A Few Things While I Eat This Apple:

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Yes, sometimes a blog post is exactly what it sounds like in the title.

1)Hot Young Indian Boy Was Staring At Me Again. I rolled my eyes because you know, what else am I going to do? But, I probably also blushed. I should note two things here though. 1) I blushed because he looked at me like my boyfriend does right before he says something wayyy too sweet for a bitchy girl like me to handle and 2) The only reason this guy keeps checking me out is because one day he caught me totally checking him out, like really shamelessly. Again, let me note that this guy looks freakishly similar to my boyfriend, and if you'd ever seen my boyfriend you can see where that's both highly attractive, and not something you can say every day.

2)Dude, I'm such a train wreck at the gym. Seriously, I don't run unless someone is chasing me, I'll work my left leg for 20 minutes and my right one for about 27 seconds if it's more convenient to my conversation with my gym buddy to turn the one way longer, and I don't own a sports bra (though this led to a great jab in the locker room about me yesterday: "If she's going to get her tits done that big, she could have gone a little smaller and fixed her face". First, I want to note that these girls were total bitches, clearly. Next, I want to feel a little smug... my boobs are sooo real)... I don't know why I bother.

3)Hey YMCA Mom that stole my camera after 6 year old swim practice? You're a bad person. I hope as they get older, my daughters cuteness gives your daughter an eating disorder. Seriously, you don't know better when you see an expensive camera than to put it in your purse?

Jerk.

Mmm, good apple. Have a nice day.

And Then This Other Time, I Thought I Was Breaking Up With My Boyfriend, But I Wasn't.

That was a good thing.

Who knew that outright refusal of breakup was an option? My precious boyfriend who suffers my neurotic fears endlessly and patiently. "I do not accept this breakup" were the exact words-- difficult to argue with.

Without going into details, we'll just say it was a curious notion on my part that this would be good for us, and I'm more in love now than ever, and there's no reason in the world I shouldn't be. I done found me a good 'un.

All of that said, there were other severely noteworthy things in my week as well, I just had to make note due to the disappearing blog of yesterday than said quite different things about my romantic status.

Besides my love life, there was an amazing trip to New York, complete with a visit with my sister who suddenly had no idea what state I lived in, who my daughter lived with, and I believe may have said "I'm sorry, do I know you?" at a couple of points during dinner. No, that's not a true story I admit, but overall the woman was beyond playing coy. There are times when you think it's wonderful that you have grown and your siblings and yourself can have really adult relationships because you're all your real selves now. And the last time I saw my sister, this was true. It was warm and funny and candid and overall she was a woman I admired instead of a teenager I looked up to and loathed in equal parts for all of her snide accomplishment. In this visit, though, my sister was every bit the teenage girl that snubbed me while smiling sweetly at me, leaving me feeling shabby and underfoot and hopeless but tolerated. The exception being, this time I traveled clear across Manhattan to a weird ass out of the way gentrified part of Brooklyn for her to say "Wait, why are you staying on the Upper East Side?" as though a simple and practical part of the city, and my choice in friends who live somewhere inconvenient to her was the real problem. Because she's my sister, I didn't say "Fuck you and fuck this", I smiled and I tried to find common grounds and touch base on some warm familiar level.

It never quite happened.

It was amazing being back in the city though, and beyond amazing being with the friend I went to see. She's someone who gets me, who I don't have to laugh around, who I don't even have to talk to. At one point we checked email and sipped coffee and muttered back and forth to each other, and it was fabulous and bonding. I'm at this mind-blowing point in my life right now where I have several women I can call my best friends, and they all get some part of me that none of the other ones do, and I couldn't be happier with any of it. And I couldn't have been happier with a visit with Ashley. For the love of fuck, she got me Swiss cake rolls and went to Sephora with me and made me coffee. There is little more the two of us need than coffee and something to put our feet up on to be completely in our element.

I know it's rambling and messy and uninteresting, but these are things I failed to blog recently and wanted to just to know it's recorded somewhere. And now it is, and I have after-trip cleaning to do, a dance recital to practice for, and 2 papers to write before morning. But I have a precious 6 year old fast asleep in bed, a boyfriend who doesn't let me freak out and I doubt would ever let me break up with him, the most amazing girlfriends in the world who ask nothing of me and I have nothing to ask of, so in the grand scheme of things I think I'm still ahead of the game.

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.

You Know What? Back The Fuck Off.

Yes, YOU, hipster film professor in your too tight jeans with your "Yeah, I'm just a guy like you're just some guys" attitude. I'm not stupid, I'm not a 19 year old who totally digs on your mocking Transformers a lot. I see you condescending every kid in this class, and I see you grading and regarding me differently because I outright fail to appreciate your false accessibility. I know you're a snotty hyper conservative who thinks waking life is brilliant and like perfectly good classic Hollywood movies ironically instead of with any real sheer delight.

And I know you don't give me participation points, and you shouldn't leave your roster open when I talk to you at your desk if you don't want me to see that.

And yes YOU, touch-my-hair-in-math-class-guy. Yes, I dropped the class. Yes, now I see you in the gym. But there are two other things we can note here: 1) I know fully well that you don't actually pick up a single weight or get on a single exercise machine, or even walk the track in the gym. and 2) I notice you are in the gym when I am every time... but I also know that you're skipping the math class in question to go to it. That, my friend? Creepier than you touching my hair.

And yes, especially YOU, boyfriend. If you tell me you know what when we're you know where one more time, I swear on your stupid sports teams I will scream and kick you and tell everyone surrounding EXACTLY why that just happened.

Now: Everyone back the fuck off. It's not my week, and as of current I am foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog... and things haven't even gotten ugly yet.

So This Is Monday

It's not to say that I don't generally have unpleasant Mondays, not that at all.

No, what it is to say is that today, even in the grad scheme of Mondays, was especially unpleasant. Why? I'm so glad you asked (and don't you role your eyes, you can stop reading whenever the hell you want, and with all due respects, you knew what this blog was to begin with, and there you went typing it in to the search bar... I refuse to be the one who feels silly here. Or the only one, anyway)

1) I had my bike stolen.

And by that, I mean it turns out that if you leave your bike unlocked for well over 6 days in front of your college, which is known for homeless people sleeping in it... someone's gonna' take that bike. Who knew? Well, everyone in the campus security office, for starters.

2) So you know how I thought I had raccoons in my attic?

Well, now I know I had raccoons in my attic, and that the largest one was 25 lbs. The pest control guy assured me that it would be released into the wilderness, did not agree to accept addresses from me suggesting where it ought be dropped, and it totally pooped through the cage onto my stairs on its way down.

3) My math professor seems to think I should be coming to class more often.

Well send your snarky emails to my babydaddy who makes me take days out of school to fight false allegations of child neglect, the raccoon living in my attic, and my 6 year old who has inconvenient ideas about when to be up all night having bad dreams that require some sleep in the daytime to recover from. We all know if I miss 2 more of your classes, I will fail the course. One of those classes I am guaranteed to miss (again, talk to the babydaddy-- when it's not his problem, it's not a relevant one), and we all know I'm barely passing anyway. Let's just step away from the send button, shall we? It hurts my heart.

And if upon further reflection you still feel you would like to beat the dead horse of your choosing, let's do it on a Tuesday, shall we?

There is more, my Lord there is more, but in a few short hours it's going to be Tuesday and the whole thing to be done over again.

Well, that's embarassing.

When we got together, not very long ago, my boyfriend and I used to write these long random emails to each other in the middle of the night. They were candid and neurotic and cautiously romantic, and it was a comfort to be able to wear my heart on my sleeve and not feel exposed or vulnerable, but a mutual participant in something overwhelming and new and delightful. He told me recently that he used to watch his inbox for messages from me, even check in the middle of the night, and that he would write me back very carefully.

It's not often that we exchange emails anymore, and I'm not even entirely sure that he reads them at all. Last night, as often, I wrote my boyfriend an email. It was neurotic and personal and candid and romantic. And, in a couple of days when I ask him if he read it, he will do what he generally does when this happens-- he will kiss me and say "I did, and it was very sweet".

And I will feel exposed and vulnerable and I will wish I'd said less, and there will be less between us, and more between us.

I've always said that relationships baffle me because there are only the two modes, advance and decline, and the advancement is short lived and exactly what creates the decline to begin with. And, now comes our decline and I have to wonder why I got on this ride to begin with-- I knew what this was.

Things I Find Annoying: A Sunday List

1) My boyfriend does the most frustrating thing.

Any Sunday that we are spending together that is cut short:

"Aww, I hate losing our Sunday time!"
"Me too. Why don't I pick you up after I gt off and we can go to sleep and I can drop you off in the morning?"
"No, you need your sleep for your business meeting/field work/cross county job trip... whatever the fuck you do. "
"No, it's fine. I like falling asleep with you!"
"Ohh, you like me!"
"Siiiike!!! I'm going to drop you off, yell "see you, wouldn't want to be you" and drive a bunch of donuts in your wet lawn in about 45 minutes. It's awesome that you just believed that suggestion, though"

Or, maybe he said "See you next weekend sweetie" when he drops me off to gently announce that he didn't find it a good idea after all when saying he had and that no, I shouldn't be waiting around midnight in my pajamas to have a cute last minute sleepover. Because he doesn't want to make me feel bad by saying it's not a great idea, and he wants me to make other plans because he's a good guy who knows I only have weekends.

Whatever-- it's the fucking principal of the thing.

2) My EX boyfriend does the most frustrating thing.

Or rather, he IS the most frustrating thing. We're still best friends, or at least we're supposed to be, but sometimes out of the clear blue sky he'll decide to just start being moody and impossible and I'll get the impression that we are not friends at all, and have no idea what I've done. Then I'll walk on eggshells, then I'll feel ashamed, and then he'll yell at me for being weird. Then, I'll cry. And cry and cry and cry and cry.

Really, it's like we never broke up.


3) It Is Raining Snow Outside.

I, personally, find that disgusting. Pick a way to ruin what I thought was the start of our Midwestern spring thaw. ONE way.

Raining snow... what the fuck.

4) My Apartment

Which really just ties into the snow and the rain and such. But, it was 56 degrees a few days ago, I lit incense and opened the windows and cleaned my living room and my kitchen (to a lesser extent) and my bathroom (which is never that bad off to begin with).

But, there's still the bedroom, and that was going to be done today, and it isn't. My problem, largely, is that specifically in winter I cannot clean. I don't know why, but my diet, my cleaning, my homework, my everything falls to hell in the colder months. Not because I'm unhappy mind you, I am actually one of those people that is very happy even in the middle of winter all the time. But still, something in me freezes the second the weather does, and I needed this thaw to last a little longer... I needed it to last until I got under the bed and the top of the dresser at least.

Freezing rain. Fuck this shit.

5) Feminists.

Specifically, the feminist who copied and pasted one of my blogs, and then submitted it to our local female studies performance group to do a stage reading of. You picked something personal, you edited the meaning out entirely, and you completely missed the fucking point.

You exploited my motherhood, my female insecurities, and if I didn't hate feminists before, I do now. Way to support the team, jack-ass.

And, that is all I have to report.

Hey, Guess What I'm About To Do?

If you guessed "Go to the Gym and get ripped", you're half right. But if you guessed "Go to the gym and drink soda and work yourself into an ALMOST sweat in a totally cute outfit, then spend 40 minutes walking the track talking about sex and potential sex with your gym buddy*... "

Well, then you should have bet money because of how 100% right you are.

*{and by this I mean partaking in discussion about sex with said gym buddy, not that there is potential sex between the two of us. Not that she isn't a lovely girl, mind you... but this isn't that kind of gym, and what's more, this isn't that kind of blog}

To Say The Least, The Week Was Difficult.

I am am a good mother.

There are few things I can say about myself with complete and utter confidence. More specifically, there is one thing I can say about myself with complete and utter confidence, and it is that yes, I am a good mother. Of my looks I will say "I have a great body-- but, I may have nursed a bit too long, and I have a little mommy tummy". Of my intelligence, I will say "I am very smart... but just in some ways". Of my house I will say "It's pretty much clean... but it's very cluttered" or "It suits me... but it's a little small".

But of myself in the end, of what I come down to and who I am, there is only the one thing I can say in complete confidence. One thing I have not and will not doubt: "I am a good mother."

End sentence.

My daughter is carefully fed. My daughter is clean and well rested and gets exercise and socializes with other children multiple times a week outside of school. My daughter knows she can talk to me about anything. She doesn't lie to me, she comes to me when she's hurt or sad or happy and because in all the world I am who she wants to go to. If she has days she hates me, she is allowed to. If she has days that she just wants to not talk about anything, just quietly sit and hold my hand or lay her head on my shoulder without getting into why she has had a bad day, that is allowed, too.

She is allowed to be a child, to say silly things like 'butt' and 'poop' or giggle at those words without being shamed. She is allowed to be 6. She is allowed to sleep in her undershirt for the next day because she gets warm when she sleeps in PJs and sometimes takes a full 20 minutes trying to put one on in the morning because she's like a 40 year old who is out of coffee when she wakes up. When it is only her sweater or long sleeves, she can put them on herself even tired, and feel like a big girl. Why this is, I do not know. But it works, and so it is done at my home.

My daughter is told precious stories about her father and his family, regardless of the living hell they have put me through, regardless of the values they have that I do not ever want my daughter to think are OK: Because if I raise her well, she will not develop them and part of raising her well is letting her love who she does and encouraging it no matter who I know those people to be.

And my daughters father files motions against her mother, who never raises her hand, enforces consequences in a loving but firm way only, makes sure there are frequent new experiences, educational toys, social interaction, who reads to her for hours and makes up stories on command, who walks 5 blocks to the laundry mat in the snow every single weekend that she can without said daughter having to come if it is cold, claiming she is an unfit mother.

And it makes me sick. Absolutely sick.

And the judge laughed. And everyone I knew first gawked then cussed and then laughed too... "That's absurd-- you're the best mother I know". This from the best mothers I know, this from teachers, this from people who admittedly hate me as a human being, can't stand the sound of my voice. This from a woman who I in younger wilder years slept with the boyfriend of... "I'll probably always hate you for how you were when we were teenagers, but even I can't believe that bullshit. You're an amazing mother. You never even say shit about that jack-ass in front of her, even the times it would be appropriate to. You're even too nice about him for some of the things she asks you about that he's suggested." And this person, if we may note, is in fact an early childhood educator.

And she agrees that I am if nothing in all the world, an amazing mother.

Because I am. I am a good mother. And now, I am a terrified mother. I am walking around on eggshells, scared to let my daughter sleep in bed with me because he may file a motion that it is indecent. Scared to joke about anything because if she repeats it he can twist it how he wants. But at the same time, scared to speak to her in any way, or to not say anything for fear that he will paint me as in-affectionate.

I spent the weekend in a bed and breakfast with my amazing boyfriend. We went antiquing, we stopped at totally random restaurants to eat, we went to the beach to look at the lake covered in snow. And I clung tight to the trip, not simply because this man is the man of my dreams, or because I have not had a Valentines Day in years... but because I'm so afraid. I'm so afraid that the man who came for a year to live near his daughter is laying the groundwork to take her away from me, and weekend visit with boys, homework that means nothing without the child who will benefit from the eventual degree, an apartment too quiet, will be all I have left.

Which is my worst nightmare, and one I never prepared for before-- one I never realized I needed to.

Because I am a good mother.

It's 9:10 am, And Already: I Can'T Talk About Today Anymore.

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That's where we're at. Just saying.

Go Ahead And Judge Me.

In the middle of cleaning my living room, I had some thoughts. I abruptly remembered I had homework to do, went back in time to sort out if I had covered all of the food groups in my daughters dinner, discovered that I can no longer find the ankle brace my jazz dance instructor lent me which I A) need for class and B) just don't want to lose because it's not fucking mine. I didn't have time to be cleaning, I was totally bombarded by having to as well as the fact that I haven't since early December, and the walls are literally closing in on me-- it's a small fucking apartment. There are a few people in my world who can understand this, but not many: Cleaning the things I have to clean is just too emotional for me, and not cleaning only makes it worse. It's like having a fear of the dentist while the cavity becomes an abscess (side note: I am terrified of the dentist and generally have not liked to go until pain from toothaches has brought me to the emergency room).

I stopped, lay down in the middle of the floor on a big pile of papers in sweatpants and nothing else (You know what? Go on and fucking judge me: The moral of the story here is that I was cleaning my living room at all. No eyeliner, no support on my double D mommy boobs, no airbrushing over the scared and tired face of a 31 year old woman who has cared for herself exclusively essentially her entire life, and minded to the task of others thinking well of her all the while-- that shit'll break you out and give you some crows feet, yo) and cried myself to sleep. I wasn't sad, I wasn't even really frustrated-- I was just full. There was a kind of surface tension, like the skin on a too taut balloon when it starts to pucker from old air a few days later, and I could feel it straining across my throat. I had been trying for hours to decide which childhood homework efforts needed to be saved and which of her hours of learning and growing could be tossed in the recycling, if I still needed this Abraham Lincoln bust I bought my ex at the dollar tree 8 years ago or if the fact that he had left in in our house when he left not a month after I did to be with the love of his life was reason enough to discard it myself. I tried to find a place for my vitamins that wouldn't get in the way of the tea or the peanut butter and longed for a moment to be the kind of woman who could add on when she ran out of space instead of having to discard this much of her life, no more or less. And just as in my overcrowded apartment something had to go from me, bloodletting of sorts--if I'd had leeches, I would have used leeches and that would have worked every bit as well.

But I didn't have leeches. And so, the crying.

I slept for about 10 minutes, then I got my ass up and blogged this because it's better than walking around carrying it, and now it's back to picking apart the little bits and pieces of my life, separating the emotional from the practical, because that's what there's room for on so many levels I can't even begin to blog it.

And now, on to the bathroom. I don't know that I've ever cried in sweatpants in my bathtub before... we'll see how it goes.

Saturday Night And The Non-Drinking Woman

Sometimes the above stated means a lot of diet soda, watching some of my favorite people do shots together, smoking a half a pack of camel light, finding They Might Be Giants on a jukepox, misspelling jukebox, and posting on my phone run on sentance style while discussing with one of my all time favorite women about what it would be like if we'd become friends when I still drank.

I love Saturday night, and for all of its absurdities and delights, I love every last Zero-proof and joy drenched drop of my life. And if I haven't blogged it yet, April, I utterly love you... the most delightful long tall girly drink in town.

Sometimes I Really Like My Life.

Grocery shopping day, for most women. For this one? Madcap romantic adventures. Specifically (today), a deli worker of all but 20 years old (he used to be a checkout boy, he couldn't wait until he turns 21 to buy his own beer) gifted me with 4 boxes of conversation hearts... and his number. He would like to have coffee, he knows I have a kid "but that's totally cool, like-- we can go somewhere that she can come too if you feel safer that way".

Aww... that's so sweet, really. But, I will be keeping the conversation hearts. And I may give some of them to my boyfriend.

(I'm sorry, really-- it's just true)

Forward, checkout line. My daughter wanted 3 items that she had at some point in our trip realized that she needed desperately, immediately, and could not risk me not buying-- so had attempted to hide them from me cleverly in my very own backpack. I always check my backpack for just such a reason, however, and was able to avoid criminal conversion charges for unwittingly smuggling the following out on her behalf:

- 2 bags of Old Wisconsin Beef Bites (which she later referred to simply as 'that bag of beef'-- and she was referring to the one bag that yes, I totally bought)

- 1 bag of Pork Rinds (because child cannot live on beef alone)

- 1 bottle of feminine hygiene wash ("Why this?" "Um because there's this butterfly on it-- can't you see?" Obviously not. Oh wait, maybe that's because you had shoved it into the bottom of my backpack before we left a store-- but no worries, I have no doubt the police woman would also be very fond of the butterfly. I mean, look at it. It's purple, for the love of all things shoplifted)

Upon my arrival home, there was one other surprise for me-- 2 bags of Twizzlers from my Aunt Crystal. Aunt Crystal is pretty much who I want to be when I grow up-- she gardens in the right seasons, she doesn't miss birthdays, she uses stationary instead of notebook paper, she can grow things on windowsills in bottles, a skill I did not acquire from her mother and my favorite grandparent, and she knows about my completely irrational mad love of Twizzlers and that it was something I might happen to need right now.

With this extra positive energy coursing through my veins, the practical thing would be to use it to clean my fucking pit of a house.

Or... to eat twizzlers wrapped around beef bites in my pajamas. Yes, yes, that will do. Tonight I really like my life. Why try to improve upon perfection right this second?

I'm Afraid I'm Going To Become One Of Those Girls....

You know the ones, the ones who blog about their boyfriend and their relationship all the time because it's their most and least favorite subject (because we who blog enjoy our least favorite subject even more than our most favorite sometimes).

And I want to spill over with details: He drives a hummer and it doesn't even freak me out, I panic about having things at his house, when he's falling asleep he's a different person than when he's awake and as such I sometimes feel like I'm in two completely unrelated and sometimes conflicting relationships. I want to gush about how he's of Indian decent which gives him unbelievable eyelashes and a sexy strong jaw, but how ultimately he's just a nice boy from Wisconsin without an exotic bone in his body, he's wholesome and bitter and funny and perfect and by far the smartest or most attractive man I've ever been involved with. I want to blog about funny jokes, I want to blog about how right now I'm in a fight with him that he doesn't even know is a fight because he's too well adjusted to know how to empathize with ways the odd goings on of a spazzy girl like me strictly within the space of my own mind.

And so, there is this post. Because it should all happen at least once (and only this once), so we can move on to more important matters-- like how I'm eating honey straight out of the jar right now, why my babydaddy is a creeper, and that my 6 year old just told me that her boyfriend is a very nice young man and she doesn't know if he should be her boyfriend because she's just too young to have a boyfriend and because she just likes him "a little bit too much in school".

Eh. At least she comes by it honest.

I'd Rather be Bow Hunting

So yeah, I totally did a 15 minutes late half dance into class deal again this morning, said sorry too loudly because of my headphones, then turned in the wrong homework. The librarian (yes, this class is taught by a librarian) glared exactly as a librarian might be expected to, the headphones flew out of my ear, and about 3 minutes later I saw her standing next to my computer.

"Young Lady (yeah, those words from a librarian: Some days my world is like a Norman Rockwell painting that has little tolerance for me in the middle of it)-- would you mind turning them off, also?" It turns out my ears were not in fact just ringing from the volume of my previous listening, but in fact that my pocket was still humming with music. Specifically the words "Exquisite Dead Guy".

And then I turned in some more of the wrong homework-- not great at the online submissions, this girl.

I want to go back to bed, go ice fishing, go shopping... I would be happy going bow hunting. All I know is that I don't want to be here. I don't want to be in this semester at all for any reason whatsoever.

And yet, off to class number two which I did a crossword puzzle through last session. Oooh... I hope there wasn't any homework.

Now, I'm not saying that I think a half pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream and 2 packages of Ramen is a decent dinner for anyone, mind you...

.

...I'm simply saying it's what I just had for dinner.

The Little Things

It's the little things people forget about when dealing with the poor single mother. And it's the little things that leave me with that big feeling, the one of not knowing how to address the little things or taste the words coming out of my mouth.

I'm dating a man who drives a Hummer, lives in a 3 bedroom house all alone, and buys $50 ties without so much as looking at the price tag. And I've been a trooper, I have. I'm gracious when he picks up the bill, I don't fret about how utterly unthinkable most aspects of my life would be to him if he were to live them. But, he is a Packers fan and I wanted to wear his team shirt (more for our own amusement given my clueless nature regarding athletics than to be of some real Green Bay support mind you). And it seemed like a good idea-- at the time.

Did you know packers shirts, or at least any moderately attractive ones, are almost $30 plus shipping? And that in order for them to get here in time to wear for more than 2 days previous to the game, it's going to be about $40?

Well I do. That is to say, I do now.

And it's sad, remarkably so. I was online looking them up kind of halfheartedly (as in not yet looking at the list prices) when I got an email from him this morning, links to three separate shirts. He was happy that his new girlfriend wants to play (and I do, I really do). I could completely see the bearded little smile playing around the corners of his mouth. And then a little smile started playing around the corners of my (un-bearded) mouth . And then I started really looking, and the smile melted away as though Amazon.com were a sudden spring heatwave in early march and said smile was one of those tiny little dirty mountains of compacted snow and ice which used to be a giant mound of plowed white that remain after most of the snow has started to puddle away.

And it's not that I don't have $40 to spare here and there. It's not even as though I didn't spend more than that on my last Sephora bender. It's just that try as I might to think of it as a gesture in the way of love, I don't have $40 to spend on a sports teamed t-shirt I'm going to wear for 3 days, and I can't find a place in my mind where I have as little as I do and that's going to be one of the luxuries I choose and I can be OK with that.

Which is fine, and not a big deal, but it's one of those glaring obvious things I keep thinking about-- me and this man, we're different. And I offered to make a nice, oh fuck-- let's be frank: an absolutely adorable gesture, and then had to say "Oh, you know, it's going to take a while to get here" and know what neither of us are really talking about (and I honestly believe that in his good albeit naive nature he really doesn't think it matters at all): His girlfriend is literally poor, and sometimes limited by that.

And it's gross to blog, even knowing that he doesn't read my blog. And it's gross to know all on my own-- and some day I'm going to have to say outright "Yeah... I can't afford (some thing that isn't a big deal to him but is to me)". And it's going to feel gross to both of us. And that's when things are going to start to change.

I understand that I elected to live the life I did, that it wasn't even that I had to make a hard choice but that "I would rather not have very much money, and I would rather raise my child without too much money". It was always not only my choosing, but my very deliberate and sometimes even enthusiastic choosing. But, other people don't understand it-- not always. Men and the date night suggestions forgetting that this requires money per hour for a sitter. Friend plan evenings out that they know I'll just love, but I have strict rules about what I won't spend money on so I can spend money without concern in other areas. And ultimately, this isn't fair to them-- I've made a lot of decisions for these people and their relationships to me in deciding I was going to be poor. Sometimes too poor for the little things, which is what interpersonal relationships are made up of in general.

And I don't like Green Bay, I don't care. But I do like my boyfriend, and I would have cared to see that look on his face when I as promised showed up on game night in an adorable little green tshirt with those yellow letters across my adorable breasts, saying adorable little things and making such an adorable little gesture.

And when I think about the adorable lost in this little matter, it doesn't feel like such a little thing at all. Which is why in the time it has taken me to type this, I've decided to put one of my little splurges on hold and get this instead, because all too soon we're both going to have to look at the truth of his poor girlfriend-- and as long as that's already coming, I want to be sure there's a lot of delightful going on before the ugliness and discomfort comes along. I had someone in my life once who said that he always liked leaving my home and feeling the weight of poverty lift off of him... and he wasn't a great person to have in my life-- but he was an honest one. And since then, I've never been OK again with letting anyone else see that weight over my head or letting it seep into the fibers of their own lives, arranged entirely different for I'm sure exactly the reasons they should have been to them.

And as long as it's inevitable, I'm going to go ahead and not crush this wonderful man under that weight any sooner than need be, or even leave any clues that it is there if he's not feeling it yet.

"Mommy, is 'sustainable' like sharpening a pencil instead of just throwing it away when it breaks like you do?"

Um... probably.

Clearly, in this house 'pencil sharpeners' are for damn hippies.

Overwhelming Realities

I was sick for a week. In the world of a single mother, this is no small statement. I don't have family, I don't have the kinds of friends who can come and take a child for a few hours... "I was sick for a week" means "Too much TV was watched, the cleaning was not done, and I didn't fight with my 6 year old the way I should have about eating her fruits and vegetables".

And then a friend died. This resulted in 2 days of tears that just won't come but in passing bursts of snot and mascara, and that haunting feeling that of course I'll see her one more time to give her a hug, to talk about things, just because you see someone one last time that stands out. I don't remember the last time I saw her, it may have been a couple of Saturdays ago when I did the Macarena with her, but it may have been last Tuesday when I was flustered and didn't give her a hug. And I'm not entirely sure which is the case, and that isn't the way you see someone for a last time. Except that it is, I'm never going to see her again. And it is what it is.

And I start school tomorrow, I don't have any text books, my apartment is a pit, and I don't know what smells in my kitchen but I know something does. A friend, one of those dear ones that you just 'get' and that just gets you and you don't know how you weren't always friends with, referred recently to "living like a depressed child". I entirely understood the sentiment at the time, or I thought I did, but now that I really entirely do I want to go back in time and retract the "Oh my God, I know exactly what you mean" and wait until now, now that I really do.

There are panties on my kitchen counter, my class schedule is scrawled like a suicide note inside of my notebook (there are 5 buildings on my tiny little campus, how do I not know where 3 of my classes are?), I have not gotten any of my text books, I have 3 pieces to finish for an auction I signed on for months ago and am only half done with, and tomorrow I am turning 31 and want nothing more than to curl up fetal position and be reborn no sooner than spring. It's seldom that there's too much for me to deal with... but there's too much for me to deal with right now. This too shall pass, that's what I keep hearing and keep telling myself, but I'm dead on my feel right now, blogging instead of cleaning, and while willing everything to pass quickly, I'm still not even attempting the very basic fix of just for tonight passing out on the cool side of my pillow.

That's how fucking overwhelmed I am-- I can't even go to sleep because I'm too overwhelmed with the thought of waking up to all the same messes in the morning.

Must Be Friday Evening

Little Old Woman at store: Oh, that smells beautiful (lavender scented hand lotion). Your husband will like that...

Unwed Mother: Oh, I'm not married. It is nice though.

Little Woman: (patting me on the hand softly) Such a pretty girl. It's OK, you'll find someone.

Aging Spinster who clearly has little to live for according to look on Little Old
Woman's face: (backing away) Um, I'm not really the marrying type. Thanks though.

Disappointed Little Old Woman: It's fine, young lady. You'll meet someone some day. God has a plan for all of us.

Needless to say, I did not buy the hand lotion. My God, when does this ever fucking end? At what age will they finally just say "Poor dear, must be too late for her now" and not address me at all?