Please go back to school…

I love my children. I really do. So it is with the sincerest love that I say this: Please go back to school, you’re driving me nuts. As I have stated before, any school breaks over 48 hours are hell at my house. After 48 hours my loving, adorable children suddenly turn into monsters that only want to argue and attempt to kill each other. It almost seems as though they simply cannot stand each other for anything longer than a weekend. I get it, close quarters, it’s cold outside, everyone is sick… It’s not fun. It’s even worse for me. The mother that gets to stay home with them and try to break up each and every fight they have. By the end of a week long break, the fights have erupted into the “he’s looking at me!” sort of stupid that makes me want to put them each in  a cage to separate them.

Right now, I am staying with my mother because I was helping her during her recovery from heart surgery. As a result, there is not only my children in the household, but my younger siblings as well. This makes for seven children under the age of ten. This doubles the amount of fighting, and whining, and coughing, and damnit please just go back to school already. Right now, we have had them out of school since the 21st of December, and they won’t go back to school until the 7th of January unless I can get moved out in this time frame. That was originally the plan, though. To move during the Christmas break so that way my children could transition in between semesters to a new school, which is slightly easier on them. Thanks to a funding issue (or lack of funding issue), the new house has not been finished enough for us to move in. Right now, the bathroom is a shell, and we sort of need the heat to be able to come on, because wow, it’s cold. Add in the fact that we have to drive from my mother’s house to the new one, and then work on it for a few hours and drive back because my husband still has to work nights, it adds to the stress of the situation. Now add in four bored children to this equation of renovation and a distinct lack of a babysitter.

At this point, I just want to curl up into a ball and go to sleep and wake up after the winter has passed and the kids are back in school. I find I have a better relationship with my children when I am not with them 24/7. I need a break from them, they need a break from me, and during school holidays, we simply don’t get that. Like I said, I love them, I just cannot mentally handle them in my face all day, every day. I’m already exhausted because of the renovating, AND being sick, so my temper is a bit short, and when they fight, I end up yelling at everyone and I don’t like doing that. I don’t like being the grumpy person that I become from the lack of sleep and lack of a break during the holidays. Supposedly the holidays are a happy time for other families. I am calling bullsh*t on this because everyone I know that has children is frazzled and stressed during this time of year, despite that happy holiday letter they may send out to all their friends and relatives. I have seen behind the scenes at family events. It’s not all happiness and glowy around the holidays, and I wish people would stop pretending it is so that those of us that are tired of pretending can stop feeling like Scrooge around this time of year. Here’s to hoping next year is better all around.

You’re Only As Old As You Feel

So Monday was my birthday. I have begun to get to the point where I start to dread my birthday, and I get depressed almost every year as it approaches. Mostly because everyone forgets. Or it feels like everyone forgets. The digital age has made everything rather impersonal. I can log onto Facebook, and I can wish a friend happy birthday on their wall, and avoid calling them on the phone and risking an actual conversation that I would have to take part in. I would not even need to remember their birthday. Facebook will remind me, so long as this friend has allowed their birth date to be shown on their profile.

This year, my good friend Armaina stopped by and hung out with me. She even picked up a cake, which was downright awesome of her. Red velvet cake, with whipped frosting, and white chocolate shavings on the cake. Oh yes, she knows me rather well. I was going to go out to dinner with my brother and his family, but transportation difficulties made that plan fall through. Oh well, I suppose we’ll do a rain check.

I started this post, thinking that people always say that you are only as old as you feel. Well damnit, I feel old. I may only be 27 now, but thanks to my mental problems and being a mother of four children, I feel older than I am. I feel restless, like I should be doing something with my life, something productive, and I think a lot of these feelings are because I am looking at my children grow up, go to school, and now I am home all day, cleaning the same rooms over and over. I felt a similar panic about 2 years ago around my birthday, and as a result, I enrolled into college that following winter. Now I have my Associate’s degree, and yet I still cannot find a job. Now I have student loans to pay and only a piece of paper that is looking more and more worthless by the day to show for it. Perhaps if I had a job, I wouldn’t feel so worthless but I still don’t know what to do about this feeling besides continue to fill out job applications.

I suppose if my life expectancy was only 60, I could blame this all on a midlife crisis…

Ten Years Passes Too Fast

My husband with my oldest looking at the turtles at the zoo.

Today my oldest child turns ten years old. It took me by surprise when I was shopping for his gifts that I was now shopping for a ten year old. He’s not a baby anymore, and yet he’s not a teen yet either. He’s a sweetheart, and for the most part, he’s a good kid. He tries to help me around the house, even when his younger siblings are driving him crazy. I never had to deal with that. I was the youngest of three, although now  I am a middle child of six, but I moved out before I gained three new siblings. I have the most experience being the baby of the family. I have no advice to offer my son when he becomes frustrated with his siblings. My husband was the oldest. I think he understands our son more than he lets me know. They have a mutual frustration, a mutual burden of being the oldest. He has to be more responsible than his siblings, he has to be the first child we figure out what methods of parenting do and do not work. At times, it probably seems very unfair. I wish that I could make it fair. I wish I could make it better. Honestly, I am not sure how to help him though. He seems to be doing alright most of the time.

He wanted to go to the zoo for his birthday, but then he ended up opting to have a party at home when I told him he’d be able to invite friends from school to the party as well. Turns out he only had one friend to invite. This new school has not been a good one for him in the friend department. It seems kids out here are more judgmental to newcomers to the school. We’re so used to military schools. You get used to being the new kid in the military. Everyone is the new kid in military schools practically. Of course, that doesn’t make the process any easier. In the last ten years, we’ve moved fourteen times. That’s rough on anyone, especially kids that are in school. Granted, we’ve only moved five times since he started school, that’s still a lot, considering he’s only been in school five years. This past year he switched schools three times. I hated doing it to him, but things happen, you have to move. There are no ways around it.

I had started this post with the intention of being sappy, and I ended up in the realm of sad. I remember my first pregnancy. I was 16. Too young to have a child, but fiercely determined to prove I could do it. (Hopefully without mentally screwing him up in the process.) My family was skeptical, I know now they were just trying to protect me, but at the time I was angry. They didn’t believe that his father would stick around. (Ten years later, he’s still here. I doubt I could get rid of him to be honest.) The pregnancy was tough and exhausting, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I was put on bed rest for the last half of it, although my family made that nearly impossible. I felt so scared, and alone, and yet that only made me more determined to prove everyone wrong.

The delivery was hard as well. I love my family, but I wish things had been able to progress naturally, rather than everyone insisting to my doctors that I be induced because I was over my due date. I understand that it was tough for my mother to see me in pain, I hate seeing my own children in pain myself but sometimes pain is necessary. I spent five days in the hospital being induced, and after all that, he still became stuck and had to be suctioned out, leaving a bruise on the top of his head. Oddly enough, even through all the pain, as soon as they handed me my son, I cried out of joy because he was beautiful and perfect and I knew in that instant that I would die for him if I had to. All the pain no longer mattered, and in a way, I forgot the pain in that instant. (I’m convinced that the endorphins we get from child birth are what allow us to forget the pain and trick us into wanting more children later.) I can only hope to raise my son in a way that he becomes a productive member of society and that he doesn’t end up hating me in the process.

55 Years of Awesome

So today is my father’s birthday. We had a surprise birthday party for him last night that he ended up coming home before some of us managed to get there. *cough-sorry-we-were-late-mom-cough* My father happens to be pretty tough to buy stuff for. If you know him well enough, it should be easy but it never feels that way. I ended up getting him some more fishing lures. C, my daughter helped me pick out the sparkly ones so he can fish for some bass. She was happy to hear that fish love sparkly stuff because she loves sparkly stuff too. I don’t think she understood that he catches fish so he can eat the fish, not to put them in a tank somewhere. (She loves sushi but no matter how much I explain that they are made from fish, I don’t think she quite gets it yet.)

Anyway… So my father has a few things that he likes: fishing, golf, and tools. All of which he could probably never have enough stuff for. Fishing lures get caught on rocks, roots in the water, or a fish will break the line eventually. Sometimes he simply loses one in the dirt. Moral of that one is, he can always use more lures. That’s pretty much why I chose that one for his gift. My nephew had a genius idea to get him a putt return. See? My family all knows his hobbies. My dad just recently had surgery on his wrist that he had fractured, so it was a good idea that will allow him to putt shorter distances so he can get some practice in once his wrist starts feeling better.

Unfortunately my nephew had to leave before I got there, as he had fallen off the trampoline and broken his wrist and elbow. (Ouch) My family is accident prone, I swear. There are very few family gatherings that do not end in someone going to the hospital. Thanksgiving it was my little sister who was at the hospital. She had fallen and split the back of her head open. Oh yeah, good times…

I originally started writing this with the idea that I was going to talk about memories I have of my father, and then I started rambling. I apologize. I do not recall very many of my father’s birthdays. I think we did an “Over the Hill” themed birthday for his 30^th or 40^th birthday. We ended up picking up a cane with a rearview mirror and a rabbit’s foot hanging from that. We were kind of mean, and now that I think about it… I should probably dread retribution for my 30^th birthday. Most of my best memories are of us at the lake. Dad rigging up his fishing poles in the sand with bells on them so he can lay there and wait for a catfish at night.

One of my favorite memories though is remembering how much my mom was laughing about the skunk one night while we were camping. We had a dog with us, and one of us, might have been my mom, discovered the skunk eating the dog food. My dad tried to scare it away by throwing a rock at it, but it leaned at the wrong moment. *bam* Passed out skunk, spraying everywhere. So my oldest brother has to take the shovel and take the skunk into the woods a bit to let it wake up and wander off out there. As he’s carrying the skunk away from camp on the shovel, it wakes up. He ends up freaking out, and catapulting the poor skunk into the woods off the end of the shovel. I am sure that skunk had a great story to tell his friends and family back home. That is, once his headache wore off.