend that money on things just for me. Carving out some funds for me to do with as I please makes all the difference in the world.

Posted in Being a girl, Happiness, buddy, family | 5 Comments »

I swear I don’t do this on purpose.

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

But is it strange that my lunchtime massage therapy appointment ended with my therapist and I discussing “happy endings”?

P.S. Please tell me I’m not the only pervy beggar who knows this euphemism.

Posted in Being a girl, Health, Odds and Sods | 6 Comments »

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