How It's Gonna Be

My house is a mess. Like shit is everywhere. It was clean as a whistle on Tuesday, but that seems so far away. I used to have an hour in my day after work where I could clean things up before X-man came home from school. But now he's always here. And most of the time, he's pretty good about picking up when I'm around, but when MacTroll is around, it's like the world is ruled by a different cosmic king and -- all clean up goes to hell.

Meh. Whatever, right? It's just going to get dirty again. The reason I hate housework isn't that it's a challenge. It's the monotony. I've cleaned up everything: Blood, vomit, paint, shreds of paper, bubbles, urine, poop, toys, salsa, wine, etc. It's always something. So I lose interest. Pristine is apparently not in my abilities any more. And I'm okay with that.

I'm also realizing that I'm not a person who really lives in my house. I use it more for storage and sleeping. The rest of the time I'm just tossing stuff into the holding cell so we can run out the door somewhere else.

For example today, after MacTroll got some bloodwork done and I went to physical therapy, we ate lunch and took X-man to Decatur to go to the Children's Museum of Illinois. We have a Super Family Membership at the Orpheum that gets us into over 120 Children's museums around the country, so we decided to put it to use. We hadn't been there since X-man was 2, so he didn't really remember it, i.e. it was all new to him. But, like usual, we spent over an hour of the two and a half hours that we were there in the grocery store/bank/post office area. :-)

We even ran into the folks at CAOS (Carle Auditory Oral School) who were on a field trip. Since it was balls hot outside and the museum was nice and cool, we decided we were very smart for staying inside. Afterwards, we took X-man down to Merchant Street to Del's Popcorn and bought him his favorite white chocolate covered pretzels and a blue slushie as a snack. Then we drove around/through Millikin (my alma mater) which took -- oooooohhhh a little over two minutes. The thing he liked most though was driving by all the factories, particularly ADM, and announcing, "What is that smell? It smells like poop." MacTroll told him it was where they produced different kinds of additives for foods. And right away, X-man figured out they were the kind of additives that drive mommy nuts. (Why, for example, does something called SOY sauce have wheat in it?)

Anyway, if you know the funk of Decatur, you understand why I found this entertaining.

We were home for 45 minutes to throw dinner at him before we dropped him off at Little Gym and MacTroll and I went out for date night. The first part was very successful. We ate at Escobar's which we hadn't done in a long, long time. Unlike other more "prime people watching" locations no one was there at 6:30. So we didn't have to wait for a table, the service was spot on and my shrimp and scallops were wonderful. Afterwards, we headed over to Urbana to drop in on the Coop expansion party for owners. We checked in and then scoped out the new space, but we didn't stay long enough to deal with the crowd. We weren't hungry, so we didn't need the free food or wine. And the music was a little loud, plus  it was standing room only. So we went into the store to get jam and honey. I feel like a jerk for buying organic jam from Italy, but it's really good pomegranate raspberry. The honey, however, was local. I swear.

So we vacated the crowd to hit Espresso on Daniel St. on campus. And as you might expect, the place was EMPTY. It was awesome. We sat there for an hour sipping on our drinks and chatting about how we couldn't hear anything. Cars and bikes were infrequent and we were two of five people in the entire coffee shop. And this, is why I love to live here. I love that sometimes, I can sit on my back porch and hear NOTHING. It's not as quiet as it was when we first built our house, of course, but at the same time, in comparison to most urban areas, it's darn right peaceful.

I'm trying a slew of vegetarian recipes this week, so if you're a friend of mine on Facebook, I'll post the good ones there. :-)

Tomorrow is set aside for either garage sale time or farmer's market time with X-man and then some work for the Tolono Library District. I have my first meeting as the Secretary on Tuesday. I'm a bit nervous, but at the same time, excited about helping out. You know me... anything to get out of my cage, um, I mean house.

So the next time you drop by, please forgive the mess. It's a work in progress. And right now, I'm working outside of the home as much as I possibly can. :-)

Damned if You Do...

Every person who has ever had a job knows that vacations are a pain in the ass. You need to get away from your life before you kill someone. You need to blow off some steam. So you scrimp and save all your cash selling off vacation time so you can actually take a week of time off (doesn't that seem crazy) out of the two weeks they actually unchain you from your desk (oven, patrol car, whatever thing you feel tied to). 

But if you have an office job or a job with paperwork, there's a mountain of stuff to get done before you go. And then after being gone for a week you have between 400 and 1400 e-mails in your inbox of things people have dumped in your lap or projects that apparently can't move forward without your input or approval. And you spend an extra 4 hours a day wading through all the crap you missed while you were out, which makes you just mourn the cool city you visited or the beach where you slurped up your fancy drink with the umbrella and read your bad mystery novels. 

Being a stay-at-home mom/student/community organizer/volunteer is no exception to the truth that you're damned if you don't take a vacation and you're damned if you do.

I left at 2 p.m. on Friday. I returned at 9 p.m. on Sunday. Before I left I paid the bills, did my homework, finished the CCHS newsletter, cleaned my house from top to bottom, did all of my laundry, changed the sheets on my bed and e-mailed out last minute emergency contact about a meet up that I organized that I couldn't be at because of my vacation, so that anyone who couldn't find where they were going could e-mail the group that had us over and find their basement set up in the bowels of a U of I residence Hall (which by the way is an uber-cool model train set up... but that's another post). 

I arrived at my house which I had left spic and span to find it a demilitarized zone. It was a wreck. I am disappointed. I am angry. And I'm trying to keep in mind that although I know that my child was happy and fed and cared for while I was gone, my house wasn't. The 8,000 things I do every day completely escapes the attention of my husband. I know that it's okay to do things differently when he parents, but what he did was leave behind another mess that I didn't make to clean up. He'd argue that he doesn't think it's my job. But the truth is that he doesn't see the mess. Therefore, he doesn't understand what the big deal is. He doesn't see that the house gets like this whenever he's home, which is silly because he's an extra grown up with an extra set of hands.

He doesn't understand how many hours it takes to undo what he's done in such a short time. Or what he's perpetuated for X-man by not teaching X-man to respect his house and our things by cleaning up. Clean up does not have to be a chore. Clean up can be a game. But it's hard to do that when you spend a lot of time on your phone or in front of the computer and then turn a blind eye to things.

I always hoped that spending more time with X-man by himself would somehow give him some sort of sense of understanding of how challenging my life can sometimes be. I guess I hope that he'd grow some kind of respect for all that I do from first-hand experience. But I was wrong. My expectations were again much too high. 

And here I am waging war in my brain and crying in my heart. Because I don't know how to balance all this shit out. What's the point of me getting away if I have to work overtime in an already packed week to clean up after him. And where did he get this blindness? 

School says biology is not destiny. It influences sure. So the penis might have something to do with it. But most often it's environment. It's something he learned as a kid.

I've lived with MacTroll since 1998 and this has always been an issue. And no amount of talking about it seems to help. I've tried a general chore chart. I've tried assigned chore charts. I've asked. I've pleaded. I've screamed. I've shouted. I've just taken all his stuff and dumped it in his office or his side of the bed (boy that pissed him off). Most of the time I just put it on the back burner because all the big stuff, the value stuff, we have always agreed on.

But this shit just drives me absolutely mad. Seriously. We'd do better in separate residences. I guess it's good that he's away more than he's home, right? Cause at least in hotels, he has someone who gets paid a wage to pick up after him. Cause I ain't no maid.

Grumble, grumble

Today I'm cleaning my kitchen floor. Every time we stay home and eat and cook, it requires almost daily maintenance to keep socks clean or shit from sticking to the bottom of our feet. Hence is the life with a crazy messy toddler and a crazy messy man.

But it made me wonder if I was the only one with this sitcho... let me know -- poll to the right.

In My Experience: Hope Feels Way Better Than Resentment

MacTroll and I finally made it over to the County Clerk's office to vote today. That felt good. So good that I swear as I stood in the hall waiting for MacTroll to finish I got teary-eyed at the people lining up to also take part in early voting. 

There were seniors, college students, couples and more diversity in that line than I think anyone in the entire nation thinks is possible for a "flyover state." 

It was awesome. 

Afterward, I dropped off a donation to A Woman's Fund. Nothing special just some laundry detergent, toys for the kids, some old desk lamps we aren't using at the house any more. It wasn't anything big. But it felt good.

Now I'm getting ready to beat the rain and go grocery shopping. 

However, this morning, life was really annoying me. MacTroll is in a tizzy over the economy and when he gets worked up, he gets me worked up. As the non-money-earner I start to feel guilty and useless. Then I think about all the stuff I do do for my family, and I feel under-appreciated and resentful. Every thing I do starts to feel repetitive and useless. And then I get grumpy. I hate when I spend all of one day in bliss and the other day pissy.

However, voting cleared all of that up. It made me hopeful and purposeful. 

I did a light 30-minute elliptical run at the gym this a.m. I do hope on making it in to the strength training class on Saturday at 10:30 a.m., but it will depend on if it's raining or not. If it is, I'll be there. If it's a nice day, I'm on X-man duty while MacTroll works on the privacy fence.

Tomorrow is our annual pumpkin painting/carving at our house. This was last year's experience... clearly it is an event not for those with OCD. :-)

"Oh crap, it's the police."

As many of you know, my husband and I don't get to spend a lot of time together. The first six years of our relationship was long distance. The next two I worked 50 hours a week and went to graduate school while he chased Monica Lewinsky, Ken Starr and other Washington players down with his camera for multiple news agencies. Then we got married, and he obtained full-time employment with United Press International (where the news never stopped, not even for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries or blizzards) and I spent my time working for a foundation for journalists that worked under similar expectations (although they paid much, much better and had no problem with comp time for weekend assignments).

Then we moved here when we discovered no one had been tending the "marriage" garden. He still traveled all the time, only now for Apple. And I stayed home working one temporary, part-time job after another so I could get some quality marriage time on his schedule. 

Then we had a baby, some postpartum depression and still the travel. 

So communicating things about our marriage through the telephone has been a skill we've both learned to deal with. In short AT&T has substituted as our marriage counselor for several years. So when the company has any kind of financial woes, I sure as hell know they can't blame us for not giving them an insane amount of money over the years.

But last night, we got into one of those "state of the marriage" discussions on my way back from Decatur. And mostly, like my previous post, I was expressing my concerns about feeling unappreciated and relegated to forever being the Mommy or the Maid in our relationship. 

I had stopped my car and parked it on the street across from my driveway for the discussion. X-man was in bed, and we were finally getting to the grit of how MacTroll felt.

Warning: As I type this, I might vomit a little.

Apparently, the last five years of making our home a home in Champaign. Caring for it. Painting rooms. Hanging photos. Cooking for it. Paying the bills. Cleaning for it. Planning vacations. Running errands. All those "homemaker" duties... 

"Aren't special. They're all things a good roommate would do."

Cue the headlights from a car approaching. It stopping. A police officer beaming his light on the back of my car. I can't get my street plowed when it snows or drains cleared when they're blocked and the entrance to the subdivision is flooding. But a cop noticing me sitting quietly in my VW. Sure.

Needless to say once he ran my plates and my license and made sure I wasn't a potential domestic violence case, I was let go with the suggestion that I maybe park in my driveway to finish the discussion with my husband because the cops sweep my street to watch on the apartments next to us. 

The minute I entered the house, what MacTroll had said was gone. We talked about other stuff for a while and laughed a little about the cop, who was very nice to ask me three times if I was sure it was safe for me to go home (which was good of him), and then at 1 a.m. I drifted off to sleep.

At 3:30 a.m. X-man woke up crying. I went to see him and hugged him. He settled back down and fell asleep, and I went back to the bedroom. I sat awake in bed. MacTroll and Riley were snoring. I went to the guest room. Couldn't sleep. His sentence turning over and over again in my head. 

Yeah. Here comes the vomit.