February 21, 2003

So Bite Me Uppity Bug Up The Butt Cool Lady!

As most of you may have figured out, I am a bit of a homebody and tend to keep to myself.  It's not that I'm not friendly, because anyone who has every been out with me will tell you I'm extremely friendly with people I encounter.  It's just that I don't feel I have much to offer folks in the way of time, energy or nurturing, so I tend to shy away from friendships or connections that might require anything beyond a few sweet words and a "Well, bye!" or can't be turned off when need be via a button on my desk.  I don't see it as being intentional reclusive, but more of being practical and watching where my energy goes. 

I had a wonderful time when I went home for Mom's funeral, visiting with friends and family and I didn't feel at all overwhelmed or imposed upon.  So I *can* do it, I just choose not to.  I have good times when the friends in my spiritual group and I go out and (I think) I function OK socially then.  At other times in my life, I've been an absolute social butterfly.

So in the context of my current life choices, what I did a couple of days ago was an extension beyond my comfort zone.  There is a house about 4 doors down from me that I have noticed every time I walked past it.  The lady who lives there has a little boy in the morning kindergarten (Dyl is in the afternoon), she drives the same model and color car that I drive, she has really, really cool Witchy/Gothic decorations on the outside of her house and I was intrigued.  I watched for her for a few months and FINALLY, a couple of days ago, she was walking just behind me when I was coming back from dropping Dylan off and she was coming back from picking her child up.  At last, a fortuitous connection!  I paused as we got to her house, turned around and said, "Hi.  I'm Katrina.  We live on the same street, have sons the same age, drive the same car and have the same taste in decor.  If you're a writer who mainlines Dr Pepper, we might be onto something here."  Insert charming smile at this moment.  She got this look like someone had just shoved something distasteful under her nose, said, "It's nice to meet you" (in that "it's not really nice to meet you"), grabbed her kid and scurried into the house.  WTF? 

Having watched way too much ER, I immediately presumed she's an abused wife who is being kept from the outside world by her overbearing ogre of a husband.  Then I thought that maybe she was just in a really big hurry.  Then I thought that maybe she was pissed about something else and just not in the mood to deal with people.

So today, she was coming out of her house to go get her kid when I was passing to take Dyl to school, so, giving her a chance to redeem herself, I smiled and said, "Hello."  She looked right at me, *sniffed* and looked away!  WTF???  I mean, I always have a blanket impression that people just understand how fun and cool and nice I am from the first impression and it weirds me out that someone would just rudely dismiss me like something stepped in and scraped off.  >:<

Nathan has decided he is opposed to me singing, humming or whistling.  Of course, at 3, he doesn't get much of a vote (not that our family is democratic...we're more of a dictatorship).  For my own headache reduction therapy, I'm finding myself curbing my vocal expressions of joy (such as bursting into song or whistledom) just because I'm getting tired of hearing him bitch about it.  Today, on the way home from walking Dyl to school, I started whistling some, "In My Life (I've loved them all)" kind of thing and he yelled out, "Stoooopppppppp!!  You're hurting my earssss!"  pfft.  Usually it's, "nooooooo!!!"  We used to sing lots..."Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed," "Five Little Monkeys Swinging in a Tree," "Twinkle, Twinkle," "Itsy Bitsy Spider," "Three Little Speckled Frog," "There Once Was a Green Little Frog," "Little Red Caboose," "Row, Row, Row Your Boat..."  Lots of stuff.  Don't know what put him off.  Silly little duck.

I watched the tail end of Joe Millionaire the other night (and I did definitely watch his tail end).  I don't know if it was to my benefit or detriment that I hadn't watched any of the previous episodes.  I watched the last 3-4 episodes of The Bachelor (the first one) and it helped to know the people a little more.  Neither of the women that Evan/Joe narrowed down to impressed me much, although the "I'm just a simple girl" approach of the "winner" was a tad endearing.  I found it interesting that she professed that his money had been a turn off, but almost did cartwheels when Jeeves presented her with a cool half mil for her troubles.  Why do the construction workers I see look more like Norm from "Cheers" than Evan?

After I posted yesterday that I needed some multi-holed frames for my pictures, my buddy Karen made the wonderfully wise suggestion of cutting my own holes in a piece of poster board and using it for matting in a regular frame, so I'm off to the thrift store (yeah, twist my arm) to scrounge for donor frames.  I still have to dig up the box of pictures from the garage, but fortunately, Josh is visiting and I can get him to crack a whip on the critters while I dig and delve through the piles of crap until I find my holy grail of pictures.  You know I'm going to be a scanning fool once I get all these pictures in perfect, Virgoean order.

That's my big fantasy...that one day, my whole house will be in perfect, Virgoean order.  Everything will have a place, like little cubbies at preschool, and everything will be *in* its place.  I'll have a car in the garage and when I need something, I can find it within a half hour.  The walls will be clean and the furniture will smell like furniture instead of feet and ass.  The furniture will be Pledged and the bathrooms will have a scent of jasmine.  The windows will be clear and clean and the oven will be sparkling.  The thing is, I don't want to be the one to do it.  Honestly, I wouldn't even mind keeping it up if it could just all get done at once.

I don't know if I mentioned this before or not (I tend to get confused as to what I actually wrote and what I wrote to you in my head), but I did isolate what my big problem is with housework.  This was a major revelation for me.  I realized that I really hate wasted motion and futile activities.  I like a sense of accomplishment that lasts for longer than 5 minutes and the delineation of job to do, doing job, job done.  Of course, being a mom and being the person responsible for house cleaning flies in the face of all of that.  Being a mom is a job of little return on your investment for the first many years, if at all.  Moms are taken for granted on a regular basis and when you really go the distance and come through for your kids in a big way, it's just seen as part of your job and blown past.  There are seldom any thank you's and you have to take your rewards where you can with the little cuddles (which are much more frequent in the first 10 years or so than they will ever be again, so suck those up while you can!) and wonderfully sloppy kisses.  Just when you're starting to get your land legs and think you've got it figure out, puberty hits and your thrown back to the rear of the class with no hope of redemption.  At that point, you become little more than a walking ATM and a whipping post for their pain!  Their angst!  Their drama!  I'm not sure when you hit a point where your kids once again figure out that you might know what you're doing.  The reason I strongly suspect that there's no chance of that is that there is zero room for error and you'll make about a million of them (errors, not kids).  There's little hope that you won't screw up your kids, it just all comes down to a battle over the degree to which you'll screw them up.

Eric and I have a theory about monkeys.  We figure that when you have a child, you ritualistically give them a monkey.  The monkey hops up onto their back and digs its wicked little claws in and makes itself right at home.  There are different kinds of monkeys.  Some are usually pretty docile and friendly, only screeching in your ear quite loudly from time to time and maybe pushing the claws in a little closer to the bones once in a while.  Others are a bit more aggressive, jumping up and down, pulling and tearing at the skin, screaming maniacally, and pissing on the wounds.  Then you've got the monkeys that are absolutely, psychotically out of control, bringing hammers and knifes and other weapons out of unseen pouches, flinging shit at other people and causing the psychobabble in your head to take on a sinister tone.  Sometimes, the kids will even feed the monkey themselves to help it grow or other folks will know the ways of that particular monkey and help it to grow or prod it into being more vicious than it was before.  The trick for the parents is to be ever mindful of what kind of monkey you're creating on your kid and the trick for the kid is to figure out how to either make friends with your monkey and train it a bit or rip the little sucker off and put him through a sausage/monkey grinder before setting the remains on fire and purifying the leftovers with salt and bleach.  Regardless, everyone gets a monkey.

Anyway, I have given my kids their share of monkeys and then some.  Regardless, you just can't win, it seems.  I adore my kids and I flatter myself that I'm a much better mom this round than I was with the first three, but I still very much have my faults and I know I hear some "eee eee eee" going on from time to time.

Don't get me wrong.  I have no regrets about being a mom.  I love all my babies dearly from 1st to 6th and love being a stay at home mom.  But the facts are that the rewards of mothering come from within yourself and how you choose to view the task.

If anything is more thankless, it has to be housekeeping.  I clean one room and while I'm working on another, the wrecking crew is aggressively deconstructing behind me.  It's like this.  You go and go and go and never get anywhere.  You work all day and go to bed at night with a list of things you didn't get done.  It sucks.  If Eric leaves work without having completed some of his tasks, he comes home and it's as though it never happened.  He's a success because the check goes into the bank and everyone he works with and for know that the sun shines out his ass (notice I didn't say "think," because he is really wonderful at his job).  If I don't do the dishes or vacuum the carpets or clean the accumulated junk off my desk or defunk the bathroom, it's right there for everyone to see and my shortcomings are on display.  If I don't get laundry done, people don't have underwear.  If I don't make dinner, people are hungry.  Sometimes (fleeting moments, mostly), it's nice to be that essential and important, but a lot of the time, it's an externally (as in "not by me") micromanaged drag. 

I tried FlyLady for a while and while she had some great ideas (her sink cleaning techniques are wonderful), I couldn't hang with her bitching at me to do stuff all the time.  For me, it wasn't helpful, it was freakin annoying.  It also took me forever to get off her mailing list once I requested it, so I ended up blocking the bitch and finally, they stopped. 

For the most part, Eric has gotten past the fact that I'm never going to manage House Beautiful, or if I do, it will be some great life change of monumental proportions.  He usually doesn't bitch much, but if he's irritated about something else, that's where it's going to land.  His mom was and is superwoman with 14 jobs, baking bread, sweet smiles and an immaculate home.  Comparatively, my lack of initiative in that department is a dismal disappointment.  I'm better than I used to be, that is for sure, but I've got a long way to go.

And I'm not getting much done sitting here, so I should get busy making things nice nice.  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and that something remarkably welcome and special happens for me.  I'm starting it with a dinner of grilled steaks and a trip to to the thrift store for those frames.

Now, the garage and my skanky house beckon (and I'm trying unsuccessfully to look the other way).

Love,

Good God, She's Verbose!  There's More!