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.

Have a happy holiday?

Well, it seems that I am not allowed to be depressed over Christmas. I should cheer up, and despite my bipolar not allowing me to not be in control over what I feel as this changes on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis. I have tried to explain that I do not have control over my emotions and sometimes I barely have control of my actions, but apparently, because I am aware of this lack of control, I should be able to take control whenever I want.

Yes, I am aware of my mood swings, and I am also aware of how difficult they may be to deal with. My husband is generally a saint when it comes to being patient with my mental disorder. He sees it for what it is. Something that is mostly beyond my realm of control. Don’t get me wrong, there are parts that I CAN control. If I am feeling manic, I try not to do any shopping, as the mania tends to make me impulsive and sometimes aggressive. This is a bad idea in a store where people are generally rude. I am a passive person on a normal day but when I am manic, I feel like I should put a fist through someone’s face, and this is frowned upon by most people.

There are days when I am so depressed, I want to stay in bed and do nothing except sleep. I can’t really do that though, because I have children to take care of. So I use most of my willpower to get out of bed and take care of the kids. Any other social interaction during those days is downright exhausting. I have to spend every amount of energy I possess to take care of my kids, so basically on down days, I don’t leave the house much either.

Lately, most days I bounce between manic or depressed, with no actual indication or reason for my mood to swing one way or another. Sometimes my mood is even changed by music, movies, or a book that I am reading. In this way, I can attempt to change my mood. If I am feeling excessively depressed, I try to listen to upbeat music to lighten my mood, but this can have the opposite effect and put me in a manic mood for the rest of the day.

And then of course, I am easily distracted, as anyone who has ever read my blog would realize. I am having issues focusing on the point I wanted to make so I’ll focus on this more at a later date. I think my point was that I don’t have control over my emotions so there’s no point in getting mad at me for what I cannot control.

A Decade of Experience

I have been sitting here, attempting to write a blog about the last ten years of marriage. I have started typing several different times, gotten distracted, then I come back and reread what I have written and delete it. Nothing seems to be coming out right, and I don’t know if it’s because I am alone on my anniversary, or the fact that I have only slept about two or three hours. Perhaps I should attempt this later when I can focus…

Update: Okay, now that I am a bit more focused, I shall try this again. I just celebrated my ten year anniversary. Normally, it’s a nice quiet day, but HOLY SHIT, I’ve been married for a decade. I sort of felt like this sort of anniversary would require some bells, maybe fireworks. Something to make the day feel special. Unfortunately, I spent my anniversary without my husband, which is the third year in ten years that this has happened. One time, he was gone for training, another year, he was deployed, and this year, training again. I am mostly just grateful he has only been gone for three of them so far, as it could have been much worse. My plan to surprise my husband was going to be to organize the garage, which I didn’t do. It’s okay though, I’ll probably get that done as soon as it cools off outside.

Those of you that know me, and those of you who can do the math will realize that I have been married since I was 16. Statistically, most teen parents don’t last very long, and I’ll admit, it has not been a bundle of happiness and joy the entire time. We, just like everyone else, have had good days and bad days, and hell sometimes we have a bad month. There were times during the first year that I wanted to give up, but I was determined to work through our differences. I reminded myself that there was a specific reason that I married him, and that was that I loved him, dearly. There are times that I look at him and I am reminded of that boy that I fell in love with 12 years ago. We have been through so much together, and I look forward to the next decade together.
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Easter

So while I sat here, filling plastic eggs with chocolate candies, I had a question that I had not given much thought to come to mind. “Why the heck do we hunt eggs on Easter?” I grew up in a Christian home, so we would always go to church on Easter Sunday all dressed up in clothes that were doomed to be stained with grass and chocolate by the end of the day. So I am familiar with Good Friday representing the day that Jesus died, and then Easter representing his resurrection. (Why they call it Good Friday is probably a whole other topic. I mean, who calls a day of death Good Friday?) So yes, I understand the celebration of the resurrection… But why are we hunting eggs? How the heck did the Easter Bunny come into being?

• Origins of Easter

To further my quest for knowledge I went online to an excellent source. (Google) ¬_¬ One of the first sites it brought up discussed the Origins of Easter Celebrations. So while it was on the About.com site, it did look somewhat promising as a starting point. So here goes. “The word Easter is named after Eastre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. A festival is held in her honor every year at the vernal equinox.” (Bellis). This article goes on to describe how the Easter Bunny came to be as well, or at least theories on the subject. “The Easter Bunny is a rabbit-spirit. Long ago, he was called the “Easter Hare”, hares and rabbits have frequent multiple births so they became a symbol of fertility. The custom of an Easter egg hunt began because children believed that hares laid eggs in the grass.” (Bellis). Well that would certainly explain a lot.

It seems that the symbol of eggs and event the name Easter all came from pagan religions long before Christianity borrowed it. Of course, Christians probably would never admit it, despite the name Easter never being mentioned in the Bible. Most Christians are probably just as clueless as I was as to the origins of the holiday customs anyway. It almost seems silly to take part in customs that you do not know about but like most holidays, I simply take part in them so my children aren’t left out. Funny how that works out, huh? I do plan on researching the origins further, so that way my children will be far more knowledgeable on the subject than I was but we will still have an Easter egg hunt at my house. I do know better than to hide the real eggs though, just in case no one finds them. (The smell would be awful before the month is over.)

• Easter Commercialization

I went out on Wednesday to pick up some Easter supplies. I waited until the last minute because if candy stays in my house for too long, I eat it. But I digress… While at the store I could not help but notice how much Easter has changed since I was a child. We would get an Easter basket with some decorated eggs, maybe a chocolate bunny, and possibly a kite or squirt gun to play with at the park. Now people put dolls, sports equipment, makeup, and even condoms in their child’s Easter basket. Yes, that last one was condoms. Yes, I have heard of it happening before. Honestly if your child is old enough for condoms, they really are too old for an Easter basket, but again I am getting off topic. It just seems that every year the baskets get bigger and bigger, and you have to try to place more expensive items in the basket in order to keep your children happy. Otherwise you get labeled as the “lame mom.”

I might end up the “lame mom” to some other people this year, because I picked up a bag of 70 plastic eggs, 2 small bags of chocolate to fill them with, and a couple boxes of peeps. I wandered around some more and found Matt standing in front of the pool section. Now I like pools. In fact, I love pools. Problem is, pools are expensive but I decided to join him and just browse anyway. Then, it happened. We found a perfect one for the kids. 18 inches tall, 8 feet across, and less than $20. I know that still sounds lame but we used to live in Hawaii, and my monsters would love to just sit and play in the shallow areas of the beach. That’s one of the main things they miss about Hawaii is that we could go swimming almost every weekend. I’d sit on the beach with my feet in the water while they played and we’d make a day out of it. So we bought it. C was with us, and she definitely cannot keep a secret, so we did not even bother trying. Heck she sang about getting a pool the entire way home. As soon as the boys walked in the door from school, she told them we had a pool. “We got a pool?!” Oh yes, I am still the cool mom. I don’t agree with the commercialization of Easter but I do know how it feels to be the only kid in class that isn’t celebrating a holiday. *coughHalloweencough* So, I know it sucks.

Works Cited

Bellis, M. (n.d.). The Origins of Easter Celebrations. Retrieved April 04, 2012, from About.com: http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/easter.htm