So This One Time I Was Going To Clean My Apartment And Cook Dinner For Myself

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But, then it was 12:14 and that hadn't happened, so I let it go gently and winced through a Bauhaus set played by my charming boyfriend on a late night college radio station (seriously, he has like 20 jobs) and realizing that we will never ever ever be very musically compatible.

And this leads to other thoughts that have nothing to do with the cleaning and cooking that never happened. It leads to thoughts of the past weekend, which was very exhausting and very sad for reasons I won't go into because there's this one tiny part of me that is a private person. And it leads to thoughts of how I don't know how to talk to people. I say I do, and I can talk about what's wrong with you or what's soooo wrong with me just to the degree that my favorite friends nearly have to spit swigs of cocktails back into the glass, yes. But I can't say "I am feeling this way about this, and I don't know what to do with that", ever, ever, ever.

So this event that's none of your fucking business, we'll say I burned dinner for his parents (because that would never ever happen both on account of me not wanting to meet peoples parents without a gun to my head and being a fabulous fucking cook in equal parts, and cannot be compared to anything from a wedding to a death to buying a new home to changing my major or anything in between-- thus protecting my none of your fucking business stance), it left me with unsettled feelings and doubts and fears and sadness and overwhelming sickening preoccupation with my future and what I want it to be, and so I did what any normal healthy woman would do with her feelings: I blamed my boyfriend for trivial things that have nothing to do with the matters at hand. I picked at him for things he picked up for me to eat in the middle of the night when I said I wasn't hungry earlier. I accused him of being insensitive for being sensitive in the wrong way. I decided he was a clueless privileged jerk because he let me pay for dart games and when I ran out of quarters just stopped playing without seeing who would break the tie.

I admit, this may have been unreasonable.

But in that time, all that I didn't know I wanted to talk about fell away and the time passed that I would be able to talk about it before everything had been rearranged to fit different practical molds of what I needed feelings and ideas and plans to be. And now it's hanging there, another something that is between us, because it was never something between us. Not because we're not working out, not that at all... I'm absurdly in love and he's the most wonderful man I've ever met in my life. Just because we're in a relationship, and this is what happens in them. Relationships are like any other new little existence. They start off pure and perfect and without stains of ego and pride and fear and indifference or self involvement, resentment, mistakes and misunderstandings and all of the things that make us what we are together as much as they do who we are individually.

And from then on, things have nothing left but to get more and more imperfect by the second, and I hate that. And it's just a natural progression and I know that, but still... it fucking sucks. Not that it's happening to us too, just that it has to be that way at all.

And removed from this, I am thinking of my daughter. She wants to meet my boyfriend. It's been months in the making, she knew that first weekend when there were pictures on the computer and mommy was singing a lot and giggling at text messages that something was up. Because it's my daughter, who's fucking brilliant, she specifically knew "Mommy, you have a boyfriend. Your friend Nivas is your boyfriend I think".

Yes, 6 year old, you think right.

And since then has been the pending meeting of my boyfriend. I wanted to do 6 months, but that requires a degree of removal from my daughters life that she doesn't care for. We share everything in one another's life, and for me to have this one part that is mine she understands-- but for me to have this one part that is secret and completely out of sight from her, that is where it gets personal.

Her father has her every weekend now for absurd reasons I can't get into without starting to foam at the mouth and developing facial twitches and bulging veins over, but regardless of all that, it is happening and we're in a bad way. She clings to my leg every waking second that she is still able to be at home, she begs me to just one day lets leave early and walk to school together before daddy can come, she wants to keep a calender to count the days until he leaves town so she can just be home again. And I guess that was the point... to stop fighting so hard for the right thing for them, let him bludgeon their relationship himself if he insisted and stop fighting so hard to protect him from himself even if it is for her sake and to just be there to love her as much as I can through the years as this continues on. And I am more able to hold her afloat than to change the course of his mad and erratic current, that's true, but for fucks sake. It's hard on the kid, and she knows I love someone besides her in all the world which I don't think she's ever really realized I could before, and she doesn't even know him.

And he'll be great, I know he will, and it will be fine, I know. But I don't do shit like this, not ever. If men meet my child, it's because we are friends. Dating, then meeting my child is totally against any and all of my rules as a parent. But, this isn't a passing thing we're seeing what happens with, this is an actual thing that we're both committed to good things happening with. And that's wonderful, and yes, that means that in the spring we should get his puppy and my 6 year old together for a little walk in the park or something. I know that, I do... but fuuuuck fuuuuck, fuuuuck.

This is not how mommy rolls.

Mommy doesn't even clean her apartment and make herself a nice dinner, more or less let her 6 year old meet her boyfriend, have a boyfriend, or reflect on how she has a hard time knowing how to talk about how she really feels or what's really wrong so that she can be a better girlfriend for her boyfriend because she really wants to see this work, because she's really really happy.

And icing on the cake... by the end of this blog, I've found that I like more than half of his set list-- and I may just clean to it. Oh, and there's They Might Be Giants, and I just sighed and smiled to myself and muttered "Awwww..." . I probably bit my fucking lip and twirled my fucking hair.

Who the fuck am I? Seriously.

Fuck.