Archive for the ‘Rant’ Category

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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 »

I think this is a new level of maturity, for me.

Monday, November 30th, 2009

Dear Fates,

Whichever one of you sorry bastards thought it would be funny to rob me of my taste buds has reserved his or herself a special place in my Big Book O’ Hatred.

Seriously. I mean, and I get how very tempting it would be to see me, all food lovin’ and happy with my taste buds, suddenly robbed of my flavour detecting agents. I see it and I’m the actual victim. The perfect, unsuspecting victim for such unkind tomfoolery.

But don’t you see? This is exactly why this is so very wrong. I haven’t got my mobility. I’m still recovering from a cold. I have no cigarettes in my life to love. All I have left of the creature comforts is food. And what you’ve done to me, you rotting scum bucket of angst and malevolent glee, is take that away. Not only eating it, but prepping it. Because really? I discovered on Saturday precisely how difficult and joyless it is to make food that you cannot taste and can barely smell.

Even ordering in is no comfort. Remember Friday night’s meal, you asinine and gormless excuse for an omnipotent being? That gorgeous pesto pizza with sundried tomatoes and feta? The one I had to stop eating because I couldn’t taste anything, but could feel the sprinkles of dried oregano on my tongue, giving the illusion that I was attempting to chew sawdust cud? Yeah, that was a good one. Hilarious humour, you maggot-ridden piece of excremental residue.

So – props to you. Great work in putting a damper on my weekend. Har har, good laugh. Well done.

But this is day four. DAY FOUR. Did you leave the taste bud sucking machine running by accident, you witless piece of deified butt shrapnel? Are you so busy basking in the glow of your pranking prowess that you’ve forgotten about me? Are you deficient in all ways, including your grasp of time?

Listen – I know it’s your job to throw wrenches into people’s works, you misanthropic waste of immortality, but this is NO LONGER FUNNY. Or ironic. Or clever.

Cease and desist immediately and all shall be forgiven. Continue and I will make as many empty threats as I can conceive of until such time as my voice goes high and desperate and your ears bleed from the pitch and you’re forced to appease me simply to get your mythic ears working once again.

Sincerely,

Me

P.S. Okay, in all fairness, I don’t have a Big Book O’ Hatred. In fact, I have a very short Hate Slip O’ Paper, made from a torn half of a post-it note. Nonetheless, you will go at the top of this list, and I mean business.

Posted in Health, Rant, cooking | 1 Comment »

Product reviews by my four-year old

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Product: Leapster 2’s Ni Hao, Kai-lan

Review: It’s supercool! You get to torture Kai-lan - for money!

Please note that any and all questions arising from this review will be answered with the phrase: I have no earthly idea.

Posted in Odds and Sods, Rant | 2 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 »

Naked blogging.

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I started writing an electronic journal since the month before 9/11. 9/11 and my blog are entirely unrelated, but the proximity of the two occurrences makes for an unavoidable connection in my mind. Much the same with Rosebud’s birth and the flooding of New Orleans.

But I digress. Lots of people blog for lots of reasons, but me? I blog to assuage the tiny fiction writer who lives in my head, who hasn’t yet figured out how to love her own stories enough to put them to paper. I blog because it’s habitual. I blog because it’s truly how I remember my life in any linear fashion. But mostly? Mostly, I blog as therapy.

However - as I’ve said before, this new venue has posed some dilemmas on that front. Back in the day, when I was exclusively a livejournaller, I’d write about everything in my day. Good, bad, indifferent. If I smacked my finger in a door, it’d be a blog post. If I succeeded at something, it’d be posted. If I failed, if I was worried, if I was happy, sad, low, up - well, there was a post.

But here is different. When I’m in a bad mood, I don’t post. Or if I do, I try to only post in the spirit of gallows humour, which is as much a part of my coping mechanism as the writing itself.

Besides - it’s bad form to complain about work or my bad moods or my maybe-mid-life-crisis on a mommy blog. I’m supposed to complain (lightly!) about my children. The rest is meant to be background noise - business as usual. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

All that said . . .

How much honesty can you all stomach from me? Because I’m starting to think that I need to reclaim my blog for therapeutic purposes. I need to be cranky. I need to be unhappy about work at the moment. I need to express my mid-life crisis. I need to whine and cry about my lack of cigarettes.

I am a divorced and remarried 35-year old mother of two, living in a mid-sized city with a mediocre job. It’s entirely possible that I will live my entire life in obscurity, with my only legacy being my progeny (from whose collective memory I will fade in a generation or two).

And you know? I think I’ll be okay, as soon as that is no longer a depressing thought. As soon as I remember that a good life isn’t necessarily one that involves international living, a retreat to nature, or fame and fortune. As soon as I can recall that the love is the most important part, and that love is something I have in spades.

But still. I think I just need to be angry for a little while. Y’all can avert your eyes if you need.

Posted in Being a girl, Getting older, Rant, Thunks, work | 8 Comments »

I was going to write something fun and light-hearted.

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

I surely was going to let the wonderment of Friday wash over me, through my fingers and onto the electronic paper that is a Word document. Instead, I regret to inform you that I am fighting for all I’m worth not to write another Dear Person letter.

Because when you attempt to participate in a company-sponsored activity, you should not be made to feel ashamed or in any way like a truant if said event is scheduled for more than the lunch hour, and you estimate that you may take the allotted time. You should not have to pelt to the halfway mark of said event, wolf down what would otherwise have been a good and tasty meal, only to leave your companions at the table still eating because *you* have to be back within an hour.

In no way should this kind of behaviour lead to any individual feeling demoralized, frustrated or disrespected. In no way should instructions like this render any person feeling as though the whole exercise of participating in company events is a total waste of time. It’s just the way things are, right?

So. I’m not going to write the Dear Person letter.

I’ll just think it at you.

Posted in Rant, work | 1 Comment »

And also

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Dear person who shall remain nameless,

I don’t really care what your opinion is about personal calls in the workplace. It is still incredibly, remarkably and ridiculously rude to express that opinion by invading my cubicle space every three minutes for fifteen minutes about trivial matters that can clearly wait. I am not a phone fanatic, I spend very little time socializing via phone - you can bloomin’ respect my personal space, kthxbye.

Sincerely,

Employee who shall also remain nameless.

Posted in Rant, work | No 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 »

Isn’t it nice when Monday lives down to standard?

Monday, September 21st, 2009

In no particular order, the reasons why this Monday has not been my favorite:

  • I believe I have had an Ibuprofen gel cap stuck in the back of my throat all day.
  • Prior to the weekend, I was snowed under with work. Post-weekend, I’m in serious need of a St. Bernard. The rescue rum wouldn’t hurt either.
  • As if my crusty mood wasn’t enough, I don’t think I saw a truly happy face all day.
  • If it were colder, the sky would look like impending snow.
  • That weekend went by so fast, it gave me whiplash.
  • I forgot my lunch at home.

Posted in Odds and Sods, Rant, work | 5 Comments »

Need to whine - avert your eyes

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Eleven days and counting on the non-smoking thing.

But now, I’m finding that it’s not the cigarettes I’m missing. It’s the psychological aspects of it - specifically, the fact that having a smoke was a whole lot like a mini-reward for me. Finish a chore? Have a cigarette. Survive an argument with the boss? Out for a smoke break. And so on.

So, I’m missing that. This is somehow morphing into feeling like I have to be Adult and In Control all the time. I don’t know why - it’s not like my life is fundamentally different now than it was 11 days ago. But I feel different. I feel like I have no fun in my life. I feel like I have to keep a tight hold on myself so that I don’t lash out at anyone.

Then I start casting around for some kind of boost. Food’s a great one, except that I’ll absolutely lose my noodle if I gain twenty pounds because I quit something that’s bad for me.

Then I turn to shopping. But I can’t shop, because we have two kids and the budgets tight and that’s just how life is, suck it up and be dowdy, princess.

And then I think it wouldn’t be an issue, if only I could just stay the same fucking weight for more than three months at a stretch. I’m tired of both gaining and losing.

Basically, anything I can actually have to help me feel better is bad for me, and the things that aren’t bad for me are things I end up feeling like I’m being irresponsible for wanting.

And then I just feel bad.

It ain’t the tobacco that I miss. It’s the indulgence.

Posted in Rant | 4 Comments »

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