Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Emptiness

***WARNING...I'm whining today. I'm tired, exhausted emotionally and have zero fucks to give at this point about anything pretty much. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr........wow. I'm a peach.***
The last two years I have lived in complete craziness and uncertainty.

"Will we move?"

"Where would be move?"
                                                   
"When would be move? Would the girls finish school? Would we able to sell our house? What if we can't sell our house?"

“If we move to ______ will there be a cheer gym? What’s the best school district in the area? Can we afford to live on Gru’s salary? What kind of house can we afford? Will there only be oak cabinets? Can I repaint the cabinets? I need to Pinterest that. Ohh, chicken, that recipe looks good. Wow, that pool in Aruba looks amazing. I’d like to go to Aruba. Look at that glittery Christmas tree, I wish I had the patience to put up such a beautiful tree.”

SQUIRREL!!!
At about that time my brain explodes because the last file tab has been opened but there are about seventy thousand other thoughts, questions, concepts, worries and concerns that I STILL have not pondered and no more file tabs on which to put them.
(Kachow!!!!!! ***that’s the sound of my brains exploding all over the place when that last tab has been occupied…right before I lose my mind, start throwing out EVERYTHING I see on the kitchen counters and yelling at everyone in my house for everything from whining to licking oneself VERY loudly and slurpily under the kitchen table***)
Today is no different except that I’m in a forward momentum of having to deal with reality. I just looked at my last post. Apparently that day the Wishing Fairies were listening. Why they weren’t listening in college when I wished to meet Lars Ulrich I’ll never know. What they chose to grant me, in terms of wishdom, was the ability to return home.
Home to my BFF.
Home to my fenceless yards.
Home to my amazing school district.
And yes, I called Wisconsin “home”.

Now, I’m hoping that somewhere along the way those little Wishing Fairies also nailed the part where I wished for the global warming that made Wisconsin slightly less tundra-like. Like you know, so that it only snows for like six weeks and then POOF! Spring arrives and my flip-flops can be removed from storage for the next nine months.

I’ll bet those little bitches conveniently forgot THAT part of the wish.

Assholes.

I guess I cannot expect the entirety of my wishes to be granted. It’s like I got the Wishing Fairy School Drop-Outs. They get most of the wish taken care of and then settle at the end of the wish granting activity and probably flit off to some fairy bar where they sip margaritas and high five each other for a job *mostly* well done.
“Meh, she said something about Wisconsin, we’re good!” they shrug their cute little fairy wings as they enjoy their end of the day beverage to celebrate their wish granting mediocrity.
In any case…two years. Two years’ worth of living in constant questioning, panic, anxiety and decorating purgatory.

We are now embarking on building another house. That means we are moving to a rental while we build…more decorating purgatory. I will just be happy once this uncertainty is over and I can place things on my mantle without having to taken them down and box them up AGAIN.

Aside from the physical emptiness of my house, and apparently my head, on my days. I also feel an emptiness in my heart. The last two years have been so trying on my marriage. I've lived apart a total of four months from Gru physically. That's a long time. But more than that is the time we've been separated emotionally because of his jobs and business. I know single parents do this every day...for weeks, months and years at a time. Honestly, I don't know how. My fuse with my girls is so short right now I wish I had given birth to some freaky looking doll things that sat on the couch in a catatonic state until it was time to do whatever the next activity was. Instead I got three girls who whine, question and talk incessantly*. I love them. I really do but I am 147% at the end of my Patience Rope. It is alllllllll gone. I know I'm in the final three weeks but when your Patience Rope is already used up three weeks might as well be three decades. (sigh) I'm just ready for our whole family to be in one place again. Whole and full of life happiness.

SS, who really was going in another direction with this post (my kids are all still alive but I have vivid, wonderful dreams where they are gone, I have a job and there are rivers of cheap, crappy beer in which I drown my sorrows)…
 
*Trust me...I know a lot of their whining, questioning and insecurities come from these moves and they feel the craziness too. I'm confident in saying that I'm not strong enough to carry all four of us. I feel horrible about that ad I'm not proud of it but at least I'm honest. I am tapped out emotionally and physically.

 

Friday, February 6, 2015

Funky Duck

I think it might be time for me to write again.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...how many times will I say that before I do it? Really, you know, what I used to love about writing was the witty comment banter, I think that's what kept me going and what discourages me now (lack thereof). I like to write, I think I'm getting back to where I was but I thrive on the social interaction.

Anyway...I cannot believe it's been 10 months since I last wrote here. That's pathetic. Apparently being a single parent wore on me after two days. HAHAHAHAHA...if only I knew that was the beginning of things going drastically downhill.

I've now been single parenting pretty much since we moved to Texas. I miss my best friend beyond words. I miss our little town feel and the school district. I miss open yards with no fencing and I miss familiarity. I do not miss the cold weather. At all.

That said...I find it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning and wonder if it's all been worth it. The bottom line is Gru's job was gone in WI so we had to go somewhere but the job here has been horrendous.

Ohhhhhhh, I don't know what happened to the rest of my post?!!? I posted this picture from my phone (yes! I have a REAL phone now, yes, I do!) and it banished the rest of my original post.

I was whining a bit and could it be that Blogger was like, "Fucking man up, SS. You're back in Texas. It's warm there. What more do you want?"

Awwww snap, Blogger.

Ok...I was saying how much I missed my BBF, how much I missed my small town, school district and fenceless backyards but apparently I should be looking for the positive.

I will try that today. I will. I will not whine

I will not whine.

I will not whine.

Hell, I'll probably whine, who am I kidding? But I will seriously turn over a new leaf and try to be more thankful.

Suburbian Siren, who has been "told" by an inanimate object to pull her shit together...yo...here goes... 

Monday, March 31, 2014

Day The Second

(sigh)

I deserve this wine more than any one person I know. Actually more than any ten people that I personally know. Most of the people I know don't know what a real problem is luckily for them. But me...I earned this shit today.


I actually probably earned more like a bottle of wine but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Last night found Gru in a compromising situation. Shitty hotel with jimmy marks on the door and no form of identification. Lucky bastard could have driven a couple more hours and disappeared into Mexico never to be heard from or seen again. Guess I should count myself lucky that he 1. didn't think of that or 2. really loves me enough to not think of that.

I woke up and panicked for two hours in the middle of the night. Mayday! Ditch the whole effort- have Gru move back home and continue the job search for something better. We'll live off of savings! Dallas is scary! Traffic is bad!!!

As you might have guessed from your own nights of waking up and panicking that solved nothing.

With the light of day everything seemed to much more manageable. What is it about darkness that makes everything seem so insurmountable? This is a constant issue with me. One night I go to bed a totally normal human with a normal, somewhat intelligent, logical brain and at 2:36 am I suddenly turn into an idiot that cannot figure out how to juggle her schedule to volunteer at school for an hour AND get to the post office all in one day.

I have isues.

Anyway, I woke up and planned on taking a nap as soon as I got the kids off to school. Gru had other plans for me. First it was accepting a phone call from Hotmail to get a 'code' and then relay that code to him and then his second task, should I choose to accept it (like if I want him to keep paying the mortgage for the next two months...) was to get his driver's license and overnight it to him.

Nap...shot to shit.

Dropped the girls off to school (will cover people who cannot properly use carpooling lane in later post...ugh) and continued on...in my jammies and no make-up. Woman on a mission. I got downtown all ready to get scrappy with the guy who I was sure wouldn't release Gru's license to me because I wasn't Gru.

"I'll tell him a thing or two and then I'll sit in the damn office until I get that fucking license because I have nothing but time. Tell me I can't have my own husband's license. He's 15 hours away from me, he can't come get it himself...tell me I can't have it, go ahead. I'll sit here all damn day."

As it turned out the kid behind the counter handed the license over without so much as a sideways glance. I should have asked for some more if they had them, looked into identity theft or something sneaky because that seems to be a cheap, fast way to get ahead. Surely I'm smart enough to figure out how to make identity theft work for me.

Drove all the way back to the 'burbs, got some make-up and real clothing on and drove into town to overnight the license. Turned on the turn signal to pull into the UPS Store and got a call from Gru.

"Uhhhh one more thing, can you send my passport too?" Uh-huh. he thought of it. He's totally taking off to Juarez. Gone.

"Sure!" I replied turning off my turn signal and heading in the world's largest u-turn to get back to my house. After successfully finding the passport hidden in a safe (we'll talk about that in a minute) I drove ALL the way back to town and shipped off the passport and license. Likely I'll never see him again, methinks. Sometimes I am so stupid.

Got home, finally some time to fuck about on Facebook. I made some soup, grabbed my fancy crackers and cheese...

Another text. "I need all the girls' social security numbers."

Well at least he's taking them too. That leaves me with just...well me! Peace and quiet. Nice.

Now here's the thing. Gru is kind of paranoid. I don't meant that lightly- he just is- OCD and paranoid. The amount of safes we have in this house is a fucking problem. It's like playing that app "Can You Escape?" every time I need an important document. I had to open one safe to get the combination of the second safe where the social security cards are kept. That took another 45 minutes out of my day.

And then my soup was cold.

A phone call.

"Can you call that girl at the extended stay place?" Uh-huh. There it is.

It is SO not the time for 'I told you so' but there it is...I TOLD YOU SO!

I did not say it though. The place I called on a month ago for him sounded great- reasonable rates, hot breakfasts, happy hours with booze and light apps, a workout facility on-site with passes to another larger place, and the girl at the front desk was kind and happy to talk to me unlike the people at his Ghetto $30 A Day special place where people go because they got throwed out they house and need a place to crash and hang out while drinking 40 ouncers and avoiding paying child support.

That sounded bad but honestly, who stays at a place in one of the largest cities in America that's $30 a night? I mean $30 a night in like North Dakota- probably cool, maybe even a five star joint. This was not a five star joint...but there were probably joints somewhere on the property. $30 in Dallas is a lunch not a hotel room.













After much back and forth I hadn't heard anything for awhile but when I checked my email there was, oddly enough, a reservation confirmation for the new, nicer, classier place for the next 30 days. Weird.


(BECAUSE I'M RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!)

So that was my whole day. I managed to swindle people out of like $80 throughout the day while I posted shit that I didn't want to pack on a local sale site and I actually made a legit crockpot dinner complete with a healthy vegetable that wasn't baby carrots or cucumber slices. Boom. Oh yes, and then my day ended with a shitty email from my mother but that's a story for another day because I can't possibly care about that today. My Give A Damn's busted as they say. I've been putting out fires for 12+ hours and that fire will have to glow and flicker throughout the night because I can't care right now.

SS, who is enjoying her wine very much so thank you...

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Day The First

So it's been a month and there is much more certainty in our lives. That's not to say that things are stable- just certain.

For certain Gru has taken a job in Dallas. For certain I will be single-mom to my girls for two and a half months. For certain we will be selling our home.

That said- there's so much unknown. Will this be a good job? Will his boss be fair and what he represented himself to be? Will everyone adjust?

Today Gru left at 2 in the morning and just as I sat down to write this he pulled into his temporary digs. I found him a really great place where the girl on the phone was more than happy to share everything about the location (free breakfast! happy hours daily! passes to the local gym!) but he chose a cheaper place. I didn't say better, I said cheaper. So far his impression has not been good. He called to tell me he arrived and no one had been at the front desk for at least 10 minutes to check him in. Hmmmm...but it's cheaper!

I found today to be much more difficult that I anticipated. I was looking forward to alone time, not being groped at constantly, having clean kitchen counters when I awoke in the morning, dinner dishes, planned and prepared...OK, maybe not the last part but definitely the clean counters. Instead I have found myself fighting back tears almost constantly and feeling very empty and sad. Not at all how I planned the first 12 hours for Bob's sake. You'd think I should have been at least able to hold it together for the first day, right? (sigh)

I just got another call from Gru...as it turns the place he rented a UHaul from last week for a project unrelated to the move still has his driver's license and therefore the extended stay place is not letting him check in. Excellent start to settling into our new home. I'll bet the nice lady at the other place that I found still would have let him in...just sayin'. But this one is cheaper!

For the immediate present I will refrain from telling him, "I told you so" in my best, most supportive wife-ly tone.

But I will FOR SURE be thinking it.

SS, who at least can chuckle about it...not WITH Gru right now but it made me smile...just a little bit...(I promise Gru is not chuckling)



Thursday, February 27, 2014

Sometimes money isn't worth it

I worked in a law firm when I was in my late 20s where there was this partner who used to spend a little too much time in my office. I'm not sure if it's because I don't sit like a lady when I'm wearing skirts or if it's because I'm irresistibly charming. My office mate would argue it's the skirt thing.

I always wondered if you were married to a really rich guy if you would be happy no matter what. When Creepy Partner spent too much time in my office I pondered that and determined that the answer was no. Under no circumstances would any amount of money make me happy if I was married to him.

Last night, did my husband, or did he not offer to substantially upgrade my diamond ring if I agreed to move to Pennsylvania? Oh, I think that did happen.

And like Creepy Partner and his money, no size of diamond ring would make this move OK. I told him for the amount of money he was going to spend on that he could just pay for nearly two years of the girls and I living in an apartment in Dallas while he 'commuted'.

SS, who is always thinking and working out the details...

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Three days.

In three days I will finally be able to sit down and, with a fair amount of certainty, know what is going to be the fate assigned to me. I've spent my life in utter turmoil and in a fair state of depression since September. By Friday I will know what my future holds.

That seems pretty dramatic, right?

You're not kidding me.

It's finally coming though. See since September I haven't been able to sit down long enough to form a complete sentence let alone write anything worthy of being read but by Friday all the things that clog my brain all day long will be flushed so that I can finally move on. This whole relocation thing has continued to dump pieces of information, fear, hope, guilt, and anxiety into my brain which has been unable to let go of anything and will be unable to let go of anything until I have a definite answer.

Two weeks ago I thought I had that answer and for two days I was very happy. I was seeing clearly and able to understand what I thought was going to be my fate- if only for a few years- at least it was clear.

And then a phone call came that changed everything.

See I thought we had committed to moving to Dallas. Done. It wasn't a fabulous job but we couldn't beat the location. It has great schools, I have friends there, the girls would be able to train at a top-notch cheer facility.

But then that phone call came in.

My husband had found another job, a better job, better for his career- better for our future. Except the location, oh the location.

Harrisburg, PA

I am an even-keeled kind of person. I try to be open-minded and positive- looking at this move as an adventure- something fun and new.

But I heard this and I. Was. Furious.

Not in a 'funny haha' kind of, 'Oh, I'm furious!' laughed the little mommy who was getting screwed sort of way. No, furious in a dark, angry, never before felt amount of pain and anger sort of way.

I know there are people who will not like this analogy but it was a lot like miscarrying late in a pregnancy. I made it through the early weeks and morning sickness (the application and interviews...will I get a call? oh! I got the call! how will the interview go? do they like me?). I had made it through that the 20-week ultrasound (they DO like me! they are going to hire me and pay me! we are moving HOME!!!). And then...

Then it was gone. That future that I had been planning. That happiness that was coming to me after being stuck here for nine long years. Gone. (snap) Like that. That glimmering light at the end of the tunnel of living here in the cold tundra?

Extingsuished.

I'm still furious. I'm not going to lie. I have expressed that to Gru and it got very...very...very dark when I talked about how I saw myself faring mentally in PA. Very dark.

I still can't make any promises but I will try to survive.

The interview is Wednesday and this Board will decide on Thursday. It's a better position for Gru and for that reason I'm horribly torn. I want them to like him and believe in his abilities but I do not want to go there. I don't know if I'm physically, mentally and emotionally strong enough to endure more years of this.

I cannot for the life of me believe that I'm even considering this but in the last four hours I've considered:
1. Moving to Dallas with the girls and letting Gru 'commute' to PA
2. Moving into an apartment in PA with the whole family so there is NOTHING permanent about the move to PA...no mortgage, no upkeep, no roots- everything about an apartment says, "This is temporary"
3. I even considered selling the house here, moving in with my inlaws in IL for three years and letting Gru take the job and commute. I'm not going to lie. That is still on my radar. I cannot believe that at 40 years old I'm thinking this is a good idea.

But the bottom line is in three days this will be done. He will or won't have the offer and I won't have to guess, speculate or wonder what is going to happen.

For now I must practice patience which is not one of my strong points. Not even a little bit.

SS, who is ready for it to be over...the stomach-aches, the burning in her heart, and the day-long, sleep-robbing 'What ifs...'...

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Not flatlined yet....

It's been a long time but things here are status quo except for the weather has gone to crap. The last two days? Highs in the single digits.

Dumb.

Anyway, holidays were smashing and my tree was torn down on the 29th THAT is a new record, my friends. I'm usually so sad to pull the tree down but in this case it was amazing. The room is bigger, brighter and cleaner.

My car is on the fritz so we have that too.

2014 will be the year for changes. Moves? Maybe. New car? Definitely. I need to do something. I keep thinking about getting a job but then I think about how much stress that would put on the whole family since I wouldn't be able to keep up with what I do around here on a daily basis, so as that turns out it's probably not a great idea.

It would be great if this...took off. As it turns out that age old question...you know, would you rather be rich or famous? The answer is RICH, always RICH. Just so you know. It's great that the product is out there and (some) people know about it but now to get it recognized so people buy it...that would be golden.

For now I continue to wait like a jumbo 747 circling O'Hare at rush hour...just waiting...watching for a signal...I know it's coming...just not sure what runway we're using and when we'll be waved in.

What's on everyone else's radar for the new year?

SS, who is thrilled to be celebrating the new year in a warm, cozy, happy house....not in a crowded bar...