Oh Look, There's The End Of The Rope

I had a bit of a discussion with That Canadian Boy I Married yesterday. I explained to him that when he kept putting off doing things or refused to help around the house, it did nothing to endear me to him and, in fact, made me resent him. Why I had to explain this to him is a mystery, but there you go, I did.

It's not like he leaves his shoes in the living room for a day or two. He leaves stuff everywhere. He left his rather expensive golf clubs and golf bag (which held his wedding ring, another very, very sore spot) in the yard for two months. I would ask/nag/yell about once a week for him to get them into the cellar or the shed or someplace out of the rain. Finally, on Thursday, I told him that if they weren't moved by Friday, I was listing them on Craigslist. They were put away that night. I shouldn't have to threaten drastic measures in order to get simple things like that done, but that's what it takes, almost every time.

Stuff like this happens all the time. All. The. Time. It's maddening and I find it very selfish and thoughtless. There's also the matter of him not doing anything around the house on the weekends, which is when I work the most hours. It pisses me off no end to come home after work to find that the sofa holds a permanent impression of his ass, that nothing has been picked up and no dishes have been washed. Last night, when I came in after working 9 hours, he smiled and said "Welcome to the disaster zone." And then he fell asleep on the couch. He may as well have slapped me across the face as I walked in the door.

The kitchen was a mess - O had made cookies and not cleaned up. TCBIM had made dinner and not cleaned up. There was ketchup all over the kitchen table and when I moved a picture I had left on the table, water had been spilled, gotten underneath it and left a huge white mark on the table. Not to mention, damaged the picture.

Should I have left the picture on the table? No, I shouldn't have. I had done grocery shopping in the morning, though, and was cleaning out the hutch and before I knew it, I had to get to work. So I left it, telling TCBIM that I would clean it up when I got home. To me, it would have been common sense to move the picture when the girls were eating - they're toddlers, they're messy. And if they'd spilled something, he should have wiped it up.

Instead, all of this stuff just gets left for me to do. And it's infuriating. I work about 25 - 30 hours a week and I take care of the kids. I do all the laundry, I do the majority of the cooking and cleaning and it's pissing me off that when he is home, he just sits on the couch watching football. He doesn't interact with the kids that much, except to feed them. He didn't even give them a bath last night.

Today, instead of hanging out with the girls, who all have the day off, I'll be cleaning up the mess. O will be cleaning the kitchen, since she made the mess in there, but I'm going to have to clean up the living room and dining room because I can't live with this level of mess. It's gross.

When I try to explain how all of this makes me feel, he doesn't get it. He says he doesn't mean to make me feel bad, that he doesn't want me to resent him, but I do. So I spend my time on the computer because I don't want to talk to him. I don't want to be nice to him when he can't be bothered to treat me with any kind of respect. He just says that he doesn't see a problem, that he doesn't mean for his actions (or lack thereof) to make me feel the way I feel and that seems to be it. If he doesn't have a problem, then there is no problem.

This is an ongoing thing with us and I don't know what to do about it. I've talked to my therapist about it and she says to talk to him, to tell him how I feel, but it's not doing anything. I feel like I'm beating my head against a wall and it's wearing me out. His complete obliviousness has me confused and sad.

I don't know how much longer I can go on like this.

Enough Already!

It's been a rollercoaster week here at Casa Bedhead.

It was O's birthday on Thursday. She's 14. Which, what the hell, how did that happen? And I don't want to be jinxing things too much, but considering she's of an age when she's supposed to be impossible and defiant and difficult and all those other fantastic teenage characteristics, she's really a pretty good kid. Sure, she has her moments, but who doesn't? I know I have mine, in spades. I think my moments are more like days, but whatever. This isn't about me (for once).

O was supposed to have three friends sleep over on Friday night. I was going to rent them some movies, get them some pizza and some soda and make popcorn and it was going to be a nice, if loud and giggly, time. But then all three friends bailed on her. One girl had a wedding, one girl's parents wouldn't let her and the third got a last minute babysitting job. O was bummed. Very bummed.

On the fly, I decided that I'd take her out to dinner and a movie instead. She was happy with that. We were going to go to The Outback (her choice) and to see Journey To The Center Of The Earth on Friday night. This did not happen.

Why? Well, Boo woke up on Friday morning soaked to her knees with pee. Her preschool teacher had mentioned on Thursday that Boo was using the bathroom a lot at school and said that her breath smelled sweet and funky. Alarm bells started going off. I checked Boo's blood sugar on Friday morning. It was 160. As soon as they opened, I was on the phone to the pediatrician's office. They saw her that afternoon and found glucose in her urine. The pediatrician wanted to run more lab work, so we were at the office until after 6 p.m.. The results were inconclusive and I have to check Boo's blood sugars over the weekend and follow up on Monday.

So, no dinner and movie on Friday. We went yesterday and over dinner, I asked O if she would rather go to the movies or go shopping. Her grandmother gave her a $35 gift card to Pac Sun and I said we could spend about $30 in addition, since that's probably what we would have spent at the theater anyway. She, naturally, decided to go shopping.

She got a couple of shirts at Pac Sun and we went to Macy's to get some MAC foundation. She'd been complaining about her face, how she keeps breaking out and nothing covers it and I told her about the amazingness of MAC's foundation. Luckily we have the same skin tone, so we're going to share it. But ouch - it's $27.50 a bottle. Still. Since I STILL get zits (and what the FUCK is up with that?? I'm old, goddammit, I should not be getting zits like I'm some pizza-scarfing 15 year-old boy.) and know what a pain in the ass it is to try to conceal them (I've given up at this point. Jesus, parenthetical much, Julia?), I thought I'd splurge.

It was a nice night out. We had fun. O talked my ear off, which was nice, if somewhat exhausting. I'm really glad that she likes to talk to me and tell me what's going on with her friends and her life. It makes me feel like maybe I haven't completely screwed up.

Back to Thursday, though (man, this post is going to need editing). Her father called her on her birthday. Now, normally that would be a nice thing, but her father hasn't contacted her in 5 months and hasn't seen her in almost 2 years, so this was decidedly Not Good. He said he'd called to wish her a happy birthday and that he couldn't talk but he'd call her back later. O was in hysterics about this. She doesn't want to talk to him. She sent him an email telling him that 5 months ago - a shit or get off the pot email, saying that she didn't just want to have a phone relationship with him, that she wanted to see him, that she wanted him to make the effort to visit (he only lives an hour away). She emailed it and heard nothing. For five months. She thought she was done having to deal with him, only to have him come back again and throw her for a loop. It's really sucked. A lot. For everyone. I hate that I can't fix this for her, that I can't just make him go away and leave her alone. I hate that he keeps screwing with her head. And if he ever calls here again, I'm going to tell him that.

In other news, That Canadian Boy I Married may possibly have a couple of herniated discs in his back and has been laid up on the couch every night for almost 2 weeks. He has to get more x-rays done tomorrow and will be seen again on Thursday, but in the meantime, he's in awful pain. His mother has horrible back problems and I'm afraid he may have inherited her issues, which is worrying. Degenerative disc issues are not fun.

And The Bug is going to be evaluated by Early Intervention because she keeps falling down. I've taken her to the pediatrician, too, and there doesn't seem to be anything structurally wrong with her, so the pediatrician suggested EI. I'm fine with that, and although I don't know if she'll qualify for any services, it can't hurt to have her looked at.

I don't know what I did in a past life - maybe I killed babies or something - but I do wish this dark cloud of doom would move the fuck away from me and my family. It's sucking the life out of me.

A Question For The Experts

I have a post up over at New England Mamas, in which I piss and moan about the commercialism that is Valentine's Day.


In other news:

That Canadian Boy I Married (TCBIM) has been working for the same small company for two years now. There are about 8 employees, including the boss. The boss belongs to an uber-Christian church - I don't know what denomination, if any - and several of the employees also belong. Others, like TCBIM, are quite happy in their godless heathenism.

Ever since he started working there, he's felt a slight favouritism towards the employees who are church members. Mostly he was able to brush it off and it didn't impact his job that much. The last few months, though, he's felt a distinct coldness directed at him by the boss. He tried speaking to his boss about it, but that man is one who avoids communication and confrontation at all costs. So TCBIM decided the time was right to start looking for a new job. No rush, he didn't feel as though he was going to get fired or anything, he just felt like things were a little off kilter and wanted to work for a company that had better management/employee communications.

He interviewed at a company based about 40 minutes from here. Because he's in sales, he can work from home a lot, so this was OK. Plus the company is offering $10K more a year in base salary and another percentage point in commission. They also said they'd provide him with a vehicle and a gas card. Yippee! He was still waffling about taking the job when he got a phone call at work the other day.

The phone call was from a financial institution that manages IRAs. They had questions about the IRA accounts for three employees plus the boss. Questions about the money the company was contributing to these IRAs. The little alarm bells started going off in TCBIM's head.

At no time was he given any information about any kind of retirement plan - in fact, he asked about it and was told that the company didn't do anything like that. To suddenly find out that yes, they do do that, but only, apparently, for fellow church members, was the nail in the coffin. He's taking the new job.

Is this legal? I thought if a benefit was offered, it had to be offered to all employees. Does anyone know the deal on that? Not that he's going to do anything about it since he's taking another job, but I do think he's going to mention it in his exit interview.

V.I.P.

What do you think of when you see those initials? What most people think of, I'm sure. Not me, though. For me, those initials stand for Virtual Irish Pub.

Back in the dark ages of the internets, chat rooms were all the thing. Or so I was told. I had no idea. But I'd just recently bought a computer so I thought I'd check it out. I was (and still am) fascinated by all things Irish and somehow stumbled upon the V.I.P. (along with another one - P45). I'd never been in a chat room before, so I had nothing to compare it to - I just thought it was cool. It had a limit of about 30 people at a time, so it wasn't hard to keep up with conversations. At the time, I was infatuated with the show Ballykissangel, so my handle was Niamh (not that I liked her, I just thought it was better than Assumpta, the character I did like.)

One day, I started chatting to this guy whose handle was Aston. He told me he was from the back of beyond in Ontario. He asked where I was from and when I said Boston - I always said Boston, it was all people knew of Massachusetts - he said "Number Four, Bobby Orr!" We chatted a lot when we were both logged on. Eventually we traded email addresses and real names. But there was one thing we lied about; our ages. He told me he was 23 (he was 19). I told him I was 29 (I was 31, soon to be 32).

The emails got more and more frequent and led to phone calls. We'd talk for hours (until I got a $400 phone bill one month) and he finally asked if he could come down for a visit. I said yes and he came down for New Year's Eve, for the big 1999/2000 changeover.

And that was that. He came, he visited, we confessed that we'd lied about our ages. Then he went home, packed up all his stuff and moved here permanently at the beginning of March and he's been here ever since. We got married that June, thus rendering him That Canadian Boy I Married (TCBIM for short). It's been seven and a half years - longer than any relationship I've ever had. And even though he drives me insane some (many) days, we still laugh a lot, we still talk a lot and in spite of the vast difference in our age, I think we're doing ok.






This post is part of Flaunt It Friday. Go check it out; participate in it, even.

If Only Murder Wasn't Illegal

TCBIM has always snored, since the day I met him. Over the last several years, the snoring has grown worse, to the point that he will wake me up with it. I have been saying, for the last year or two, that he needs to go to the doctor, he needs to get a sleep study done because he may have sleep apnea. I wax and wane on the subject, depending on how much sleep I've gotten lately.

For the last six months or so, he will come home from work, eat dinner and almost immediately fall asleep on the couch. He's usually out by 8:30 or 9 pm.. Snoring away. So again, I got on his case. Call the doctor, call the doctor, I'm not your fucking mother, I don't know your schedule, call the doctor and set up an appointment. Ad nauseum. It has been driving me infuckingsane, the snoring and the sleeping and the nagging to just call the damned doctor already.

Last night, as he's about to leave for hockey, he says, "I was talking to a guy on a job site today and he said I might have sleep apnea and I should really get it checked out by a doctor, that that could be why I'm so tired all the time."

Seriously. Isn't that cause for justifiable homicide? Or at least for a cast iron skillet to the head?

Who are you and what have you done with my husband?

TCBIM is lounging on the couch, watching the opening night of...no, not hockey. Not football. Not the World Poker Tour. Not even House. Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down?

The opening night of the New York Philharmonic, live from Lincoln Center. It's Dvorak. "Look," he says, "It's Yo-Yo Ma." Yo-Yo Ma?? Yo-Yo Ma???! I didn't even think he knew who Yo-Yo Ma was.

Today, when he had a couple of hours between sales calls, he came home. He did some work on the computer first, sending emails and faxing things like busy Canadian bee. The little girls were napping, so I was doing a book review and an entry for a new blog I'm working for - more on that soon. When he was done, he stood behind me and gave me a 10 minute shoulder massage.

He didn't follow that up by asking if he could go on a weekend trip to Vegas.
Or Atlantic City.
He didn't invite twelve people to dinner tonight.
He was just being nice.

Doods. What the fuck?

Alien abduction. It's the only logical answer.

This Post Has No Title

Whenever I get down, I listen to R.E.M.. I've been listening to a lot of them lately.



The baby didn't sleep last night. At all. She won't sleep now. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with her. She doesn't have a fever, she doesn't seem to be sick, she's just not sleeping.

I'm sick and tired of being the only person who takes care of these children. It's not like I sprung them on my husband. We both wanted to have kids. But now? He'd rather play poker or hockey or golf than spend any time with them what so ever. If he's left alone with them for more than an hour, he's constantly calling me on the phone, wondering when I'm going to be home.

The ONLY way I can get him to do ANYTHING with the kids is to leave the house. Yesterday I had to run a couple of errands and go to the market. He called, of course, about 45 minutes into the trip, to tell me The Bug was up and when was I going to be home. When I got home, he had her in her highchair and he was playing a game on the computer. She was crying and he wasn't even looking at her, he was just saying "Hush, hush, you're fine, you're fine." She so patently was NOT fine that I wanted to hit him, hard.

This whole avoidance thing that he's doing, with the poker, the hockey, the golf, the falling asleep immediately after dinner on the nights that he is home make me wonder if he's found someone else. He did it once before. It was an online thing, but it was serious enough that they were sending dirty pictures of each other back and forth. She lived in Detroit and he, conveniently enough, suddenly had a business trip out there, which mysteriously got canceled when I discovered what was going on. I haven't come across anything like that this time, but there are a lot of phone calls that are taken outside, text messages that get immediately erased from his phone. And yeah, I check. Once burned, etc., etc..

Add all this shit to the fact that, because the bottom fell out of the housing market and because we stupidly got an adjustable rate mortgage, we're most likely going to lose our house and I am a very unhappy person right now.

TCBIM reads this blog sometimes, so this post may come down later on.

Complaints Department

It's hot as hell. I'm cranky. And I'm going to have a good old bitch-fest now. You've been warned. If you don't want to read it, click away now.

The Bug's birthday party is tomorrow. I have so much to do to get ready for it. And what is TCBIM doing to help with the whole getting ready thing? Playing in a three day golf tournament. Started this morning. Nice, huh? I am furious. He only told me about the tournament on Tuesday. TUESDAY.

So, today and tomorrow, I will be:

• Getting the doohickeys that go into the weed whacker because TCBIM never seems to have time to go to Home Depot (I know, what kind of man doesn't have time for that?) and pick them up.
• Whack said weeds.
• Mow front and back yard.
• Put away the eighty-gajillion plastic toys that are in the back yard
• Clean out pool.
  
• Get propane for grill.
• Buy food for party.
• Wash kitchen and dining room floors.
• Clean bathroom.
• Clean living room.
• Make potato salad.
• Buy beer/wine for party.
• Do all this while wrangling a 2-3/4 year-old and a one year-old.

It's hot. Did I mention that? It's, like, 95 degrees hot. And humid. And I'm a delicate, fragile flower who does not do well in this hothouse environment.

I need to go away for a weekend. Just leave and let TCBIM deal with the kids and the house. I know if I do that, I'll come home to a pig sty, though. It's almost not worth it to leave.