Category: Fretfulness

. . . most things I worry about never come to pass.

Because I Am Nice Beyond The Call of Duty

I spent my evening driving to Seattle to pick up a car-load of my sister’s cast-offs for my mother’s garage sale which is to take place on Saturday. I left at 6:30 p.m. and returned home at 10:30 p.m.

I felt like I was in an endless car wash in the dark without my contacts in. I clutched the steering wheel and concentrated on not appearing on the eleven o’clock news as a fatality.

Tomorrow? No daycare kids. After I suffered a mild breakdown last night which included crying until my eyes were swollen and sleeping on the couch, my husband has rallied to my aid. Just in the nick of time. Now I shall not throw myself on the train tracks. The carpet cleaner will arrive at 2:00 p.m. My hair colorist will arrive at 6:00 p.m. Before those events, I hope to scratch off more items on my “To Do or Not To Do List.”

Or not.

Stayin’ Alive

When I woke this morning, I felt a footstep further away from death. Until that moment, I was tiptoeing towards death. Today was better, not great, but better. Tonight, however, every time I cough, my temples throb with pain. And I can barely type due to a pool injury. Last night, Babygirl wanted to go to the bathroom at the pool. (I have to admit that the very first day at the pool, I suggested to her that she pee in the pool. She’s tiny. She has a small bladder. The pool is large and full of chemicals. Urine is sterile.)

She would have none of that. Some days, we traipse around the pool and into the slickly tiled bathroom and tug down her swimsuit repeatedly. Five or six times we do this, but yet, no output. Last night, the toilet seat was wet. I reached into the toilet paper dispenser to get a wad to wipe the seat. I recoiled in pain–something sharp sliced a quarter inch wound on the tip of my finger. (Oh, and Babygirl didn’t bother to actually pee after my Incident.)

It bled and bled. Today it doesn’t bleed, but it hurts, especially when I type. The pain distracts me from my headache. It turns out that you use the letters “D” and “E” with painful frequency when typing in English.

We just found out tonight a bit of ludicrous, yet greatly welcomed news. When we travel to Houston (a glorious town!! a lovely delightful hot spot in our country!! yee-haw and show me the cowboys!!) in a week or so, we will be staying with my husband’s stepsister and her husband. They are our age, yet she had the good fortune to give birth while in high school (look Mom, no Texas jokes) and so she is a grandmother already with an empty nest. We will descend up her empty nest and make ourselves at home because she and her husband, along with my husband’s dad and stepmother, will be out of town for the entire week we are in town. More than a week, actually.

Ha ha ha ha ha cough cough cough cough ouch ouch ouch my head! Cough sputter sneeze.

Oh. Where was I?

My husband has four more siblings and their assorted spouses, ex-spouses, nieces, nephews, and two other sets of parents (don’t ask–it’s really a very complicated story), so we’ll have plenty of in-laws and out-laws to visit. But we’ll do so from the privacy of the house we’ll be living in, alone, how-can-you-not-believe-in-God-when-He-is-so-good-to-me?, introvert-heaven.

The funny thing–okay, maybe not funny ha-ha, but funny-pathetic-sad-and-typical, is that the Very Important Event keeping my sister-in-law and parents-in-law from staying in town is a church-related event. My husband’s parents have always, always, always put church events before family. Always. His brothers rebelled against the church for this very reason. His mother left his father for this very reason. I know it hurts my husband’s feelings, just a bit, that his family (just this portion of his family, but still) can’t put aside the annual church thing for our benefit.

I have only been to Texas twice during my 18-year marriage. My two younger children have never been. The twins have only been once. This is almost a once-in-a-lifetime event. (Do you know how much it costs to fly from Seattle to Houston? Yes, a lot!)

Oh well. My husband thought our dates would avoid the church-thing–plus we had to work around our school vacation and other summer activities.

I can’t tell you how relieved I am to know that most of our trip will take place without the awkwardnesss of living with relatives. I have been so worried about how we’d manage. I need a reasonable amount of quiet time a day. Or I get a little snippy.

Tomorrow is the last day of school. YoungestBoy only has a half-day. I asked him, “What do you think we should get your teacher?” I suggested a gift card to a bookstore. (That’s what I’d like.) He said, “No, I want to get her something pretty.” I said, “Like what?” He ran across the room and pointed to my Spode Christmas Tree pattern cookie jar in the china hutch. “Like that!” he said.

I love that this kid has such a definite mind of his own. I found a little ceramic thing at Hallmark–I can’t really describe it, but it’s a kind of pretty bank for adults. He thinks it’s pretty. (It cost $2.95 on sale!) I added a set of fragrant candles and a card.

And so ends another school year. Summer will come and go in a flash and hopefully, by then, I’ll be able to breathe through my nose again.

The Little (Digestible) Things

Sure, I could discuss a wide variety of issues, but I am too distracted by the comments on a previous post. I mentioned how CuteBaby’s mom discovered digested paper in his diaper. Misery truly loves company, because I am greatly cheered by your reports of the following objects discovered in infant diapers:

1) Two Barbie shoes and a marble (in the same diaper!);
2) Needle;
3) Spider;

(I must comment on the urban legend about eating eight spiders at night while you sleep. . . my advice? Wear pantyhose over your head and prevent this from ever happening to you!)

4) Tinsel (by a cat, but still, it could have been a baby).

Does anyone else have something to add?

Tomorrow, I will have something of substance to say, I promise. I know this because I have phone calls to make to recruit volunteers and paperwork to complete and I hate these tasks and will need a way to look and feel like I’m working without actually facing the dreaded chores at hand. Behold, the blog!

How To Freak Me Out

Without telling me, turn off the ringer to the kitchen phone.

Leave three messages on my telephone answering machine. (I’m old-fashioned. What can I say?)

First message: “Hey, I’m at your house, picking up the tape, but it’s not there. Call me. I’m going to XXX this morning, but before I leave town, I want to deliver the tape to my secretary so she can finish typing it today.”

Second message: “Hey, I’m still in town. Call me and let me know if the tape is ready to be picked up. Are you okay? Maybe your husband could deliver the tape to my office if it’s not ready before I leave town. Call me.”

Third message: “I’m in XXX now and my secretary is standing by, ready to type that tape. I hope you are okay. Are you okay? I haven’t been able to reach you all morning. I called your husband and he’s not at his office. Is everything all right? Please call me at XXX-XXXX.”

———————————————–

At that point (1:24 p.m.), I knew that the reason my boss hadn’t been able to reach me was because someone turned off the telephone ringer downstairs. I knew this because at about noon, the worthless, barely working cordless phone was sitting on the couch and began to ring. But the kitchen phone did not ring. I picked up the kitchen phone, however, to hear my husband’s voice. He told me he’d called earlier, but I hadn’t answered. He was in Portland for the day.

I looked at the buttons on the phone and saw that the “ringer” button was switched to off. I turned it back on.

It was an hour later that I discovered the phone messages upstairs.

At that point, I panicked. Not long ago, I attempted to rewind a cassette tape (which I transcribe as a part-time job). The irreplaceable, valuable-for-legal-reasons cassette tape jammed up and quit working. This time, the envelope containing the cassette apparently disappeared from my front door, where I’d taped it for my boss to pick up. He told me to have it ready by 7:30 a.m. and I’d taped it there at 7:15 a.m., just about the time DaycareKid arrived.

I put Babygirl and DaycareKid to bed, then came downstairs to investigate. I called my boss: “I left that cassette taped to my front door for you to pick up. My phone ringer was off all day, so I didn’t get your message. I’m going to figure out what happened and get back to you.” I left a message on DaycareKid’s dad’s cell phone, “Uh, you didn’t happen to see or accidentally take an envelope off my front door, did you?”

I walked outside and scoured my front yard for evidence of the envelope or the cassette. Nothing, other than TwinBoyB’s socks which are balled up and soaked by rain on the front lawn (and I used the word “lawn” loosely).

Finally, I called my boss’s office to speak to the secretary. She answered after half a dozen rings. I said, “Do you happen to have that tape?”

And she said, “Yes.”

“You do?” I said, stunned and relieved.

My boss had his wife come and pick up the envelope and deliver it to the office.

Now, DaycareKid’s dad will wonder at my extremely bizarre message and my boss will wonder at my groveling message, but I don’t care. I didn’t lose the cassette. A quirky thief is not prowling my neighborhood for envelopes stuck to doors.

The end.

Listless

If I were a boat, I’d be a sailboat in the doldrums. I’d be floating in a calm sea of fog, dry land out of sight, sun veiled behind gauzy clouds, carrying only stale granola bars and tepid drinking water.

If I were a ball, I’d be tethered to a pole cemented into an old tire. No one would even come by to smack me and watch me bump into the pole. No quick games of volleyball for me. Just dangling listlessly.

If I were a tree, I’d be a white birch, my branches extended while all my leaves dead and gone. No shade under me, no shelter from storms, just immobile, helpless to keep dogs from peeing on my trunk. I can’t even scratch my nose.

I’ve been casting about, trying to come up with a flash of brilliance or a chin-stroking, eye-squinting, thought-inspiring topic, but I am listless. Both listless in the classic, dictionary-defined sense of the word and listless as in devoid of lists. I ought to make a list or two and check it twice. I need to get a pulse–stat!–before the Good Housekeeping Police come and carry me away in a body bag.

Loneliness

Last night, as we watched David Letterman, my husband said, “So, what’s new on the board?” Usually I regale him with stories of happenings on the message board. When I discovered I was pregnant in January 2002, I nosed around a bit and landed on this board for women expecting babies in September of 2002. I’ve participated avidly ever since, through crazy debates and educational threads and laugh-out-loud hysteria and drive-by postings by trouble-makers and the mundane, everyday stuff.

Two weeks ago, I decided I’d had enough. That was the day I wrote this. Although I had a lot of laughs and sharpened my detective skills (I’m just warning you–don’t lie to me unless you have a better memory than I do) and made some excellent friends, but I just got slapped once too many times by women who think pastor’s wives ought to be vacant, spiritual, uncontroversial and sickly sweet all the time.

And just because of my marriage. Nothing else. Somehow my marriage to a pastor requires me to be perfect, though if I were, I would most definitely hear, “You think you’re perfect, don’t you!?” Nevermind that these same women are regular church-attenders with similar religious backgrounds to mine. At any rate, lest this turn into actual Gossip, I’ll just leave it at that.

I had enough. Enough. I just shut the door without saying good-bye and crept away.

So last night. My husband says, “What’s new on the board?” and I say, “I left it.” I was on my side, facing away from him, and he said, “What?” And I said, “I left the board.”

He said, “Why?” I said, “I just had enough.”

We watched David Letterman in silence then and my heart was so solid and heavy that it pinned me to the bed. I felt like I’d swallowed an ever-expanding balloon that filled with hot breath I could not exhale. Tears began to slip from my eyes and pool on the side of my nose where my glasses formed a little dam.

I felt so lonely, so completely all alone, even lying next to my husband, just on the other side of the house from my sleeping children.

At last, his breathing deepened and I considered going into the bathroom and curling on the floor and crying until I died. But I didn’t want to wake him. So, I gingerly reached for a tissue and his soft snoring stopped and he said, “Are you all right?” I said, “Yes,” but he could hear the sadness, I guess, and so he reached over and hugged me–stiff and resistant and said, “I’m sorry about your board.”

I said, “It just sucks to have no friends.”

Even as I said it, I knew it to by untrue, but sometimes the feelings are more real than reality. He said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” And I said, “It’s probably just hormonal.” I considered telling him how lonely I felt, how alone, what a horrible wife I am and what an impatient mother and how truly, if I weren’t here only Babygirl would be damaged forever–or maybe she wouldn’t even remember me in a few months and then I thought how YoungestBoy would miss going on rides at the fair with me and so, I said nothing at all.

At last, he rolled back over and slept and I dabbed at my eyes and wiped my congested nose and felt utterly miserable and lonely.

How is it possible to feel so lonely and to long to be alone at the same time?

This morning, I woke with swollen eyes, no worse for the wear.

Stuff That Really, Really Drives Me Crazy

1) Break-downs of major appliances. My trash compactor decided to go on strike. Unfair labor practices or something. Well, too bad for Mr. Trash Compactor. He’s going straight to the landfill where he can lounge around with refrigerators who freeze eggs and washing machines who will no longer agitate. I paid Mr. Sears Fix-It Guy a hundred bucks last time Mr. Trash Compactor quit working. I will not pay anymore. Mr. Trash Compactor, buh-bye!

2) Bowls and glasses which break upon impact. Geesh, I’m so sick of sweeping up broken glass and then vacuuming up the remaining shards so baby feet will not be punctured.

3) Gritty floors.

4) My boys’ horrible aim. Now, listen. I don’t have one of those things, but I have used the garden hose and it’s just not that difficult to hit a target! I’m sick to death of my boys’ bathroom which smells exactly like an outhouse. I don’t camp because I hate the stench of outhouses.

5) Really bad, stupid, inattentive drivers. But we all hate them, so I will move on to number six.

6) Stubbing my toes on errant shoes. Why can’t people at least kick their shoes out of the path of my feet? Seriously? When I kick off my shoes–which admittedly, I leave in every room of the house–I put them in corners and tuck them into nooks so no one will trip over them. No one extends this same courtesy to me.

7) Thinking up dinner plans every night. Preparing dinner every night. Hearing people say about dinner, “Ewwwww, that’s nasty.”

8) My kids discarding their trash randomly. Mr. Trash Compactor probably quit working in response to my kids’ complete disregard to his feelings. The only person who likes to put trash in the compactor is Babygirl. But then again, that wasn’t trash she just put in there.

9) Late people. I am not exactly always prompt, unless I’m with my husband, Mr. Fifteen Minutes Early, but I do arrive at my appointments and obligations within five minutes of the start-time. My siblings think that if you merely arrive on the same day. that’s close enough. That’s why we had Easter Dinner at noon. And 1 p.m. And 2 p.m. My sister brought her kids’ to YoungestBoy’s fifth birthday party an hour late. And it was a small party. She arrives chronically late to work–forty-five minutes, an hour, whatever, and takes my neice and nephew to school late. Every day. My sisters and my brother claim this is a family trait, but it’s not. It’s just rude and inexcusable.

10) Doing things out of order. I am sequential by nature and I tend to get frazzled when I have to do something in the wrong order. I get crazed when I am interrupted ten thousand times in the middle of something.

This explains my general insanity. Stay tuned for even more exciting details and enter our sweepstakes to win a stay at Western State, Washington’s finest mental institution!

On Being a Good Mother

I sometimes hear mothers say with great confidence, “I am a great mother!” This is often in tandem with a complaint about a mother-in-law’s meddling ways and criticisms, but still. There are women–mothers–who absolutely know that they are doing a fabulous job.

I am not one of them.

I worry. A lot. About whether my kids will be the ones who inhale glue or walk on railroad tracks or become fixated on pornography. I waste time wondering if my boys will grow up and marry cold-hearted women who are bossy and sarcastic and then blame me. I am terrified that my kids really won’t remember anything except the times I scream, “This is driving me crazy!”

Maybe that’s why I take so many pictures. We always look really happy. The kids seem to be having a great childhood. Yet, I have no confidence that I am a wonderful mother.

See, a wonderful mother plays Monopoly with her kids whenever they ask. She makes a hot, homemade breakfast and packs a delicious, nutritious lunch that her children eagerly eat. She doesn’t wear June Cleaver pearls, but she does have on matching clothes and a cute haircut. And make-up. She never yells and her laundry is always caught up. Oh, and she doesn’t fly into a frenzy when yet another glass bowl bites the dust right next to the baby’s feet. She needs no time to read, to think, to shop, to write, to talk with grown-ups. She is completely, slavishly devoted to her children, even the older, smelly ones.

I fret that the boys are going to freak out some day about the fact that they are adopted. I worry that they have fantasized a Perfect Mother in their heads–she probably resembles the Perfect Mother I have in my head. I torture myself with the reality that the twins cannot remember the times they slept on our floor in the middle of the night and the times we took them to playgrounds and the times they ran through the sprinkler and rolled in mud and shrieked with laughter. They’re approaching the “I’m bored, this is not fair, no one ever listens to me” stage of pre-adolescence. They can’t remember the first four years of their lives when they were the center of our universe.

Most recently, I have worried that the addition of the younger children has robbed the older children of everything–of our time, of our money, of our attention. YoungestBoy was born just as the twins went to kindergarten. I couldn’t be the Room Mother. I couldn’t go to their baseball games. I couldn’t practice with them so their baseball games weren’t so humiliating. I answered, “No, the baby is sleeping,” too many times to count. I shushed them constantly.

They have to share a room. They have to share their toys. They have to be nice to YoungestBoy, even when he’s being a pain in the neck.

And then, just when things were getting manageable, we had Babygirl. YoungestBoy was four and a half.

I do not recommend this spacing. At all.

I wish for each of my kids that they could be Only Children. I wish they had their own room, their own space, their own solitude. (Or maybe that’s just what I wish I had!)

I can only be cut into so many tiny little pieces. I feel like the kids get their piece and whine, “No fair! He got a bigger piece!” I am never enough.

My hope is that what my kids lose–attention, time, money, things–are outweighed by what they gain–companionship, lessons in getting along with people, lifelong friendships with their siblings, experience, compassion, generous spirits.

My ultimate fear? They grow up, never find meaningful work, never find lifelong love and blame me.

(Yes, this is another premenstrual syndrome entry. My neurosis comes in regular cycles. How convenient.)

Yellow Roses

My husband brought me two dozen yellow roses yesterday.

At 5:30 p.m., he took our three sons to a movie. My baby went to sleep at 7 p.m., so I’ve been alone in my quiet house so long that I have started to worry that my menfolk have been in a devastating car accident somewhere and that the seatbelts failed and somehow, my boys were ejected from the car and are now in a ditch somewhere.

Okay, not really. But it has been weirdly quiet here. I have two television set on “American Idol” and I kept switching rooms as I wander about cleaning and putting stuff away.

My throat hurts still from this cold. Now I feel a little bit bad that I wasn’t more sympathetic to TwinBoyB last week when he had this cold. I am a terrible nurturer sometimes.

Anyway. My husband either senses when I’m close to the edge or he reads my journal. I’m not sure which. At any rate, he’s a good husband and a good person and he makes me laugh out loud almost every day.

Last night, when I got home from a movie (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), he was sprawled on the bed upstairs with the thick book about dogs that we bought when we first married. We used to go through all the breeds, imagining which dog would be perfect for our family. Three and a half years ago, we bought Greta, a Newfoundland. After two years, we had to return her to the breeder when she nipped two of the children. They still have scars. I wrote about this a long time ago, so I won’t go on and on about it.

The fact is, last September, just after Babygirl turned one, I drove Greta two hours north to the breeder’s home under cover of darkness and returned home to my broken-hearted boys and Greta’s empty crate. My husband said, “That’s it. No more dogs.” He told me he never wanted her to start with, that it was my idea, that it was a bad idea. Well, it was a good idea, but the timing was off because two months after Greta arrived, I became pregnant.

YoungestBoy still misses Greta. When I’d mention that YoungestBoy had cried about Greta, my husband would say, “No more pets.” But last night, he happened to be the one to hear YoungestBoy’s cries. When he put YoungestBoy to bed, he put Big Dog on the bed (a huge stuffed animal) and Little Dog (a small stuffed animal). YoungestBoy burst into tears and cried for five solid minutes. Those five minutes prompted my husband to begin researching dog breeds so his boy can have another dog.

That sums up my husband. He is soft-hearted and generous and kind. He is the calmest, gentlest person alive.

But YoungestBoy hasn’t mentioned Greta today, so we will move forward without a dog. For now.

Here is the last picture I took of Greta, as she was celebrating Babygirl’s birthday with us:

Can I Have a Do-Over, Please?

I need a do-over. Yeah. Really. I think I should never have married or had children. I would like to have a second chance and if I were that same 20 year old girl, I would go to medical school and then disappear into some needy country to devote my life to serving others.

That would be easier than where I ended up. Okay, right, so that would be my hormones talking. Or maybe my sore throat and aching head. So what?

My husband was gone most of yesterday and the day before and the week before that and the weekend before that and the week before that. Turns out that I am a horrible single parent. The kids drive me crazy with their incessant arguing. TwinBoyB, in particular, seemed to be on a mission to make my head pop off my neck. I’d tell him to do something (like “stop hitting you brother and come here”) and he would slide his body half-way off the couch at glacier-speed. I gave him a thwap with my foot under his thigh and he shrieked as if he was burned with a hot poker in the eye.

Of course, his dad came downstairs just then and got his wailing report of how I kicked him. Which, technically speaking, it was a kick. It wasn’t intended to be a kick, but a . . . well, a reminder-thwack. My husband scolded me and said I should use time-outs. Yes, I heard that loud and clear: You are the worst mother in the world and a rotten human being as well.

That was Saturday. Sunday, I decided I would use time-outs. So the first time TwinBoyB disobeyed me, I told him to go sit on his bed for ten minutes. He said, “No.” I said, “Okay. You just earned yourself an early bedtime.” He launched himself into a wildly dramatic performance, flopping around on the ground. Then he went and sat on his bed and screamed, “Mommmmmmmm! Mommmmmmmmm! Mommmmmmmmmmm!” He wanted to argue with me about his punishment. I told him to stop immediately or he’d get an additional ten minutes.

He got the additional ten minutes.

This kind of thing wears me out.

Last night, he expected not to go to bed early. He thought he “earned it back.” I said, “No, there is no earning back your punishment. Otherwise, it won’t count.” He sobbed and cried and carried on so much that I said, “Just go now.” It was 7:40 p.m. He laid on his bed and shouted and cried. When I’d go in and check on him, he’d argue with me more and complain more. This child is not a quick learner.

My husband came home, of course, after TwinBoyB had been sent to bed, but before he had finished throwing his fit. TwinBoyB tattled on me, trying to make his behavior my fault.

Husband tells me I should go in and comfort him. I do so, but of course, get even more aggravated with him. Now it’s not about his behavior but about his brothers and school and why he’s going to fail math. I told him it’s all about choices. You choose how to behave, you choose how to do in school.

Then TwinBoyB comes out to report to his dad that he does not have a particular item he needs. I already know this, but TwinBoyB is telling his dad anyway. I say, “Hey, if people would tell me when they use the last one, I would buy more!” (Early in the day, I find out that we have no more trash compactor bags. I did not use the last one and I did not know we were out.)

My husband rebukes me and says that it’s my job to know these things and not the job of a 10 year old boy.

With that, I went upstairs and ironed Husband’s clothes and fumed and stewed and then crawled into bed at 9 p.m., watched a show until 10 p.m. and turned off the lights. I never, ever go to bed at that hour, but I was tired, sick and emotionally drained.

I decided just as I fell to sleep that I am a complete failure as a wife, mother and homemaker. The worst part is that being a wife, mother and homemaker is all I do. So, at least I would win “Best All Around,” if Anti-Mother of the Year Awards were given out.

Of course, that’s completely irrational, but it still sounds true to me today.