Home again, home again, jiggety jig

I've spent the last few days getting used to everyone being home again. Wonder of wonders, Michael did not yell at me for cleaning his room. He even went so far as to kind of thank me. Which was a huge thing, from him. It was really nice to get an acknowledgement from him.

The confrontation about the cigarettes went, well, okay. The husband handled it and I don't necessarily agree with his approach toward his son. But, as I keep reminding myself, this isn't my child. I can give opinions and input, but ultimately, I have no say.

Michael's explanation was exactly what I expected. He claimed that someone at work had forced the pack on him and he had brought it home because he hadn't known what else to do. The husband probed for a little bit, then sent Michael out of the room so that we could discuss the situation. I pointed out that for one thing, that was nearly a full pack of cigarettes. I found it hard to believe that someone he hardly knew (he said he'd only worked with the guy that one time and couldn't remember his name) would want to force something rather pricey on a boy that doesn't even smoke. There was also the issue that it was carefully hidden, not in the garbage or left in a pocket or dumped amidst all the other trash on his floor.

I do think he hasn't tried smoking at most more than once or twice, and definitely isn't addicted yet. I don't believe his story about how the cigarettes came into his possession. The husband agreed with me, but didn't feel (this is the part I vehemently disagreed with) that there was a need to go any further than a one week grounding for bringing cigarettes into the house. Although he did point out to Michael that he didn't really believe him, and that it was hard to trust him after the whole thing with the coin jar.

We'll see how it goes. Hopefully he got jolted out of this by getting caught.

Yippee!

I'm one of the three winners of Blogging for Books this month! I'm so excited! You should see me jumping madly about the house. Wheeeeee!

You can read my winning entry here.

Mr. Clean

AGK's husband promised her that he'll take over the housecleaning once she gets published. Wow! Now that's an incentive. If my husband promised me that I'd be published tomorrow!

Although, now that I think about it, how great an incentive that is really depends on the cleaning abilities of the husband in question, now, doesn't it?

I don't know about AGK's husband, but mine can't clean to save his life. Well, let me rephrase that. He can't clean effectively to save his life.

I have seen that man spend two hours on a room, only to have it looking just as bad as when he started. And he's been working hard the whole time, too. Take the kitchen,for instance. The first time the husband announced that he was going to clean the kitchen I was ecstatic. It was a real sight that day, dirty dishes covering the counters, clean dishes in the strainer, counters that needed wiping, stovetop needing a good scrubbing, mess, mess, mess everywhere I looked.

So I gave the husband a smile, a hug and a kiss and went off to take care of something else that needed doing. I could hear him moving chairs around, opening and closing doors, and in general, sounding busy. I was so happy.

A long while later, the husband came and told me he was finished. All excited I ran to view the kitchen that I hadn't had to clean. It was somewhat of a letdown to see a kitchen that didn't seem to have changed at all from earlier.

The husband was standing beside me, very pleased with himself. "What do you think?" he asked.

"What did you do?" I replied.

Come to find out he'd mopped the floor. That floor was the cleanest it's ever been. It was immaculate. It was the "so clean you can eat off it" that my mother always demanded when I was a kid.

It was one of the more discouraging experiences of our early marriage.

I have learned over the years since then that this is how he works when cleaning. He can spend hours getting something completely inconsequential utterly sterile, and ignore the visible mess lying all around him. So, while I accept his offers of help, I don't expect much. If I want it done I'll have to do it myself. His mind just doesn't work that way.

It does lead to arguments sometimes, though. He gets upset every so often that I don't clean the way he does. He'll start getting uptight over not having every surface sterile (he has a real thing about floors) and haul out the cleaning supplies to take care of it himself, muttering the whole time. I ignore him. Unless I get too annoyed at the muttering, in which case I'll go to another room and fume until I get my sense of humor back.

Alas! I'm just going to have to go back to my original incentive. Sell enough books to hire a housekeeper!

Saving money through cleaning

Michael is at his mother's this week, so I decided to take the opportunity to clean his room. I do this knowing that he'll be mad at me for, as he sees it, invading his space, but I figure he'll be better off for being in a clean area while he sulks.

So far this week I have done eight load of laundry and hauled three trash bags full of garbage out of there. I have put all his books, music and movies into one place, organized his newly clean clothes, and put his winter things away for the return of cold weather. I found clothes in there that his mother bought him last fall which still had the tags on them. He has many more clothes than I had any idea, and since almost all of them have been sitting on the floor since he was given the responsibility of doing his own laundry, they are as good as new.

(This is kind of nice, because it means that really, I only need to buy him jeans, socks, underwear and shoes for school. It turned out he has seven coats, ranging from a windbreaker to a heavy-duty parka. He has a huge pile of t-shirts and a pile of shorts and swimtrunks that he wears as shorts that is even taller.)

All I need to do now is make his bed and dust a little. And it only took me two days. (Yes, that is sarcasm, just in case you're confused.)

There is just one small problem. Michael has a good reason, it seems, to want us to stay out of his room. I found an open pack of cigarettes hidden in his drawers.

His father and I will be having a long discussion with him the day he gets home. Rebellion is one thing, smoking is another. I don't care for his bad behavior but I accept it as part of this age. I will not, however, tolerate his doing something that is going to risk his health and his life.

I would never have thought he would do something this stupid. I thought he was smart enough to realize what a health hazard smoking is.

I think this is what my mother would call, "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

Gardening Success

Woohoo! I have picked a grand total of three, yes 3, (THREE!) tomatoes from my tomato plants! That is three more than I have ever gotten before. And I've been trying to garden for nearly two decades now.

Yeah, I'm really, really bad at this. Herbicidal thumb, etc. etc.

But perseverance pays off! I have several more tomatoes on the verge of ripening, I have six bell peppers on my two bell pepper plants and an uncounted number of jalapenos coming right along, and I was even able to give my daughters a bite each today of our very first strawberry ever. We have two more strawberries that should be ripe tomorrow. A strawberry each! Life is good.

All this is due to container gardening. Did you know you can grow anything in a container? Except maybe corn, which tends to get too tall for containers, I have read.

I have just kept plugging away, year after year, and this year (since we're renting) I decided to try a few plants in pots. Well, the peppers and tomatoes took off like crazy, so when I saw a gardening catalog sale of their end of season small berry plants I went ahead and got strawberries, blueberries and raspberries for 75% off. An experienced gardener I know warned me they would all die, but only the blueberries have. (Which was sad. I was really looking forward to fresh blueberries next summer.) The raspberries (a fall-bearing variety) are thriving in their pot and you already know the strawberries are bearing, to my complete shock (I didn't expect to see any fruit until next summer there, too.)

I'm so happy! I have huge plans for next summer. And maybe a fall garden, too. I just need to find out the freeze date around here ...

Must. Not. Kill. Him.

Michael is doing his best right now to get himself fired.

When I picked him up from work last night it was obvious something was wrong. I could tell by the way that he called his boss a "b----"

It took some doing to get out of him what had happened, but finally he gave me at least the general outline and enough details that I'm amazed he still has a job to go back to, although, as I said, he's working hard on taking care of that slight problem.

It seems he was assigned to wash dishes last night. This made him unhappy. He feels he has been washing dishes entirely too much since he got this job. Being thusly displeased with the vicissitudes of working life he expressed his displeasure by telling his boss that it was obvious that he was just the "dish monkey" around there. Only, he told me, he didn't put it that nicely. I have a hunch he probably started swearing at her. He was certainly swearing about her.

Last night he was saying that he didn't feel like going in to work tonight. He's in for a nasty shock if he's still thinking that way when he gets up today. I told the husband last night and we both agreed that's not an option. He needs to suck it up, go back in there, apologize to his boss and learn to deal with the fact that a job isn't about having fun.

**Break**

I just took a slight pause and went off into thinking about how to talk with Michael about this and wound up getting into a diatribe in my head with him about the realities of the universe. I mean, honestly, when you get right down to it, no-one cares if you don't like your job. You're unhappy? Then get an education. Get the skills that will allow you to support yourself doing what you like. You don't want to do that? Then feel free to starve. That's just the way it is.

I've had jobs I've hated. The husband has had jobs he's hated. We did them anyway because, as one boss of mine used to say, "Working allows me the luxuries to which I've become accustomed - food on the table and a roof over my head." So, hate it or not, I did my job cheerfully and well. And it paid off. I got promotions, got raises, got great letters of recommendation when I moved on to jobs that paid more and were more fun. That's how it works. That's how you play the system and make it work for you.

Michael's way of approaching life - his temper tantrums, his insistence that things go his way or not at all, his refusal to play if he isn't perfectly happy - is going to leave him with nothing but a bloody nose when he gets out there in the real world. He is running out of time, too. So, how the heck do we get it across to this kid that he's throwing his life away before it's even started? How do we make him understand that he's going to be stuck washing dishes his whole life if he doesn't start participating in school? How do we make him see that all the luxuries that he likes so much right now, like his PS2, internet access, fast food, new clothes, new books to read, all this is dependent on being able to make enough money to afford them? And how do we get this across to him without triggering a temper tantrum that will lead him to refuse to participate, just like he's been doing with school?

Or can I just hope he'll grow out of it in another year or two?

Yes, I did have children just so that I could make them work for me.

We have a new game at our house! I call it Sock Skating. I got the idea for this from a Flylady letter to her list, in which osmeone talked about using old socks to clean your kitchen floor.

I have quite the collection of old mismatched socks that I really need to get rid of, but haven't been able to make myself throw out. (Hey, why do you think I need Flylady, after all?) They came in handy though, for this game. I put old sock on the girls' feet and then dumped a couple of cups of water on the kitchen floor. The three of us (I had on old socks, too) then scuffed our feet around the floor in imitation of ice skating. The girls thought it was great and it did a pretty good job of getting the floor clean, too. Afterward I just mopped up the excess water.

I love anything that makes cleaning easier!

Michael got his first paycheck. It was only $54 so the withholding bit wasn't too bad. He cashed it before we knew he had it and took some of his friends out to dinner. I told him we're using the next one to open up a savings account for him. If he cashes all his checks all the money will disappear without him even knowing where it went.

Speaking of money and Michael, and on a somewhat depressing note, we caught Michael stealing from us. We have a jar of coins that we've been keeping on our dresser. Well, the other day the husband asked me where I'd put it. I hadn't seen it, although I'd noticed that morning that it was gone. I'd assumed the husband had done something with it. Since neither of us had, we assumed Arielle had climbed up and gotten it. She's obsessed with coins and thinks they make the best toys ever. Arielle looked blank, though, when we asked her about it. We asked Michael, then, but he said he hadn't seen it anywhere.

A couple of days later I went into Michael's room to do a bowl and silverware search and there was the coin jar, sitting in an open dresser drawer.

The upshot of all this is that he confessed when his dad confronted him, but was angry and defensive, blaming us for it (naturally.) Evidently he'd asked us for some money and we hadn't had that much cash on us. When he was told he'd have to wait he got angry and took the coin jar instead. His argument is that we're always saying we don't have money, but there was the coin jar, full of money! Obviously we were just being selfish, greedy and mean.

Of course, the coin jar had, at most, five or six dollars in it, as compared to the $15 to $20 amounts he asks for, or gets paid for doing things like mowing the lawn.

Here is where I take a break to hit my head against the wall, while chanting, "Grow up, grow up, grow up!"

So, I've hidden the coin jar for now. Michael has agreed to pay back what he took from it ($3 he says) We'll have to figure out how to keep this from happening again.

Drat that boy! I really wish he's stop destroying our trust in him.

One Word

I got this from AGK. I wanted to leave her a word, so now I am supposed to do it, too.

Please leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me.

It can only be one word.

No more.

Then copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word about you.

Fine Young Cannibal

Gabrielle was bitten at church yesterday. She's old enough to be in nursery now, the class for little ones old enough that they don't have to stay with their parents, but still too young for the more organized classes for the older children.

So, halfway through my meeting one of the nursery volunteers came in and told me in hushed tones that one of the other mothers wanted to talk with me. It seems her son had bitten my daughter. Hard. Twice. Once on each arm.

So much for the rest of church. Actually Gabrielle took it rather well. They told me she didn't even cry. I guess that's why they didn't catch it in time to keep it from happening again.

Now, I know small children do things like that sometimes. Actually Gabrielle bit me a couple of times before I managed to convince her that was a bad idea. They bite because they can't talk and they don't have much in the way of skills to communicate. It's not anyone's fault. It's not the child's fault. He's just a little guy and he's still learning. It's not the mom's fault. She's working on teaching him and that takes time (she apologized to me, weeping the whole time. She felt terrible about it.) It's not the nursery workers fault. They do a fantastic job of caring for the kids and stuff like this can happen pretty quickly. (Although, yes, I am a bit peeved that it happened twice. But then, I can't guarantee even my presence would have kept it from happening again.)

It's no-one's fault. Which, unfortunately, leaves me with my protect-my-baby-aggression all revved up and no-one to vent it on.

These were nasty bites, too. On one arm her wrist has several red teethmarks, even more than a day later. On her other arm you can still see a complete circle of red teethmarks. He almost broke the skin with his front teeth. I've been keeping a careful eye on her all day, just in case. Human bites, I have been told, are very prone to infection.

She hasn't complained at all, but if you touch her am where she was bitten you'll get a quiet little, "Ow."

Yeah, that's the sound of my heart breaking.

I've been debating what to do next Sunday. I've pretty much decided that for at least this next week I need to go to nursery with her. We'll see how that goes and I'll decide if I need to keep going. Just because it's nobody's fault doesn't mean I'm going to take a chance on it happening again, after all.

Harry Potter

I am a very fast reader. I always have been. In grade school the other kids refused to believe I was reading as fast as I appeared to be. They accused me of just turning the pages to make it look like I was reading fast.

Nope. I wasn't. Although I have noticed as I have gotten older, and busier, that how fast I read is heavily influenced by how much I've been reading. I guess it's like anything else: Practice makes perfect.

I finished the latest Harry Potter just before midnight last night. I'd been reading it almost nonstop since I plucked it from the mailbox aroung 1:30 that afternoon. I didn't mean to finish it so quickly. In fact, I really didn't want to finish it that quickly, and now I am rather sad, because it is all done and I'm quite sure I will have to wait two years for the last book. But it was so much fun to read that I really couldn't put it down. So here I am, forlorn.

I've been rereading Lord of the Rings, lately, and I've been amazed at how good it is. It's been so many years since I've read it that I'd forgotten how well Tolkien writes. On the other hand, I've leafed through many books that have tried to write in what they seem to believe is the "Tolkien style." They have uniformly been heavy, pompous, and impossible to read.

JK Rowling is no JRR Tolkien. Reading both authors' works so close together has impressed that upon me. She is, however, a very good writer, and while Harry Potter lacks a certain complexity (and why shouldn't it - it is written for kids, after all) she certainly knows how to tell a great story.

One of the things she does do well, in my opinion, is characterization. I am especially impressed at how she is able to portray adolescence. Reading books five and six, I could see Michael in her descriptions of her teen characters' behavior. In the descriptions of their feelings and thoughts, I could see myself at that age. I really think that's something. So often books with young protagonists treat their characters as miniature adults instead of real kids. Personally, I find it intimidating to try to recapture my memories of those ages well enough to create a believable, real, character. So, my hat's off to to Rowling.

And to those of you who might be Harry Potter fans, who are either in the midst of reading right now, or still waiting to get your hands on a copy of Half-Blood Prince, I say, "WOW! You won't believe what happens!"

I tortured Michael all afternoon who kept telling me to stop laughing, stop making horrified sounds, and stop gasping. He was very relieved to have me finally hand it over to him. I can't wait til he finishes it, so we can talk about it and speculate on Harry's next, and final, adventure.

A few memories for future reference.

Sometimes I just can't think of anything to say, some days there's so much happening that I wind up leaving out huge chunks of our lives as I try to keep entry lengths managable.

So, in honor of the fact that this is supposed to be a semi-journal for myself, as well as a blog to appease to my vanity (by getting myself readers!) here are some quick notes on recent big events in our lives. Feel free to skip this as being way too boring.

Gabrielle is growing so fast. She's finally getting teeth in the gaps in her little smile. For the longest time she had four front teeth, top and bottom, then a gap, and then molars. She finally has teeth growing into the gaps on the bottom, as of about three weeks ago, and teeth are starting to show through on the top as well. Yippee! I never really did quite get used to the way the molars looked with the gap. I kept seeing her smile and thinking she had something in her mouth. Well, duh, Jennifer, yes, she does. They're called teeth. Do try to keep that in mind for future reference.

She's also making amazing strides in learning to talk, although it takes some concentration and word solving skills to figure out what she's saying. Yesterday she kept asking me, "Sno-go? Sno-go?" I had to repeat it to myself several times before I realized she was asking me to snuggle. She loves to cuddle up with Mommy on Mommy's bed, the both of us wrapped up in a blanket, like when she was tiny and still nursing.

Gabrielle has also hit the Terrible Twos. Last Wednesday she threw a temper tantrum and she hasn't really stopped since. OK, that's a touch of hyperbole. She stops for a few seconds here and there to breathe. How long can one child scream before going hoarse? I think I might get to find out over this next year.

School supplies are on sale right now all over the place which has gladdened my heart (it's the writer in me coming out. "Look at all that blank paper and pencils to sharpen!) but greatly peeved Michael who is not interested in thinking about school preparations yet. Crayons have been 10 cents a pack at one local store. So have 70 page spiral notebooks, so I've been buying scads of both for the girls to use. I'm also thinking of buying a bunch of stuff and keeping it on hand for when the inevitable charitable drive for underprivileged schoolchildren starts up. There's always something along those lines every year.

Arielle has been increasingly lobbying to be allowed to play outside alone. She keeps telling me about friends of hers who are allowed to play by themselves. Sorry, little girl. You have a paranoid mommy, who is going to be a pest to you until you are on your own, and probably even then. Learn to live with it. It's better than the alternative.

She's started doing something that is becoming a bit of a problem, though. After we put her to bed, she will sneak out of her room and into the husband's and my room, where she will fall asleep curled up in our bedspread. The first time I walked in and saw her there I about had a heart attack. I'm not sure how to break her of this. I guess we'll just keep picking her up and taking her back to her bed when we find her, until she grows out of it. Maybe? Hopefully? Surely she'll grow out of this sometime, right? Before she starts kindergarten, at least?

I'm going out with a friend tonight to a Harry Potter party at the local bookstore. I've never been to one. I can't say I really care where I go, as long as I go somewhere. Whoohoo! Time out with a friend. That's almost as good as a date with the husband.

Now we wait.

Well, the husband had a second treatment for the pain he's been having. Years ago he hurt his back and now he's having problems with a nerve getting pinched. He had a treatment a month ago and it didn't work, so he went back this week to get another version of the treatment, this one a little riskier. Basically, they knocked him out, stuck a needle in his spine and gave the nerve a shot of steroids to reduce the inflammation. He had this done once before and it relieved the pain for pretty much a year. We're hoping this last shot works the same way. Otherwise he's going to have to have surgery. They'll slice him open and enlarge the area in his disk that the nerve goes through, as well as cutting back some calcium deposits that are pressing on the nerve.

I'm a little scared to have him go through surgery. Even the shot he just got had a certain risk of hurting the nerve and causing paralysis. The husband, however, is so tired of being in such pain all the time that he is more than ready to get cut up if it will stop the pain. He doesn't care about the risks anymore. He just wants to stop hurting.

It will take a couple of weeks before we have a firm grip on how successful this treatment was. I'll be holding my breath until then.

Update on the ring

I've given up. I can't find it anywhere. I don't know how it could have disappeared so thoroughly, but I'm not going to find it without a metal detector. Maybe not even then.

I am so sad. It's just a ring, but well, you know. It's not the ring, it's the sentiment attached to it. Everytime I looked at it I was reminded of when we got it, of the husband putting it on my hand when we got married, of how shiny and pretty it was at first and how it got scratched up so quickly. I was sad to see it get scratched, in those early days of marriage, but after a while I decided it was nicely symbolic of how we were managing to fit our lives together.

It was a cheap ring. We got our rings on sale, $60 for the set. 10K gold, bands on the narrow side. We were both of us very poor back then. I didn't even have an engagement ring at first, because we just couldn't swing it. The husband surprised me a week before our wedding with a $30 cubic zirconia ring from Walmart. I was thrilled. Even $30 was a big sacrifice for him at that time.

It's our private joke now. My engagement rings looks very expensive, actually. It makes me laugh that the wedding and engagement ring cost the same amount. I never wanted anything pricy. I'd feel too nervous with something that costs thousands of dollars on my hand. My sister has a friend who was given a family heirloom as an engagement ring. $14,000. Yeah, she lost it. It was insured, but still. Losing a family heirloom? Yeeks! I'm glad I don't have to feel guilty as well as sad about my ring.

Sometime in the next few weeks I'll get a babysitter for the girls and the husband and I will go over to Walmart. We'll pick another inexpensive ring, as much like the original as possible (which shouldn't be hard.) It won't be the ring, but it'll be good enough. After all, what's important is that I get to belong to him and he gets to belong to me, and I get to wear a ring letting the world know how much we mean to each other. I'll always remember my first ring, but I'll make new memories with my second ring and they'll be precious too.

To start with, I'll think of it as a recommitment to each other. Yeah, that works.

I oughta be a locksmith.

I was going to go shopping this afternoon. After all we need things like tortillas, yogurt, etc. etc. Note, however, the emphasis on the word "was".

As in, "Instead of going shopping this afternoon I spent two hours trying to get various locked doors open."

I was tired this afternoon. So tired that when I got a call from my sister, we weren't very long into our conversation before I slipped into a slight doze and started babbling to her. When she got done laughing we said good-bye and I decided to take a little nap on the couch, while Gabrielle took her nap and Arielle watched a movie.

What could go wrong?

I didn't sleep long, or very deeply. 15 minutes maybe. And then I woke up, got up, and headed for the bedroom to take care of some things. Except that the bedroom doorknob wouldn't turn.

Wait a minute. Arielle in living room. Gabrielle in crib.

Oh no.

Not again.

This time, even with the benefit of experience, I just couldn't get the darn thing open for the life of me. I wound up taking it apart, only to find out the part that held the door closed still wouldn't move! So I took the teen's bathroom doorknob apart and figured out how to make everything turn.

Hooray! All is correct and as it should be again!

Except for the master bathroom, which I then discovered was also locked. At which point, seeing the look on my face, Arielle burst into tears and ran into her bedroom.

So I took that one apart too.

Now everything is fixed.

But we're still not going shopping. Arielle, as punishment for her misjudgement, is going to have to go without yogurt for breakfast tomorrow morning.

She's almost as unhappy about that as I was about the locks.

Jekyll and Hyde

This is my entry for Blogging for Books #13. 1,992 words, just under the word limit. My regular readers will notice some of this has been excerpted from earlier entries.

I love my father. He is my protector. He is smarter and stronger and braver than any other daddy in the world and I worship him.

I remember being a little girl, playing with other kids in a lush back yard, surrounded by fir and pine. Looking back, I can see that I'm young enough that they don't really want to play with me, so they tell me that we're going to play house. I'm the baby. They have me lay down on a plastic webbed lounge chair, near the empty swingset that they're playing on. The swingset is one of those old metal ones, with the legs like two triangles at either end. There are supposed to be swings and a teeter totter on the set, but they've been removed.

The children clamber over the set, which hasn't been anchored into the ground, several of them perched on the top cross bar. As they move around the swingset moves with them, swaying from side to side, increasingly unsteady.

I'm watching them, content to be the baby, vaguely aware that I've been pawned off, but too young to be anything but pleased with whatever crumbs of interaction they'll give me. Suddenly, the set begins to sway even more, then to tip over. The children start to jump off, making the tip worse.

One of the children, the one who told me to play I was the baby, yells at me, "Run, baby, run!" I think it's part of the game, so I wave my arms and legs like a baby would, and make gurgling noises. I'm very proud of myself for playing so well, as I watch the swingset fall toward me.

The next thing I remember is sitting in the car with my parents. My father is upset, driving very fast and talking to my mother in an angry tone of voice, although I can tell he isn't angry with her. Mommy is holding something warm and wet to my head. I'm curious and want to see what it is, so I try to pull her hand down. She resists, telling me to leave it alone. Peeved, I wait until she's focused on my father again, forgetting to pay attention to me. I pull her hand down quickly, before she can react.

It's a washcloth, and there's blood on it, my blood. The sight panics me. I begin to fight and cry.

There's another blank spot there, then I'm in a room with strangers. I'm lying on my back, unable to move. There is a bright light shining directly over me, hurting my eyes. I'm terrified, fighting and screaming as hard as I can. I want my father. If he was only here everything would be OK.

And then, he is there. He comes to the head of the table I'm lying on, and cradles my head in his arms. I immediately relax. Daddy is here. I'm safe. Everything is all right.

I heard the story from my parent's point of view many years later. Yes, the set did hit me, splitting open my scalp. They drove me to the hospital, where it was determined I needed stitches. They were barred from the room where I was being treated, but could hear me screaming. Dad pushed his way into the room, telling the nurse who tried to stop him, "That's my daughter in there. Get out of my way." The doctor just smiled, and gestured to everyone to let Dad in. I was in a child's strait jacket. As soon as I saw Dad, though, I calmed down. They were able to stitch me up with no further trouble.

I knew, if Daddy was there, I was safe.

*****************************

I hate my father. He is the bogieman standing beside my bed in the middle of the night, screaming at me. He is a monster who terrifies me, destroying everything I love.

I remember being a little girl, huddled on our living room couch. There is a wide archway to my left. It leads to our kitchen, warm and yellow. Daddy is angry. My brother and I cling to each other in a corner of the couch, both too afraid to move. My parents are in the kitchen. Daddy is yelling at Mommy. He has his hand wrapped around her hair, and he is dragging her around the brightly painted kitchen. She's hunched over, both her hands clutching at her hair in a vain attempt to keep it from hurting so much. She's crying, pleading with him to stop hurting her.

Grandma gave me a pretty little salt and pepper shaker set a little while before. They're tiny pitchers, china, painted with roses and gold edging. I love them, because they came from Grandma and represent the cleanliness and peace of her house. I already know I want my house when I grow up to be nice and peaceful like Grandma's. Daddy picks them up, and hurls them at the wall. I sit on the sofa and cry silently, too afraid to make any noise.

Later I try to pick up the pieces, hoping I can glue them back together. I'm already familiar with the need to fix broken things. Mommy tries to help me. She gives me an envelope to put the pieces in. I place them in there, even though I know that the pieces are too small to put back together. The china shattered, and thin slivers are buried in the gaps between the floor and the baseboard, out of reach of even my tiny fingers. I pretend that I still think they can be fixed, though, and tell Mommy that it's OK.

*****************************

"There was a little girl and she had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead, and when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid."

My father is bipolar. He is intelligent, literate, cultured. He taught me to appreciate fine art and great music. He is a great outdoorsman, taking us on hikes and camping trips. I learned to love the beauty of the natural world from him.

He is also, during his frequent bad times, dangerous, erratic, moody and unpredictable. Through fear of him I learned to be hypervigilant, to let no-one behind me, to fear men.

All I ever really wanted was for the bad daddy to go away, and the good daddy to stay. I never could learn how to make that happen. I tried for years to make him love me, to be good enough to finally please him. In my mid-twenties I finally gave up and spent years mourning the relationship I'd never have with him.

And then I found out he was in the hospital for emergency open-heart surgery.

*****************************

My brother calls late one afternoon. Dad is in the hospital. He's been feeling sick to his stomach and dizzy while out walking. He finally went to a doctor about it. The initial tests were inconclusive, so they did more tests, also ambiguous. The doctor decided to refer Dad to the local hospital's heart center for a final decision. The doctors there did another test, looked at the results, and immediately admitted him. Now he's scheduled to have a sextuple bypass tomorrow.

I'm in shock. I don't know how I feel or what to think.

So many things are swirling through my head. I could lose my father. Probably not. This isn't exactly experimental surgery, they've been doing it for decades. It's still major surgery, though. Stuff happens; in spite of everything people still die sometimes.

I can call Dad tomorrow after his surgery.

Maybe I'll know what to say to him by then.

I've got good genetics. All of my grandparents were in their late 80's when they died. Dad's always sworn he was going to live to be 100. I never seriously considered he might not.

It's several hours before the shock starts to wear off. Late that evening I start crying, just a little; I sit at the computer, staring at somebody's blog, sniffling slightly while a trickle of tears runs down my cheeks.

Luckily, I'm married to a man who's very good at emotions. He invites me to sit beside him on the couch and snuggle a bit. I wind up sobbing onto his chest until he's soaked.

Some feeling is growing in my chest, welling up from where I'd buried it decades ago. Every tear gives it further strength and definition, until I can haul it into the light and identify it.

"I only ever wanted him to love me," I sob to my husband, and it's like iron bands around my heart breaking. I draw a breath and it's like walking out of an overly humid room into a dry and brisk spring day.

In the morning I get another call from my brother. Dad's surgery has been delayed another day. Things are looking good, though. His doctors consider him an excellent candidate.

Another day. My brother calls during dinner. Dad is out of surgery and in ICU, hopefully not for long. Everything went very well. He's good for at least another 20 years, the doctors say.

Over the last few years I've been consciously working on forgiving Dad. I don't want to say, "That's OK, it doesn't matter, everything's hunky-dory again!" I do, however, want to let go of the anger, see him as just a person and not the bogieman from my childhood. I want to be free of the fear, free of the hate.

Later that evening I call the number my brother gave me. I'm not afraid or stressed. I actually feel affection for my father as we talk, and when he starts complaining about the dangers involved in my youngest sister driving across the country to live with me I even laugh.

"I don't like this," he tells me, his voice more gruff than usual. "She's going to wind up dead in a ditch, raped, with her throat cut. That car of hers isn't up to the trip. It's going to break down halfway there and she's going to have to fly back home and she'll have to borrow money that she won't be able to pay back because she won't have a job."

Usually I'd be upset, angry that he has so little faith in the judgment of his children. When I decided to go back to college he told me I wasn't smart enough. The first year of my marriage he would ask me, every time he called, if my husband was beating me yet. He's done that to all of us, and it's hurt and angered every one of us. But right now, hearing his concerns, the illogic suddenly seems hilariously funny.

I laugh so long and hard I can almost hear him bristling in offense. "Dad," I tell him lovingly, "that is so you. You find the worst possible scenario and go right to worrying about that."

He gruffs at me, then goes back to discussing all the horrific dangers presented to a young and foolish girl traveling cross-country.

It's the first time I haven't seen this sort of thing as an attack on us, as just one more spoonful heaped on his pile of reasons stating why we're essentially unlovable.

It's one thing to know with my head that my father loves us, even if he's not capable of showing that in any normal way; it's another thing to convince my heart of that. Somehow, though, his illness has broken through my fear and that lonely child inside me has stopped feeling guilty.

I can finally see him as what he is; flawed, ill, but trying. Sorry for his past actions. Working to control his illness. My dad, without the burden of my expectations and pain. Human, like me.

I can forgive him. I can let go of the past.

I can love him again.

Welcome to the world of work.

Michael finally had his first day of work yesterday. Due to some misunderstandings and problems here and there it took him almost three weeks to pull his first shift. It was a doozy, too. 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. 10 hours.

Needless to say, he was dead on his feet when I picked him up. The only reason he was still awake, I figure, is because he was floating on who know how many gallons of free Mountain Dew. Caffeine and exhaustion have the effect of making him giddy, it seems, which was fortunate. It made it very easy to get information out of him. By the time he'd got up this morning he'd already shut back down, so it was good I questioned him while the opportunity was there.

He told me that he really doesn't want to have to do closing anymore. He was rather horrified to find out that he was expected to wash all the utensils, pans and dishes. He also had to take out the garbage, another unthinkable requirement!

I have to admit, when relaying this to the husband later on, I laughed so hard I started snorting.

He learned how to put toppings on, though, and how to wrap a taco, although he says he's not very good at that yet.

Today when I asked him how he was feeling he said that it was all worth it, because of the money. Evidently whenever he started to feel too tired he'd remind himself how much he was making per hour. (A useful technique - I remember one particularly boring and miserable job I had where I had figured out how much I was making per second and when things were really bad I'd count off the time by reciting, "Two tenths of a cent, four tenths of a cent, six tenths of a cent ...")

His next shift is after the weekend. Closing again. I praised him for what he was doing, let him know how proud I was of him, and promised him that after about a week of this he wouldn't be nearly so tired.

We've agreed to let him spend of all his first paycheck. He'll start saving with the second one. He's already planning how he's going to spend all that money. I'm bracing myself for the howls of anguish when he sees how much gets taken out by the government.

Oh beautiful for fireworks?

The husband is working tonight, which is just as well, as he has a slight touch of PTSD which makes fireworks a tad problematic for him. He doesn't scream, "INCOMING!" and dive for cover, but it does make him rather tense and he tends to twitch, just a little, every now and then. Since the meadow across the street is filled with groups of our neighbors, setting off what seems to be every bottle rocket and roman candle in the county, he might have found this evening a bit trying. (There's so much smoke over there, it looks like fog.)

I'm impressed that the girls haven't woken up. I guess my wear-them-out routine today worked well.

Kira wrote today about her favorite verse of America the Beautiful. For me, it's a couple of lines from the fourth verse of the Star Spangled Banner that I always think of at this time of the year. "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!"

I've told the story before, so I won't repeat it here. Follow the link if you want to read it. I'll have to send a copy of it off to my brother. I want him to know how much I appreciate what he is doing.

The fireworks have finally ended. Peace reigns over the neighborhood. Thank goodness. They went on for almost two hours. That's a lot of fireworks! And way too many of them were aimed over our roof, which was making me nervous.

Oops. Never mind. There they go again.

Happy Independence Day!

I hope those Americans that read this blog are having a great holiday. And I hope the rest of you are just have a good day in general!

If I die, this is why.

Sometimes, when I think of death, it's as a thick soft comforter, the kind my grandmother used to make. There's an equally soft pillow there and the bed is made up with crisp, clean sheets, cool at first, but warming up as I pull the comforter up around my shoulders and turn a little a few times, so that the bedding is tucked up around my body in a cocoon. The pillow case has been washed so many times there's no stiffness left in it, and it's soft and comforting to my cheek as I tuck my hands up underneath the pillow, palms together like a child praying.

There are days when everything is like it used to be, before I got pregnant, before the depression struck me. I feel happy, able to think clearly, energetic and capable.

Then, there are days when I'm just so tired and all I want to do is lay my head down on that pillow and never have to wake up again. It's not a physical tiredness. I don't know how to describe it, really, but lately it's like all my senses are wrapped around cotton batting and it's uncomfortable to do anything. My eyes hurt, but in a numbed sort of way, that's worse than a sharper pain. My head hurts, vaguely. Even my emotions have gotten into the game. Everything feels far off and it's hard to focus. When I sleep it's hard, not as in a deep sleep, but a tense sleep, that leaves me with a headache when I wake up and my muscles stiff and hurting. Only it's hard to feel them hurting because it's so hard to feel anything at all.

Other days are just overwhelming. There's so much to try to handle and I can't get anything right. Everyone is upset with me and I'm dropping balls all over the place. I spend my waking hours hiding from everyone, paralyzed with fear of screwing up again. There's so much activity in my brain, so much anger with myself, with everyone else for expecting so much of me and abandoning me to cope alone. It's like little energy storms floating around my head. Sometimes one will center in on me, bringing all the others with it, and for a few minutes it's all completely unbearable and hopeless and I can't see any way out, except through death. It's the only escape I can see and I'm so desperate at those moments that it takes all my willpower to keep from taking that final step.

I have more good days than I did before I started the medication, but the bad days are so much worse and they outnumber the good days. I didn't have any good days before. It feels like the good days are decreasing, though, from where they were a month ago.

At the least, the medicine isn't working. At the worst, it might be making me feel worse. I have to go back to the doctor and I'm scared, because if I start another medication I have to wean off this one first, which will mean I'll have about four weeks that have the potential to be really bad.

I'm so tired of this. Sometimes I feel so desperate to feel good again that I'd do anything, take anything that would give me some energy and hope. I can see how this kind of thing can lead a person to become a drug addict or alcoholic.

I keep holding out for my girls' sake, but I'm not so sure about that anymore. More and more it seems like they'd be better off with the trauma of me leaving them than with me staying with them, like this. Remember, I know how bad it is to grow up with a crazy parent.

And I'm so tired and that pillow is so soft.

New Look!

What do you think? All this is thanks to Point of Focus.

I was trying to fix the problems my front page was having, but wound up accidentally making things so much worse that I really had no choice but to start over completely.

Sleep is a not atonnnnne true alkjnclvk ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

So this is three nights in a row now that Arielle has gotten up when she should be asleep. 4 a.m. the first morning, 5 a.m. yesterday, and last night 1:30 a.m. And it's taking me roughly an hour to get her back to sleep. Last night she pitched several crying fits, wanting to sleep with me.

Let me just point out that I am not into Attachment Parenting. Family beds? I don't think so. My sweet little daughter is going to have to quit this, really quickly, because Mommy is not about to let her keep this up.

In other news, Gabrielle somehow got hold of a bottle of food coloring last night. I'm not sure how. I had the box on top of the fridge! And yet, she walked in the living room clutching the tear drop shaped bottle in her little blue hands and gave me a big blue-lipped smile.

It's very strange to see your baby with Goth lips.

Naturally the camera batteries were dead. Oh, well, I shall be sure to keep that picture in my memory. Or I could just give her the food coloring bottle to suck on again. Hmmmm ...