C’s The Day April 5, 2016

Hello, all! I have technically failed the April writing challenges already, since I didn’t write yesterday. But you know what? We are not going to worry about that.  Not a thing we can do to turn back time, so might as well move forward from here. I was going to try to catch up by combining this entry into a C post AND a D post but I decided it was too late at night for that. My C topics are cats, candy, and crying.

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About the cats.  We have three. Yes, I know for most people that is three too many, but hey, I know someone who has NINE cats. Anyway, I don’t love them and I don’t necessarily hate them. I just hate the consequences of having them in my life. When the kids don’t clean out the litter box, my house smells. They have literally destroyed the carpet under every single door in this house by scratching to get into or out of rooms with shut doors.  And they have also destroyed my couch. I mean, granted, that thing is on its third owner. But it would still be in better shape if we didn’t have cats.

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Candy is just something there is no longer any of, left in my house. My family had their Easter celebrations late because my parents were out of town until this past weekend. My mom made baskets for everyone and there was quite a lot of candy to be had around here. This is, of course, a bad thing, because where there is candy, I will, of course, eat it. I have been engaging in a fierce battle with myself lately about eating and food and weight and self esteem, and I am losing that battle in spectacular fashion: I eat, I gain weight, I utterly loathe myself and everything about me.  This is a bad thing, and I know it. I know I am supposed to believe that people are beautiful no matter what size they are.  I am supposed to remember that sexy is an attitude. And I am supposed to know without a doubt that the most important part of any person is NOT what you see on the scale or in the mirror. I can’t do that and I don’t know why. I can’t believe or remember or know. I wish I could. I’m working on it.

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Which leads me to the final topic, crying. I have done a lot of that lately and I know it hasn’t done me a bit of good. I just have to throw off my pity party hat and throw on my “I have done this before and I can do it again” hat. Yes, it sucks royally to have to re-lose weight you have already lost once, to fight yet again a battle you have fought over and over before. I don’t know what the secret is, but if I figure it out, I will be sure to pass it on.

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And now, my C poem:

Catch me if you can

as I fall into a river of tears.

i shed them.

They come in a downpour

and rise high enough to sink ships.

My sunglasses sit on my face.

I’d like to think they hide my eyes

but really

they don’t.

my eyes are seen behind them

as the tears seep out from underneath.

Crying.

DD

4/5/16

11:25pm

 

Until next time,

D.

 

 

Following the Mule… November 7, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

Hello all.  Today I am in pain.  My head feels like a cross between the worst hangover in the history of fermentation and a sinus issue so severe as to require enrollment in a study.  My eyes are puffy and they feel like they’re full of salted gravel and it hurts to turn them in their sockets.  What?  No, I didn’t go out and get trashed last night.  I’m pretty sure if I had, I would not feel quite this awful. No, this feeling is a direct result of last night’s family drama.  I got into a screaming, insane fight with my youngest sister and spent the rest of the evening weeping hysterically.

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I don’t think I can really say what precipitated this outburst.  I’m not sure, except that everyone was cranky to start with, and there were unwanted goldfish, and sassy teenagers, and previously unspoken feelings, and unshared frustrations and fears, and it all got out of control like nitroglycerine on a tilt-a-whirl. 

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The result has been that I have awakened this morning feeling that I’d give almost anything to just… take a break.  From parenting, from work, from family, from thinking, from life.  I have an intense desire to just check into a nice, quiet, calm facility somewhere where they feed you sedatives with your evening jello, and you can throw yourself around the walls of your comfy padded room and just enjoy the freedom to not think.  I’m so very tired of thinking.  So tired of trying to unravel the tangled knot of how I feel and what I think and what I believe and what I want my life to be. Taking a break would be nice.

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But then the tiny little remaining part of me that is still struggling to be sensible and responsible says “No.  You can’t do that.  Everyone gets overwhelmed from time to time.  Everyone has issues and problems and things that make them, even if for the briefest instant, long to be swinging from a bridge or cooling slowly in a pool of blood in the shower floor.  But they don’t just decide to check out and neither can you.  You have to face it and keep going and keep trying and keep forcing yourself to do what you have to do.  Never mind that you feel like you’ve been existing on autopilot for your entire adult life except for the last year.  If it works, stick with it.  You know how individual farmers plowed hundreds of acres with just one mule and a little piece of steel?  By continuing to put one foot in front of the other, even when they were exhausted and worried and doubtful and afraid.  They didn’t have time to give in to it.  They knew the only hope they had that things might get better was if they plowed fields and planted crops and those crops survived.  All they could do was keep plowing.” 

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It’s kind of funny though.  Now that I think about it, I don’t think it would have done the farmers much good to keep plowing if they were just following the mule up and down hills, through the forest, down the road, through the center of town, and wherever else the mule felt like going.  The metaphor doesn’t work that way.  The crux of the matter was that they were guiding the mule, making it go where they wanted it to go, where it needed to be. 

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Well great.  At this moment I think I’d rather just unhitch my mule, sit down on my butt in the middle of the field and watch as it ambles on down the road without me.  Maybe I’ll decide to chase it down later.

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So back to the unwanted goldfish part of the story.  My mother took Daughter J. and The Boy to the school band carnival last night.  It was supposed to have been the week before, but it got rained out.  So naturally, when they came in the door last night, they were both wearing hopeful expressions and clutching clear plastic bags containing poor prisoner goldfish.  As my regular readers can well attest to, I am not all about the pets.  We already have two cats and three dogs, and adding two fish to the equation is just going too far.  But they do provide a small source of amusement.  Right now, for example, The Boy’s fish is in a small container sitting on the desk across the room.  I’m not sure, but I think this poor creature is going to give itself a concussion trying to escape.  It’s flitting back and forth very fast, occasionally flipping out of the water, and then continuing to act like it is desperately searching for an escape hatch.  Now it is floating with its face just barely under the water, seeming to breathe heavily.  The funniest part is that the cats are obsessed with the fish!  Mussolini was climbing up the front drawers of the desk, trying to get up there to look at it (or perhaps dine on it) and Hitler was standing up reaching his front paws as far up the desk as he could, sniffing and looking!  Have you ever noticed how funny cat toes look when they’re all spread out and clutching for dear life?

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Anyway.  I guess I’m fine.  Drama happens.  I’ll keep plowing, and hopefully I’ll find the strength so I won’t be just follwing the mule through the center of town. 

Until next time,

D.

PS- I woke up this morning and checked Facebook, and was honored and pleased to find a shout out from my blogging group, Studio30Plus.  To their Powers That Be, thank you so much for the plug!  I hesitated to put a post like today’s up on the one day when I might have more traffic than normal, but then I thought ‘What the heck?  This is who I am and this is where I am today.  Maybe someone else can relate.”  Thanks for reading me, and come back again!

Encounters of the Four-Legged Kind! May 9, 2010

Hello all.  Happy Mother’s Day!  I hope everyone has had an enjoyable day.  We went to church this morning, and for the first time in forever, my sisters and I were all there.  Baby Sister was in town for the weekend, and Middle Sister came out to go to church with us as a sort of gift for Mom’s special day.  It was nice.  Afterwards, all of us except Middle Sister and Melon-Head went to Mom’s.  We tried to talk her into going out to eat, but she had already started some food before church, so we just went over there.

After that, someone got the bright idea to go look at the animals in the Ardmore Animal Shelter.  I won’t say who, but her initials are M.y M.other.  So we cleaned off the table and put things away, and loaded up to drive all the way to the other side of Ardmore to go look at all these poor animals we had no intention of adopting.  Seriously, I hate going there!  There are so many animals, and some of them are so beautiful, and you just know that there are never going to be enough people to adopt them all, but you try not to think about it, and then the kids start begging for a kitten and you know you have to say no, but way deep down inside you wish you could say yes, but you don’t and then all the kids start missing their various pets that have died, disappeared, or are backpacking through Europe to find themselves, and they all get sad and depressed, and it all could have been avoided if Grandma would have just kept her ideas to herself!  You know that feeling, right?

Anyway.  Daughter S. is STILL sad about her cat that disappeared a year ago, which I had no idea she was so attached to, and will forever feel bad about that.  It was a fluffy black calico named Pearl.  She was a really sweet cat, but geez, she barfed all. the. time!  Maybe hairballs were to blame, maybe she had something wrong with her, but we basically have a brand new house after the fire, and I really would not wish to have it continually christened with cat hurl, so I’m glad the poor thing is no longer with us.  Except that it makes my Daughter S. so sad!  Still.

And speaking of pets that should not still be here, guess which hard-shelled houseguest is still in The Boy’s keeping?  That’s right, Mr. Turtle is still with us.  I didn’t make The Boy take him back to Grandma’s after church this morning, but he’s gotta go soon, before A.’s more destructive tendencies kick in and he somehow commits Turtle-cide.  (He just informed me that he and Timmy Turtle were going in the living room, “because we’re bored.  I don’t know what to do and he doesn’t know what to do.”  I told him to clean his room, and suddenly he’s not bored anymore!  Isn’t that amazing?)

Daughter J. doesn’t really miss any pets yet.  She still has the dogs.  Oscar, Sadie, and Abby.  Here they are in their kennel when we were still at Mom and Dad’s after the fire.    Abby, the black and tan is on the left.  Oscar is the black and white in the middle, and poor old Sadie is on the right.

 

Sadie is Daughter J.’s favorite, and everyone else’s least favorite, because the poor dog is ugly! She’s a mixed breed, so she has too long legs, and a weird chest, and an underbite!  She is also the oldest, so I definitely dread the day when something happens to her.  Nobody on Earth has yet to equal Daughter J.’s ability to obsess!  When the dogs get out of the fence sometimes, J. will chase all over the neighborhood to get them back, no matter what the weather or the time of day.  Then when she gets them back in, she finds where they got out and piles junk in front of the hole- rocks, pieces of board, spare tires.  Whatever she can find that she thinks is heavy enough to keep them safely contained.  Which is why my house looks like it was landscaped by Sanford and Son!

So anyway.  Will not be adopting a new Pearl from the shelter any time soon, but if anybody has any black calico/tortoise shell cats they want to get rid of for free, I might consider it. 

Until next time,

D.

Cranky Teens and Kidnapped Turtles! May 8, 2010

Hello all.  Ok, so tonight was what you might call a multi-occasion celebration.  My sisters and I, and our families, went out to my parents’ house to celebrate the birthdays of The Boy and my youngest sister, and for Mother’s Day.  Dad was going to grill for us, but he ended up letting my Bro-in-law, Melon Head, do it for him, because he overdid it on the lawn mowing today.

Anyway.  I already had one cranky teenager, because wouldn’t you know it, her baby brother’s birthday had the bad luck to be on the same weekend as her best friend, who was turning 16.  Now if you were a teenager, which event would be higher on your priority list- your baby brother’s 9th birthday or your Bff’s Sweet 16?  Your Bff’s, natch!  Of course it would.  So Daughter J.’s best friend’s party was a sleepover at a hotel in town, so they could swim.  Well actually, this event lasted several days.  Apparently they had a sleepover at their house on Thursday night, and they’ve been at the hotel last night and tonight.  Or maybe it was just Friday night at their house and tonight at the hotel.  Either way, we’re talking about a significant portion of time.  So I had the audacity to make Daughter J. stay with the family on Thursday night so we could celebrate as a family on The Boy’s actual birthday.  I took them swimming at the YMCA and we ate at Burger King.  Not exactly a high class evening, but hey- it was all Little Man wanted. 

So then I let Daughter J. go to her friend’s house after we got home Thursday night and they were getting ready for bed.  They didn’t have school Friday, for some reason, so her friend wanted Daughter J. to stay the night and “help her do some stuff.”  Let me just add that we had been going round and round about this all week, her begging to go to her friend’s birthday events and me telling her that family was more important and if she didn’t back off and quit bugging me, she wouldn’t get to go to any of it.  We were trying to swing it so that she could be at both. 

Anyway, long story short, she had been at L.’s house from Thursday night at about 10:00 to today when I picked her up from the hotel at about 4:15.  We went to Mom’s and she proceeded to hide out in the back room, watching videos or whatever she was doing, barely participating in the fun family togetherness, frowning and sighing with regularity.  She had made me quite aggravated when when I got to the hotel and she wasn’t ready to go, after Grandma had told her I’d be coming to get her around 4-ish, and she needed to be ready.  Where was she?  In the pool, of course, which necessitated that I wait for her to change her clothes and gather her stuff.  Mom had told her that my middle sister could take J. back to the hotel on her way home, but I told her she wasn’t coming back because she didn’t do as she was told.  This did not make her very happy.  The friend’s mom tried to help J. out by saying she was going to go get J. and have her ready to go, but she forgot or something. 

So, back to the party.  In addition to Cranky Daughter J., I also had Cranky Daughter S.  Now, to be fair, Daughter S. was not cranky until it was approximately 9:45 p.m. and we had consumed roughly enough food to feed an entire NFL team (burgers, dogs, chips, guacamole, veggies, cake, ice cream, and giant cookie), and then played a rather interesting family game of baseball.   **As a sidenote here, I would have sold my left arm to have a video of my sister chasing her husband with the bat for distracting her when she was trying to bat, or some similar offense.  Furthermore, this sister is quite possibly the most competitive person I’ve ever known, and cannot have her picture taken without looking high.  Just in case her identity is ever in question.**

Anyway.  Daughter S. was not cranky through all this.  She took a turn at bat a few times, hung out in the outfield, etc.  It was only when we finally got ready to go after she’d been nagging for twenty minutes, (here comes the turtle part) and Little Man was wanting to bring home the turtle he’d found in Grandma’s back yard and been carrying around all night, that she got really cranky.  I have several theories as to why this might be.  One:  I told The Boy he was not bringing the turtle home with us, and he cried and begged and pleaded and frothed at the mouth and I gave in.  Two:  she desperately wants a cat and I do not wish to provide a home to a cat.  We already have in the back yard three dogs that she hates passionately.  Daughter J. feeds them sporadically and refuses to let us consider getting rid of them when we say that the poor dogs deserve a more attentive family.   So when I let The Boy bring home the turtle, she quite resented it because she would be the only kid in the family without a pet.  Not entirely an unreasonable feeling.  And Three:  the turtle is a wild thing and we were taking it from its home, and she feels highly sensitive about most wild things and them being taken from their homes.  Also not an unreasonable feeling. 

I felt guilty, so on the way home I told The Boy that the poor kidnapped turtle could come home for a sleepover, but tomorrow after church, we are taking him back to Grandma’s house.  Poor kid.  He’s desperate for a turtle, but he killed the last one he had by taking a hot bath with it.   And no, I’m not kidding.  It was quite possibly the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to the poor child, aside from divorce and fire and natural disaster.

This may be my longest post ever, so thanks for reading.  I’ll let you know if we manage to return Mr. Turtle to his home before he passes from this life. 

Until next time,

D.