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.