Here’s a quote I found a while back, and loved. I have a friend now who is struggling with some of the same things I am struggling with. I dug this out and shared it with her, and now I’m going to share it with you. I’m a sharer. I can’t help myself.
“No faith is as solid as a wounded faith.” ~Elie Wiesel
We’ve gone from unseasonably cool to unseasonably warm temps here in a matter of days. Today was nearly 100*. PERFECT time for the air conditioning compresser to crap out on us.
M and I took the girls to a local park for pancakes (it was a fundraiser for the local sexual assault response center) this morning, ran some errands, got home about noon and proceeded to turn into two little puddles that vaguely resembled Beege and her beloved (even though he can be a dumbass, he’s still my beloved).
The repairman came and looked at it. He can’t fix it. A master technician will come out and look at it on Monday, but odds are that we’re going to need a new compresser to the tune of TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS.
This is where I really like the fact that this is my parents house, because if it was ours, we’d be out of A/C for the rest of the summer. As it is: we’ll help as much as we can with the cost, but that isn’t going to be much.
Once the repairguy left, Familia Beege adjourned to the 8 foot wading pool I was suddenly nigh-orgasmically thankful I’d purchased for the girls. M and I lay like white, slightly flabby beached beluga while the girls squealed and splashed around us.
Once I finish up my sermon for tomorrow, I think I might head out to the pool for a second soaking before bed.
It’s been warm here lately, so I’ve been sending the girls outside to play in the mornings before the heat gets oppressive. This morning was no different. We watched some “Yo Gabba Gabba” and then I sent them outside while I cleaned up the breakfast dishes.
Nea was back in the house within minutes, shouting, “A mouse, Mama! A mouse! And it’s not dead or anything! It’s just laying there, opening and closing it’s mouth! I think it’s hungry–can I have some cheese for it?”
Not sure if this was a real or a pretend mouse, I went to the door and sure enough: there lay a tiny field mouse, gasping for breath, laying quietly on our patio. Sarah was crouched down beside it, “Yook, Mama! Mouse!” she exclaimed, pointing.
I shooed them both into the house, my mind racing to figure out where in the hell I could put this mouse where if it was going to recover: well and good, and if it didn’t, it would convenient to take care of the aftermath. Between Nea’s announcement, my confirming the mouseocity of said mouse, and my findng a container for it (2 minutes tops): the mouse expired.
Linnea freaking lost her shit. She lost it even more when I took an old spatular and flipped the mouse into the container, took it out to the dumpster and threw it away. I then proceeded to go ape-chit crazy with soap, water, and hand sanitzer. The girls and I will not have to wash our hands for DAYS they’re so clean now.
Nea keeps crying about it…about how she wanted to keep it for a pet…how much it makes her sad that I just “threw it out like garbage”…sobs about how she and Sarah will always keep the mouse in their minds…weeps bitter tears over how she’ll never ever see the mouse again…you get the picture. When I ask her what else I was supposed to do with the mouse, she has no answer. I’m thinking she wanted to flush it or something similiar to what we did when her fish, Feather, died last winter.
It WAS a cute little thing, and in the spirit of honesty: I cried a little bit, too, although it was more connected to my small daughter’s distress at the death of the little creature than the creature itself. Poor baby.
Death sucks, no matter what, who, or when it happens.
So, M has a job working as a chaplain at the county jail. He loves it, his superiors love him, he’s good at what he does–everybody wins.
But lately, I feel like I am the last in a long line of his priorities…somewhere behind his job, the inmates, his co-workers, his supervisor, his friends at work, the girls, and Spore. All he does is play various and sundry video games, either on his computer or on his DS. I try to talk to him and get monosyllabic answers. I suggest things we could do together and am told that he’s really too tired to do much more than what he’s doing.
Last night (after giving me a hug and telling me how much he missed me), he shot down to of my “together time” suggestions, and I just got fed up. Shut down. Pulled away. I’m tired of trying to engage someone who refuses to engage back. About the only time he ever reaches for me anymore is when he wants sex. We have precisely two topics of conversation: his work, and the girls. Occasionally we throw his mother or my mother in there to spice things up.
So last night I told him: I’m tired of this. I’m tired of trying to have some kind of relationship with you and being constantly shut down. You’re a busy guy. I get that. But I’m tired of listening to you say you miss me, but not doing anything about it, and shooting me down when I try and do something about it. So I’m done. You come talk to me when you feel like you can spare some time for me.
We’ve been misfiring a lot since moving in with my parents. There are many factors…my parents, total lack of privacy, the girls, our finances. They are all taking a toll. I never, EVER thought that divorce would be something that I could see flashing on the perimeters of our relationship: but now I do.
I don’t think it will come to that. I will fight HARD to keep it from coming to that. But for the first time I understand how damn easy it is for two people who love one another more than anything else in this world to wake up and wonder, “What’s the point?”
He came to me this morning. He wants me to give the girls an early and shorter naptime so that we can have some time this evening to talk. He says he needs it, that he misses me, that he feels like he’s falling apart because he’s so disconnected from me. These are all nice words…but they’re kind of just words to me now, you know? Because I don’t see much effort or energy behind making the words unnecessary. It’s only because I said, “I’m done.” that he thought, “Oh. Shit. I guess it’s up to me now.”
I don’t know. But at this point I’m getting more friendship and emotional support from Facebook than I am my husand, and that is so beyond fucked up, I’m not sure what it will take to get back.
Tonight I was out, puttering about in my garden. (Isn’t that just the best phrase ever? “puttering about in my garden”–I’m so glad I can use that in my daily vernacular!). I’ve got bibb lettuce up, leaf lettuce up, lemon cukes, pickling cukes, a single, hardy bush bean (we planted them in a WAY damp part of the garden–the area gets saturated not only by our sprinklers, but by our neighbors, too. We should have put the cukes there instead. Next year.), carrots, and a flourishing row of radishes.
Tonight, I brought in a beautiful, round, pink radish and presented it to my husband. It was about the size of a large marble. It was so pretty! My first gardening success. Something is munching the radish tops, but they’re leaving the radishes themselves alone, so: I can let them eat in peace.
I am the very picture of gardening satisfaction.
Nea has an admirer.
A young man, who lives in the house behind us. Let’s call him…Pugsley, shall we? He does bear more than a passing resemblance to that character. Pugsley has a tall playscape, that allows him to see quite easily into our backyard. He likes to hang out there and make rude noises so that Nea will look at him and laugh. If she’s not in the backyard, he gets REALLY obnoxious, in order to try and bring her to the window.
What’s truly funny? Listening to M and my dad talk about all the different ways they want to try to hide our backyard from Pugsley’s prying eyes. A 12 foot fence…poplar hedges…a lattice with poison ivy climbing on it…a moat stocked with pirhanas…you get the picture. I can see that I will have to run interference with young men for my girls…as long as I consider those young men worthy of my sweet babies. 😉
Speaking of milkshake: I’m hitting a parenting conundrum (other than the not sleeping thing). Nea is too big now to shop in the toddler section for most things (really? At 5 and a half?). But my problem is that most of the clothes in the next section up are a little…hoochified? I don’t want to dress my five year old like she’s a miniature twelve year old, and I won’t want to dress my twelve year old like she’s a miniature twenty-five year old, you know? But that seems to be my only real option.
That’s a huge part of why I’ve buckled down and learned to sew. Because at least you can still SEW age-approrpiate clothing for little girls, rather than the skanktacular ones in the stores. It makes me sick that we sexualize our girls at such a young age. Can’t we just let them be kids, fer crap’s sake?
My. GOD.
The fighting. The tattling. The hitting, scratching, kicking, poking, and drawing on one another with markers. The whining. The complaining.
And have I mentioned they’re not sleeping at night? Still up until nearly 10PM, and awake at midnight for a little while, and then awake again at freaking dawn (and dawn? She comes early now, folks!). Last night they both were up until about 9:30; woke up again at midnight and tried to come into bed with us. There was not room for all of us. Linnea left because Sarah insisted on snuggling with me, Linnea didn’t want to snuggle with M, so she went and slept on the floor. Then she got into bed with us AGAIN.
Both my girls and I have RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome). I’ve had it all my life, and thought I was completely nuts until I realized that it’s an actual medical condition. The best way I can describe it is like having mild electrical currents running up your leg. Not painful. But not pleasant, either. Your legs refuse to stay still, you get really twitchy. Ours seem to be mild cases, hitting mostly when we’re exhausted. When Linnea or I get them: I give us Advil, which seems to help. Sarah? She’s allergic to Advil, and Tylenol doesn’t seem to have the same effect, so: she gets to suffer through. Which means we ALL get to suffer through.
Finally, I got up and went and slept on the couch. A few minutes later, Nea came out and slept on the loveseat. Sarah woke up at about 5 (three hours later) screeching that she needed to “snuggo Mama!” and she came out and joined me. I got up, went back to bed, made M go get Linnea and put her in Sarah’s bed, and that’s how we concluded our HIGHLY restful evening.
All of which serves to make the whining, complaining, crying, fighting, hitting, tattling, kicking, screaming, tantruming, punching, poking, and markering that much worse–both as a cause, and as an effect.
I’m kind of at my wit’s end with the sleeping thing. It’s been a couple weeks now of not sleeping well at all. I’m not sure what to do. But I’m thinking tonight: Nea’s getting some Dramamine and Sarah is getting some Tylenol. If they’re not sleeping because they’re legs won’t let them rest: we’ll try and address it as best we can.
But something’s got to give.
Then, on the flip side, are all the many sweetnesses of getting to stay home with the girls. Linnea is writing a play, and she’s planned the staging and the costumes…as near as I can tell, she’s still missing an actual story to tell, but that doesn’t stop her. She LOVES art, and I’m thinking about having the two of us work on a book together, sending it off to Snapfish, and giving it to people for Christmas gifts (if you read this and are on my Christmas gifting list: SURPRISE!). She’s growing up into such a young lady! Asking about the way a big kid holds silverware, doing her “homework” (a kindergarten prep book I bought her), drawing hopscotch squares on the patio with sidewalk chalk, helping me cook lunches and dinners. It’s fun!
And if Linnea is growing up fast, Sarah is growing up even faster. Her language development is plowing forward in leaps and bounds. Last night, I took her bowl of cottage cheese away. It looked empty, she’d said she was done, but when I took it away she shouted, “Hey! You get back here with my cottage cheese!” CRAZY. (Her new pediatrician was concerned because she hadn’t heard Sarah talk at all during the visit, and asked if I thought Sarah knew at least 10 words. I told her, “Sarah can pull out more than 10 sentences.”) She’s so loving with her little doll babies, and she does a lot of mimicking the imaginitve play she sees her big sister do. I think she’s proably a budding tattoo artist, as she can’t have a marker in her hand without giving herself colorful designs all over her body. Paper? She don’t need no stinking paper!
I have such fun girls. I’m still not sorry that I quit my job to stay home with them. But that sleep thing? That’s critical.
If this weekend was the kick-off to summer, it’s going to be a great one! Plus, we’re only a little more than a month out from our annual beach vacation! There’s nothing I don’t love about that.
So, I was reading Clover today. She’s a friend of mine–we started out being friends on the interweb, then met in RL, and she hosted the fabu Mom’s Weekend I attended last August. She is, I can safely say, one of the coolest, craftiest women I know.
And she’s doing this really cool thing on her blog, where the first three people to leave a comment on her post get some Clover swag. Sweet! I’m #2. BUT: if you leave a comment here, I will send Beege swag to the first three people who leave a comment. The rules are thus: you must also post this topic on your blog (linking to me) in order to pay it forward, sending ho-made swag love out into the interweb. But I may get kooky (or bored. I’m a SAHM now, so you never know…) and send swag to MORE than just three people. Depends on how bedtimes go. So leave a comment, and we’ll see! 🙂
You might get something sewn…or drawn…or knit…or glued…or baked. One never knows with the mysterious, increasingly granolalicious Beege…..
Twelve. Twelve. Hours. Of. Sleep.
Can I get a hallelujah and a whoo-frickin-hoo?!
My man is so good to me. I can’t think of ANYTHING he could have done that would have meant as much to me as turning to me as soon as he got home last night, looking me deep in the eye, and saying, “You look exhausted. Why don’t you take a couple of Tylenol PMs and go to bed when Sarah does?”
This is what I did.
My man? He’s the BEST.
Mairsy Dotes 