Archive for the ‘buddy’ 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 »

My husband at 35

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

On Sunday, my Buddy turned 35.

Pfft. Took him long enough*.

For his birthday, he got fed kielke and trappings on Friday, pizza and beer on Saturday, and my mother’s famed chop suey (with three kinds of meat!) and blueberry pie for Sunday.

See how I didn’t cook a meal for him? It’s ‘cause he gets my food every *other* day of the year. This time of year, he gets everybody else to cook for him.

He was also gifted with a Halo 3 special edition Xbox 360 Elite, which has replaced food, air and me on his hierarchy of needs. Temporarily, of course.

IT IS TEMPORARY, RIGHT HONEY?

To compensate, I’ve taken up crocheting again. Not by any pattern of any kind. I just started making a string to see if I remembered how to do it, and the next thing I knew, I’d created six or seven rows of the same pattern, three up, three across. I have no idea what I’m making, but apparently I like it that way, just fine.

I also gave him as much of the weekend as possible for his own entertainment. Which meant that I had to do more running and bending and lifting than I’ve done in quite some time, but you know what? 1) I’m extremely grateful that my spine came around in time for me to be able to do it and 2) It was entirely worth it.

That man. He draws me pictures and puts them in my lunch box. He pats my head when I’m sad and my back when I’m proud (the rest of the patting has been censored, for your comfort). He is a tremendous father and caregiver to both our girls. He is funny, sweet, kind and clever.

I’m incredibly grateful to have him in my world. I still love looking at him. I miss him when we’re apart. I’ve had to change everything I understand about the world because of the love he’s given me, and I regret not an inch of it.

Which is probably why I (mostly) put up with his ageist remarks against me.

That’s all I’m saying.
* Yes, he’s approximately seven and a half months younger than me, and yes - he does like to hold it over me. Like you, I am also amazed that he survives such antics.

Posted in Getting older, Happiness, buddy, family | 3 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 »

Reason #637 that I was clearly destined for this man.

Monday, October 5th, 2009

His family is almost entirely made up of foodies. No surprise, really.  I’ve known about CH’s foodie nature from extremely early on and Pal is no creampuff in the kitchen, either.

On Friday, we went over to his uncle’s home - where we were fed with local chicken, local potatoes, local corn and extremely local bread and apple pie (both bread and pie made by said Uncle) produced from local apples.

No kiddin. I’ve never had a bad food experience with his family. Dinners are generally occasions where wine, food, conversations and children roam freely. The food, even if it’s delectable, never quite drops the conversation into catatonia. The wine paints CH’s cheeks a rosy red and puts a warm fuzz in my stomach, but never seems to generate slurred vitriol about who made the better battery (Duracell, of course) or which way is the appropriate way to pour coffee (*in*, not *on*, for the record).

And this kind of dinner? This is exactly the kind of dinner I love. If my entire social life could be composed of dinners with friends and foodies, I don’t think I’d ever want to depart this mortal coil.

But since that’s unlikely, I’ll have to resign myself to the simple knowledge that I have these dinner parties in my life, and be grateful for that.

Posted in Happiness, buddy, cooking, family | 2 Comments »

Why didn’t you tell me?!?

Friday, September 25th, 2009

D’ya know, before Rosebud started school, Buddy and I were terribly excited. We fell asleep each night, with visions of sugar plummy tantrum elimination dancing in our heads.

See, for some odd reason, we had it in our heads that school would engage our Rosebud to such a degree that she’d arrive home, already nigh-onto-comatose from all the stimulation. All we’d have to do is cajole her into wakefulness long enough for her to eat dinner and have a little mellow family time before we removed the toothpicks propping her eyeballs open and let her sleep.

So tired and so satisfied from her time at school, we imagined, Rosebud would immediately cease any and all tantrums and whims and histrionics.

Two weeks in, we’re actually reminiscing fondly about the defcon 5 moments she used to have as a pre-schooler.

She’s invented a new level, you see. School appears to have taken our darling Rosebud, energetic little master of determination that she already was, and put her into overdrive.

I’m telling you, it’s like she’s got the four-year old equivalent of ‘roid rage.

She arrives home from school, usually having already unleashed the sound and fury at least once over having to leave school for the day. She then proceeds to have drama after drama after drama, on subjects as varied as “What’s for dinner” to “Wrong episode of show” to “what do you mean it’s bedtime”.

Throughout all of it, she seems to have lost the ability to be still for more than three seconds at a time. She talks constantly, moves constantly and already (in her own words) “fell in love” with a boy in her class.

Buddy picks the girls up from school (whilst I’m power-walking home for the exercise) and he reports that she’s most often holding court in front of at least half a dozen children when he arrives.

She is turbo, she is dynamo, she is energy incarnate.

And we’re exhausted. We’re waiting for her to suddenly realize that she’s beyond exhausted and somehow, some way, return to some level of life approaching normal.

I mean, honestly, this girl still makes us laugh hysterically. The things that emerge from her mouth are beyond pithy.

But still. I want to know when she’ll be coming down a notch. I also want to know, Intarweb . . . WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME THIS WAS COMING?

Posted in Being a girl, Rant, Rosebud, buddy, family | No Comments »

The dog days are over.

Friday, August 28th, 2009

It’s Friday (in case you haven’t noticed. Because I’m sure there are legions of us nine-to-fivers who dread the coming of the weekend with unparalleled ferocity). That fact alone is enough to have be feeling sprongy and chipper, but couple that with the fact that I don’t have a sense of impending doom about tomorrow’s Rosebud festivities, and you can count me as over the moon.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t have a metric ton of lasagna to make, a cake to coax into existence (and hopefully, edibility) or sangria/hummus/odds and ends to prep. I do. That will be my entire Friday night.

There are things working in my favour. The first of which is that both girls will be at their respective other parents’ homes, which means that I can cook and bash around to my heart’s content, including loud blaring of music and late night whizzing of various concoctions.

It also helps that I know Buddy is equally prepped for a night of puttering. I do enjoy the way we work together. He’ll roam around the house, performing different tasks and chores without any kind of prompting, hinting, nudging or pointed staring. He simply knows that these tasks need to be done. (Yes, I know he’s practically a miracle, in that he does this, but is not an OCD clean freak. No, I won’t share him and I don’t think he’s interested in holding seminars.)

However, he also stops by the kitchen at frequent intervals to be my sampler, coach, cheerleader and witness. He’s yet to cease being fascinated by the alchemy of cooking, and I absolutely adore being able to natter at him about what’s working and what isn’t.

All in all, this sounds like a lovely Friday night. I could, as I have in years past, muse about how much I’ve changed, in that a night spent at home cooking and cleaning sounds like entertainment, but I won’t*. I know now that my heart resides in my home, with a particular focus on the kitchen. And that even though this is a sign of aging, it’s an age I’ve grown into, happily.

*Much.

Posted in Getting older, buddy, cooking, family | 4 Comments »

The snuggle quandary.

Monday, August 24th, 2009

You’d think, being as over-the-top mushy schmoopy as Buddy and I can be, that we’d also be that couple who fall asleep cradled in each other’s arms, with nary a stray move until dawn breaks over us. That we’d be awoken by the chirping of birds as we stared into each other’s eyes, dewy-faced and fresh as daisies.

This, of course, is total bollocks.

Over the course of his years being single, Buddy developed some sleeping habits that he shows no interest in modifying. These habits require no less than three pillows, which must be yanked about every time he rolls over, making it a production of not one, not two but four separate maneuvers (one for each pillow, plus his own rollover). That he will roll over the instant any body part of mine touches any pillowing, blanketing or portion of his flesh is particularly maddening, as I’ll find a comfy place with a hand or a knee sharing one of his pillows, and just as I’m falling asleep, it’ll be yanked away. Restart for Wylie.

Buddy sleeps in a fortress of solitude. And now, I’ve discovered that he’s in danger of manifesting blanket hoggery. When we were in San Francisco, our hotel room came with a particularly slithery blanket - one that invariably ended up spooled on the floor by his side of the bed, helping warm the floor, but not my person.

Also - we share the bed with at least one feline per night. The reliable feline bed partner generally reserves the foot and generally doesn’t cause us much difficulty, except in that half-aware semi-fugue state of the middle of the night, where you’re desperately aware you can’t stretch out your legs, but you can’t quite figure out that it’s perfectly humane to deposit your feline bedpartner on the floor, if he/she proves to be too much in the way*.

The other one will frequently sleep on my head. Not because he loves me, but because that’s his best perch to watch Buddy sleep (since Buddy’s policy of “don’t touch me” is truly universal when it comes to sleep time).

And I wonder why I get recurring neck aches.

As for me . . . I have one head pillow and a completely flattened body pillow, which inevitably ends up on the floor. Why? There is simply no room left at the inn.

We are not nighttime snugglers, and our queen size bed is terribly crowded at times - crowded enough that I can (sort of) understand Buddy’s desire for complete solitude.

More, I begin to suspect that couples who do snuggle are the rarity.

What about you? Snuggle, fortress of solitude or somewhere in between? I really want to know if I should be asserting custody rights over one and a half of Buddy’s pillow buddies.

*I mean, c’mon. He’s a cat. He can catch up on his 120 winks at another point in time

Posted in Being a girl, Rant, buddy | 3 Comments »

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