Idle Thoughts

Mood: sinking
Music: Fuel - Hemorrhage; Deftones - Change

I didn't write on the 2nd anniversary of my father's death. There was nothing to say that I hadn't said before. The same hamsters on the same wheels, turning and still getting nowhere but perhaps feeling cheated and angry and ...well, grieving. I'm tired of my own grief, in a way, but can't let it go. Can't let him go. We had him cremated and his ashes divided in two for my sister and I, because neither of us could bear to put him in the cold, cold February ground. Half of Daddy sits in a handsome urn on my bookshelf, where I pass it every day and know that I'm still not ready to let him go. Pain and a solid stubborn streak make for strong cement.

I didn't write on my 37th birthday, either. I'm not upset about being 37. Granted, there's a tiny part of me (probably my mother's voice) that whispers "only three years from 40 now", but there's a bigger part of me that looks over her shoulder at the first voice and says snidely "Yep, and I still won't have grown up". I think my refusal to act my age is my way of exacting revenge on my mother. There is a dark core of me that is far older than it has a right to be; forced into old age and cynicism. But on the outside - I look far younger than my mother did when she was my age; probably because she smokes and insisted on sun(baking)bathing. Now, and I hate to say this, she looks nearly as old as her own mother, and her skin looks leathery to me.

I'm not a high-maintenance girl. My face is lucky to see moisturizer once a month, I don't wear makeup most of the time, and it just seems silly to me to be so wrapped up in creams and lotions and such. I admit to a certain amount of vanity, though. I mean, I wouldn't go out to dinner without putting on makeup. But I'm not particularly fussy. I cut and color my own hair, straighten it with a flat iron now and then if we're going out, and call it good enough. I'm just not into spending much of my life in front of a mirror.

I have to laugh - I just remembered a visit to my mother's where she just gushed that I had to try this new face stuff she'd found. I let her drag me into the bathroom, where she applied this lotion and then looked at me expectantly. At first, there was nothing...until a tingle started..and then a burn..and then my face was melting. Seriously, that's what it felt like (it burns! it burns!). I grabbed a cloth and washed it off, and Mom looked disappointed. She chided me for being silly, saying it couldn't have been that bad. The woman just doesn't get it - she's totally a different skin type and tone than me. I'm a redhead with sensitive skin....as opposed to her tougher (hide) skin.

Ugh. I'm starting to sound mean-spirited, and I don't like it. Not where Mom is concerned. I know we have vast differences, but she's the only parent I have left, and I really do love her. Deity bless her, but she tried as hard as she could to make me into a kinder, gentler woman. It's not her fault that I turned out not to be the daughter of her dreams. And I really shouldn't antagonize her; I have a knack for being blunt, and some wicked little girl in me just loves to shock her with life's little truths. That little girl hates the rose-colored glasses Mom has lived her life behind and pounces at the chance to pierce them with a little reality. But then I feel bad, because Mom is who she is, and at the end of the day, I love her and wouldn't change her for the world. She is my balance - the Pollyanna to my Eeyore.

Of course, I could never shatter her illusions once and for all with the truth of the past. I just couldn't do that to her; though I strongly suspect she'd go so far into denial as to accuse me of lying. Then our relationship, such as it is, would be gone. That is not acceptable. As much as I'm loathe to admit it...I need my Mom.

Well. If this descent into the black was a game of Shoots N Ladders, that would have been a water slide. Oh, hell.

Now I miss my sister, too. I don't ever seem to get to talk to her. I don't get emails from her, except when her kids have gift lists to pass around. Sounds awful, doesn't it? Well it is. She and I used to be very close, and I miss that terribly. I don't know why the silence from her; she isn't upset with me that I know of, and when I finally do manage to get ahold of her on the phone, she sounds tired but glad to hear from me. *sigh* Life's too damned short for this shit. Didn't she learn anything from Dad's death?

Bleh. BLEH, I say.

File this under A for apathy, B for bleh, C for cynicism, D for disgust, and E for ....hmm...F for fuck it.

Potpourri

Mood: pretty decent
Music: Evanescence - Anything for You

Can you tell I hate coming up with blog post titles?

Well, Christmas went well. A couple days before, I had this wonderful sense of peace and calm. A rare gift at any time of year, and absolutely unheard of during the holidays. I was happy with the gifts I'd gotten everyone, and didn't care that hubby kept saying he felt bad that I wasn't getting much this year. It just didn't matter to me (still doesn't). I had finished the afghan for my mother (she loves it), and I actually got everything wrapped on the 23rd. Christmas Eve was, for once, not spent wrapping gifts at the last minute. Amazing!

After all was said and done, and the girls were picked up by their dad, Mom and hubby and I sat around Mom's kitchen table and talked. The topic turned to Dad, and Mom brought up that she still wanted to talk to Dad's second wife, who was there when Dad died (she was renting a room from Dad and his girlfriend). Mom said she couldn't understand why the second wife (let's call her V), who was a nurse's aid for years, let Dad go 24 hours complaining of chest and arm pain and not feeling well before he died.

My jaw hit the floor, I think. That's not at all what I'd been told by V about Dad's death. I'd been told it had been pretty sudden. She lied to me, and I won't even go into what that's done to my opinion of her. She's made it to the Unforgiven list, let's just leave it at that.

To think that V should have recognized the signs and either didn't or ignored them.... I'm speechless. Come on, ask anyone what the symptoms of a heart attack are and one of the first things they'll tell you is chest pain, and right behind that is pain radiating down one or both arms. I can't help but think that Dad would be alive right now if V had gotten him help. He'd never had any more trouble than high blood pressure, which he was taking medication for. I think nowadays men are more likely to survive a first heart attack than not. If I felt cheated before, that's nothing to how I feel now.

But...at the same time, knowing this doesn't bring him back. I can be angry and upset and hurt all over again, but...he's still gone. I don't know if that helps or not. In a way, I'm angry that it doesn't change anything. I mean, shouldn't he get a do-over or something? It's not fair. It's just not fair....

*takes a break to compose herself*

Okay. That was painful. But on to better news. I get the girls back from their dad today! I miss them so much; the house is just too quiet without them. And little man misses them terribly, too. He wouldn't go to bed Christmas night - he told me he was waiting for the girls to get home. I finally, at about 2:30am, got him to understand that they wouldn't be home for a few days, and he went to bed. He wasn't happy, but he slept. He's been asking about them every day since then, and when he found out last night that they are coming home today, he was thrilled. This morning I was greeted with "Good morning, Mommy! We go get the girls? I get my shoes!". Hated to tell him we don't leave until this afternoon, the little guy is so excited.

Well, I should fix some lunch and get ready to hit the road. Two and a 1/4 hour drive this time, since the ex doesn't seem to have the gas money to meet me halfway. So, I get to meet his girlfriend on her way to work, about 30 minutes away from their house, toward our house. Lovely. Don't get me started on his girlfriend, she pokes her nose in where it doesn't belong far too often, and one of these days I'm just gonna lay her out.

Damn, that thought makes me smile.

Pluggin' Along

Mood: neutral-to-good
Music: Seether - Rise Above This

It's one of those days where I'm just plugging along and puttering around. Playing a little Holy War, listening to some music, and waiting to get over this stupid congestion that's taken up residence in my chest. So not amusing - I've filed eviction papers, but you know that takes forever... *chuckles*

Being sick isn't fun, per se, but it can get interesting when your defenses are down a bit and things come to play. Little crawly things that speed around at the edges of vision, darting for cover when I turn my head. Fear and paranoia that are not my own, but thrust upon me from some outside source. I'm not amused by that, either, but at least it seems to have stopped.

So. It's three days to Christmas and I have nothing wrapped, and still have shopping to do. Nothing new there. I'm supposed to take the kids shopping so they can buy presents for people. I'm supposed to bake a gazillion Christmas cookies. Hmm....now that one might get done, since I've had a vicious craving for sugar cookies for days now. And not just any sugar cookies, but the ones we used to make in my mom's little pie shoppe/restaurant. Incredibly yummy. I'd share the recipe, but I'm not allowed - family recipe, proprietary info, etc. So, I'll just make a batch and think of all my friends while I eat every delicious morsel. *wicked laughter*

On a more sober note, my cousin is supposed to get test results back today - they did a biopsy and a scan of what they suspect is a tumor on his chest. Mom says that he could be in surgery before Christmas if it comes back as malignant. Scary stuff - he's one year younger than me. We grew up together, a set of four cousins; he and his brother, and my sister and me. Our mothers are sisters, and it seems our families were always together. In any case, I'm crossing my fingers for him.

And on goes the day, just plugging along....

Happy Frippin' Holidays

It's been ages since I wrote last, I know. But I had decided to let this blog just die out, like so many before it. Don't ask why I do that. I don't have the answer, and maybe it really doesn't matter in the long run.

I do know that I only seem to write when things are bad. I can't really write cheerful, perky crap. It's just not me. And I write best when it comes from somewhere deep, and the only time I get to that deep place is when something forces the lock on that door open. Because it is usually firmly locked, to keep That Which Must Not Win from consuming me entirely.

Anyway, back to the topic of this poor excuse of a post.

We put the Christmas tree up today. I do this with some reluctance in these years since Grandma died on Christmas morning. I used to love Christmas. Now, I endure it. I hope someday I come to a place where Christmas will let me remember her with love and fondness, rather than with pain and sorrow.

So anyway, while we were putting up the artificial tree (I dislike real ones), I had Dad in the back of my mind. He and I used to assemble our family's tree together when I was a kid. So there's the subconscious weight of Dad's memory in my head, and the three strange dreams I had this morning are still rippling the waters of my mind, and the girls won't stop bickering. I mean -constantly- at each other. And then daughter 12 told daughter 9 that their stepdad doesn't control her actions. And I blew up at her. I told her that as long as she lives in this house, and until she is old enough to support herself and be on her own, we WILL be controlling her actions. And if she chooses to demonstrate that she can be responsible and mature, she will be given more control over her own life. But until then, she can empty the damned dishwasher like she's told!

Well, that settled down a bit, and I went back to putting lights on the tree while the girls continued to bicker over the dishes. Finally, lights on tree, dishes done, I told the girls they could now decorate the tree. I came back to my computer and was checking on Holy War stuff, when I heard a small thud combined with the soft sound of fine glass breaking.

Little man, age 4, had gotten past the girls to 'help', and had dropped a large hand-blown glass ornament that was still in its box, and the ornament had broken. I got up and took the box, and couldn't say anything for the tears rolling down my cheeks.

Dad had given me that ornament, years and years ago.

That ornament had survived three 800-mile moves between PA and NC, plenty of shorter moves, years of being put on the tree, and several cat-induced tree tipovers. And in the blink of a four year old's eye, the slip of his fingers, the short drop to the ground from his hand....it's gone.

And he's too little to understand the blow he's dealt to his mother's grieving heart, and why.

Dreamfest '08 (yes, that's sarcasm)

More dreams last night. These ones had my sister, ex-husband, and I think either my mother or my one remaining grandmother was in there, too. Maybe occupying the same figure and switching back and forth.

At one point, my sister and I were driving in Erie. It was dark and raining, and I was trying to remember how to get places, and taking wrong turns. She was sort of laughing, sort of impatient about it.

At another point, we were in my dead grandma's old house, but she was recently dead. We were spending a lot of time there, having to stay there overnight and such, and my sister and I changed the sheets on what had been Grandma's bed, and shared it.

I dreamed we were later standing in the kitchen, and looking at the floor. The vinyl was in bad shape, which would have been so not Grandma. But that's when my ex was suddenly standing there, looking at the floor and talking about laying tile (he's a professional tile man).

There was a dog, which was odd, because -that- grandmother didn't have a dog, the other one does. The dog's water dish had been put on the back porch for reasons we were speculating about, with me saying that 'she probably didn't want to damage the floor with spilled water'. I moved the dog's water dish into the kitchen, next to his food dishes on the floor in an out-of-the-way corner.

Then someone...I knew them in the dream, but don't remember who it was now, came up to the back porch and said something like "The gray board from Mr. So-and-so's shed is gone again." (I heard the name in the dream, but don't remember it now). It seemed important that the piece of gray wood in an otherwise white shed kept getting swiped. Interestingly, this shed and the gray piece of wood show up in other dreams - where it's called to my attention that the gray board is gone. And it always seems to be disturbing news.

This is all getting old. I feel like I've gotten on a ride at an amusement park, only nobody told me until we were strapped in and started moving that it's the worlds' longest roller coaster.

The Tween Years

Today is picture day at school, and late last night, I had the girls pick out what to wear. Middle daughter (from here out, D8) had little trouble finding something suitable to wear. Oldest daughter from here out, D11) ended up crying when I asked her if she had a pair of black pants.

Nonplussed, I asked her what could be so awful about black pants that made her cry. Come to find out, it wasn't the pants at all (I didn't figure it was, but you have to start somewhere). She was feeling like there was too much pressure about how she was going to look for the pictures. I wanted her to dress one way, and she felt that it was going to be very different from what other kids were doing. She said 'you can't understand how I feel'.

Well, we had a heart to heart on that one. I showed her pictures of me at her age - glasses, bad hair, the beginnings of teenage skin...it was painful for me, but I wanted her to see that I DO understand. I know a lot of parents seem to forget what it was like to be a kid, but I'm not one of them. Maybe it's because it was so rough for me. I don't know. But talking to her was a little funny, because I remember my Mom giving me some of those same pieces of advice. Things like "you might want the same haircut some other girl has, but it might not look as good on YOU as it does on her" and "fads are fine, but classics are timeless". And I laughed at myself and TOLD her that my mom had said some of those same things to me, and that, like D11, I wasn't willing to listen.

I think there's a difference, though, and I told D11 this, too. My mom would just deliver a statement and not discuss the reasoning behind it. So it always felt like she was making arbitrary statements rather than taking ME into consideration. But with D11, I made sure that I took the time to talk to her about how these things relate to HER - that while Skye has a cool haircut that looks great on her, getting the same cut wouldn't make D11 look like Skye. And I explained to her that while the Hannah Montana t-shirt is cool, it doesn't make for very good portraits. And I backed that up by showing her the section in my photography lessons on portraiture that deal with backdrops and subjects, and simplifying. She didn't have much to choose from in the way of solid color shirts without distracting graphics, but we came up with a black polo shirt and black pants. And when I did her hair this morning, she looked fabulous!

I hope this teaches her to trust me a bit more. I know kids think they know everything - I've been there, I remember. And being 11 is SO awkward for a girl. Not a little girl, not yet a teen...hence the name they've come up with for it - tween. I just want to get her through these years with some semblance of self-confidence. It will be my gift to her - and something I never had. Rather than hide wounds behind false apathy, I want her to be armored against them with a solid sense of who she is and what she's worth. I want her to be able to shake off comments from rude brats, and also be able to accept a compliment with grace. She deserves to be happy - I want SO badly for her to be a happy, confident young woman. Maybe I feel that something good will have come of my own messed up youth if I can use it to make things better for her. It kills me to see her suffer such self-doubt..it's too much like looking back at myself at that age. I can't reach back and help that version of me, to tell her it will be okay, that she will survive even when she doesn't want to. But I can maybe head that all off for D11, and let her not only survive, but thrive.

I think maybe guiding her through this is helping to heal me a little. She is so terribly much like me in some bad ways, and if I can just steer her in a better direction....she can have a better life than me. I might be able to stop her from becoming bitter and shutting herself off from any real friendships or relationships. Maybe she won't be afraid to love, and won't suffer from a lack of it. Maybe she'll be confident enough not to marry the first (and second) man that comes along. Maybe she'll have the courage to be true to herself, and to speak up for what she needs or wants.

I was going to say you couldn't pay me to go through my tween years again...but through her, I am.

It's Raining Caterpillars and Frogs

Well, it's raining here, and it seems to have brought out tons of fuzzy caterpillars and billions of baby frogs (okay so maybe not that many..). The kids and I keep trying to identify the caterpillars; Mom got the kids a 'Butterflies of the Carolinas' field guide, and about 80% of them show small photos of the larva stage. Our little fuzzballs seem to be in that 20% that aren't pictured. Of course.

We had to rescue a baby frog from the cat last night. Oliver was extremely interested in one spot of the kitchen floor near the back door, and when we investigated, there was an itty bitty baby frog (fwog) hopping frantically around. You could almost hear the "oh shit! oh shit! oh shit!" that had to be running through the poor thing's head. The look on Oliver's face was, of course, "I wonder how he'll taste...."

Not getting much done lately, but I don't feel that bad about it right now. I started DMing an AD&D campaign for hubby and the girls, and it's been a little hectic. I haven't run a game before, so I decided to use modules I got for free from www.dragonsfoot.org to get me going. They were designed for 1st Edition AD&D, but I'm having no trouble using them with AD&D rules. The XP and gold values are a little screwy, but they're easy enough to alter. My main thing was needing the basic story and the maps, and this is working out great for our little first-level group. Right now, they've just solved a murder and are about to go on the chase. It makes a DM proud. *sniff, sniff*

Maybe next gaming session, I'll throw in some caterpillars and frogs...

Restless Futility

I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm unhappy for any number of reasons, and I want something to change, or want to change something, but it all seems so futile to even try anymore. I thought Lance and I had drawn closer as a couple - we both commented on how much better we felt after the cruise. And then last night, he comes home and rips everyone's head off about the house, becoming a total tyrant again. And like a flower wilting suddenly, I felt my heart just shrivel up again.

It's clear that my worth is only equal to my ability to keep house, and since I suck at that, I am worthless.