Julien and Scarlet have gone to San Diego until Saturday. Saturday my dad is coming over to help rip the patio off the house. Yes, we’ll rebuild it and no, I am not quite sure when. I’m hoping my dad rides in with a miracle in the back of his truck but I doubt it. We’ll see… In the meantime S.O. and I have some ideas on improvements and tweaks to make it more friendly so perhaps patio 2.0 will be a total win and all this will have been for some kick-ass goodness.

S.O. and I have had more orders this month than we have had all year combined. If this continues a pay cut won’t even be a blip on the radar… mostly.

What I’m working on right now is gratitude, if you can’t tell. “By the skin of our teeth…” S.O. and I often say, just as we were about to lose it all a saving grace comes through and yanks us back. I’d like to think that we’re being taught to have faith. That maybe that’s the answer to the whole “this life sucks” problem. Faith as small as a mustard seed… I’ve got a little more than that and I’m grateful for it. So many things have taken a radical turn and gone right when it was practically assured it was all going to go very wrong. And, that gratitude thing, when you look at your most used tags in your post stats… well, let’s just say that I’d like to start seeing “happy” and “thankful” show up in that list.

Deirdre and I have been doing some school shopping online. I had nearly forgotten that school starts in just a couple of weeks. Between homeschooling, high school, and college my back to school expenses have been reduced dramatically. It’s nice and I’m thankful. Sure, in the long run teenagers are more expensive, but I can get by with doing a little now so there are some nice, fresh things to enjoy as school starts back in and then do a little more as the weather cools off.

I’ve slept pretty well the last couple of nights. Last night S.O. and I settled in and enjoyed Memphis Beat both of us laughing out loud and pretty hard at several different parts… “What we have here… is a ghost plane.”

S.O. just rolled in fresh from the gym still wearing his athletic shorts, t-shirt, and sunglasses. Today I’m super grateful to see my husband come through the door and to find him so steamy attractive.

and I’m happy to hear my girls giggling in the floor a few feet away from me. I’m grateful all my children are happy and healthy.

and I’m so happy to be going on 4 weeks without anti-depressants as of this Sunday.

It’s not perfect but life is good.

Here we go again… the Wicked Witch of the West (shortly to be turned into an acronym because I’m tired of saying my mom, my mother, etc.) or WW is on a warpath again. She’s emailing S.O. constantly for stupid reasons and of course, we know from my cousin’s wife that S.O. is the ONLY employee she harasses.

She has some lovely, pompous posts on her blog that contain little jabs here and there that, of course, only I would recognize.

I should have known this morning when I woke up with massive cramps that it was already time to call it a day. Instead I got up, helped Julien with his resume and worked on some business files.

By noon Deirdre and I were putting ourselves together so she could go downtown with me while I got my hair done. I was way excited because I was beyond overdue for a “trim” which ended being a major whacking. I left the salon feeling lighter, cooler, and oh-so pretty. Deirdre and I decided we would stop by Starbuck’s for an iced tea and a snack. We blared the music that the guys make fun of us for blaring and sang along at the top of our lungs happily lost in our own little world.

I swear, if I had had the money we would have just left for the coast for the night, stayed in a cute hotel, had breakfast and come home in the morning.

So there I am wishing I wasn’t “just” Deirdre’s mom and that I was about XX lbs LIGHTER and 20 years younger. Really. I was barreling down the highway in my big ol’ “mom with kids” screaming Suburban heading west as far as I was willing to go without wasting too much gas or more time than I probably should. We drove to the outskirts of town and turned around and came back. All the while I was dreaming of summers in the backyard at my grandparents house, music on the radio, and at least 2 or 3 girls squealing, barefoot, swinging on the porch swing.

Deirdre was telling me about her friend who spends summers on the rodeo circuit with her dad and all the cute cowboys that were hitting on her now. I smiled and told Deirdre how I always seemed to have too big a weak spot for those cowboys and that the ones you always fall for are the biggest heartbreakers. How’d I put it? Ahh, yes, that they are nice to look, sometimes they are fun to touch – but never, NEVER let them go to your heart, girlfriend.

I laughed and told her how her daddy knows about my weak spot and asked if I’d still have him even though he wasn’t one of *those* cowboys. Meaning, boots, hat, and one of those asses that make you shiver when you see them in a pair of jeans. My man is a sort of cross between mountain man and cowboy. He had horses, knows his way around them and knows how to hunt through some very rural and scary mountain parts with a gun and a pack of dogs. After all, he killed his first bear at the age of twelve and it wasn’t a cub by any stretch.

Deirdre smiled and giggled. The kind of giggle that means she gets me and isn’t thinking of me as “ugh, just my mom” for that moment. It was nice.

But, nice wasn’t about to last… because around here nice never does.

I came home to find Julien seeming more wired than usual. S.O. was at my desk trying to get my computer to turn on. Okay, power surges and bullshit are nothing I am unfamiliar with in this oh-so wonderful energy sucking state we live in. As S.O. went out to check the electrical panel (on a house that is barely 4 years old, mind you!) our son let it slip that we had gotten a letter in the mail from city code enforcement.

Code enforcement.

For what?!?!?!?

Oh… because I had a couch sitting in my driveway on Monday when they happened to bring their sorry asses by – because a friend was coming to pick it up.

AND… wait for it…

My patio.

MY PATIO in the REAR OF MY HOUSE. My professionally constructed (by my DAD a BUILDER with a CONTRACTOR’S LICENSE!!!!) outdoor kitchen and patio – why? Oh… because even though it is under 100 Sqft. in this money fucking grubbing economy these cocksuckers are looking for every fucking dime they can get their stupid hands on. We have an existing patio and my dad added on to it. So now they want it permitted. My dad is calling some friends downtown. Thankfully.

It’s fixable, but it’s a royal pain in the ass.

In the meantime, my husband did a quick search on our property and found out that the same floor plan as ours just sold for $80,000.00 LESS than what we owe on our house. After all the modification drama… we were only maybe $20k in the hole… so in that time values have dropped again. Thankfully, there isn’t much we can do except continue to make our house payment and see what happens in the future. Still, S.O. isn’t happy.

Back to the permit bullshit… yeah, well, we have 2 bantam hens in our backyard that are also against code because they are considered livestock even though they aren’t full-size chickens and are bred for pets and show. Which means I am going to have to hide them out like illegal refugees or something.

It’s just more than I want to deal with and I’d just about kill for a couple of months of peace and quiet. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mean a two month VACATION – I just mean two months were nothing dramatic happens. Where we work and pay bills and raise kids and just live like normal people. That’s all I’m asking for and at this stage in my life – that can’t be asking for THAT much, RIGHT?

I recently finished reading “Women Food and God” by Geneen Roth. I absolutely love her way of writing and I was thrilled when I saw the word “fuck” numerous times through the pages.

I’ve been struggling with my weight for at least 10 years. It’s a major point of frustration for me. I’ve been very thin and right now… I’m not. Life is a bit too stressful to throw a diet on top of it. I don’t need to feel like I’m punishing myself on top of having to struggle in every other area of my life. And, the truth is? When I diet, I get angry and miserable. It really is as if I am punishing myself and then part of me gets very pissed for being punished so unfairly.

It’s not that it should be okay to be overweight. My health is definitely suffering and so is my ego. Ha!

But, somewhere beneath the fat and disgust with myself is something a little deeper that has taken me a long time to really desire delving into. This book helped me look at everything a lot differently. It’s not an overnight fix, it’s not an instant magic bullet, but it’s better than I was before I read the book.

In my life there are the things that happened before Julien’s diagnosis and then there are the things that happened after. It’s as if that event created this permanent line all crystallized by that moment where the first doctor told us he had cancer.

My son had two years of high school that were relatively normal. Track meets, finals, formal, his driver’s permit, and one week after obtaining his driver’s license his world shattered apart. By the time the surgeries were over I no longer had a mother or brother.

Tomorrow night my son graduates from high school. My brother will be seated just a few chairs away from him. My mother and stepfather and God knows who else they will drag along will be there as well. I fully expect my mother to attempt to make contact with Julien at some point in the night.

Graduation starts at 7:30pm and S.O. will be leaving immediately after to drive over 4 hours away because my mother and her boyfriend (S.O.’s boss) scheduled a class for S.O. to attend the morning after graduation.

I don’t think Julien is all that excited about graduation. I think he feels a great deal of anger, if not rage, at the fact that not only did he have cancer but he feels as if he is still paying for having cancer. As if he did something wrong… flaked off high school and now has to pay for it by attending community college for a couple of years before transferring to a university.

Meanwhile, my brother will leave after graduation for Europe with my mother and stepfather, she was kind enough to blog about how Julien wouldn’t be able to make the trip. In the fall my brother will attend the University of Santa Barbara and my mother will be relocating there as well to be with him.

I’m glad she’ll be gone. I’m glad there will be a great deal of distance at least most of the time. Meanwhile, Julien feels like a screw up. He was in tears yesterday convinced he had blown off high school that he could have pushed himself and done better.

All of this… should have been different. There should have been senior pictures, graduation announcements and all the other crap that goes along with it. Instead we had pain specialists, special diets, bad reactions to pain meds and the school treated him like he was a trouble maker.

It all should have been different. But, it’s not and we all need to just get on with our lives, I know. And, it’s very easy for me to tell him he has his whole life ahead of him and he’ll end up with a diploma from a University whether he spends 2 years at said University or 4.

I’m saying all the things you’d expect a mother to say and more. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t. And at the end of the day I have to be still with other thoughts, how unfair life can be, how cruel. Then I have to remind myself that my son is still living, breathing, healthy, cancer free and I have to have gratitude for that.

It’s just a tough pill to swallow and gratitude is hard to cultivate when what happened shouldn’t have happened to begin with.

So we’ll dress up and go through all the motions. We’ll throw a party Saturday night. We’ll keep our happy faces on in public so that no one knows that all of it got to us and especially so my mother knows that not even her last ditch effort got to us.

18 and half years ago when I gave birth to Julien I never anticipated this. I pictured high school graduation and I swore it was going to be different for him than it was for me. I didn’t walk across the stage. They called my name at rehearsal, from what I heard. But, I didn’t attend. I was home caring for Julien.

I’ll take it, I guess. At least he is walking across the stage.

It’s been a long time since I received any awards or pay it forward type of cool things like this. I adore Tiffany of Snerkology and have for a very long time. There are a very small handful of people who have followed me through one crisis after another, one blog to another, and as if that weren’t enough have actually reached out to offer me an ear, a shoulder to cry on, and that all important phone number with the genuine instruction to “call any time day or night”. Tiffany, is one of those people.

If you read her post she talks about a dear friend who gave her these awards and how they have never met in person but forged a long-distance friendship across the internet. My closest friends are much the same although I’ve been extremely fortunate to have met two in person. I count Tiffany among those friends. She’s a really awesome person with a really wicked sense of humor and I suck because I don’t get over to her blog nearly enough.

I’m just going to quote Tiffany on the things that go along with the awards.

For the Happiness 101 Award, I am encouraged to list the ten things that make me the happiest. For the Sugar Doll Award, I am encouraged to list ten things that you all may or may not know about me. For both, I am requested to pass the awards on to five blogger friends, who then post the awards on their site with the required information and then they, too, pay it forward to five of their blog friends. And on. I confess I have no idea the origins of these particular awards, but the concept is what keeps us all connected.

Happiness 101 – Ten Things That Make Me Happiest

This is a really good one for me to do and I want you to know that I’ve struggled with the ten things because I wanted them to be really meaningful and I wanted to challenge myself to some soul searching focused on happiness. The way things have been rolling around here it’s been far too easy to focus on the bad stuff and I happen to believe that what you focus on grows, so God knows I need a shift of focus. You might not believe this but I had one helluva time working up this list. Seriously.

1. I am happiest when my family (specifically husband and children, including Scarlet) are in the same room for an evening getting along, cracking jokes and genuinely enjoying each other’s company.

2. I am happiest when I am being creative and it works out. There is no substitute for quality zing time.

3. Quality time alone with my husband. It recharges my battery and gives me the strength I need to keep moving in a positive direction.

4. All the bills being paid.

5. The right music at the right time. It can make my soul soar.

6. A hot bubble bath, glass of wine (or whiskey on the rocks), iPod, and being able to text and giggle with friends while I zone out.

7. When S.O. rolls over in the middle of the night and wraps his arms around me like he might not be able to keep sleeping unless I’m curled up next to him.

8. My son when he’s in a good mood and being his usual funny, witty self.

9. Cooking. I really enjoy getting lost in chopping, dicing, prepping and putting my own spin on things.

10. Meditating outside in the sunshine.

Sugar Doll Award – Ten Things You May Not Know About Me

1. I love Anne Rice and one of my favorite books is The Witching Hour. So much so that I named myself and my children (on this blog) after characters in that book. Unfortunately, the character I would have wanted to name S.O. after has the same name as S.O. and that’s what you call ironic.

2. The movie “50 First Dates” makes me cry every time. No matter how hard I laugh during, I’m always left with a glass half-empty / glass half-full clusterfuck feeling that never ends well.

3. I drink coffee almost every morning and at least once a week Deirdre finds a cup in the microwave that I warmed up and forgot about.

4. I cry every time I listen to “Better Than A Hallelujah” “I Need A Silent Night” and “Overnight” by Amy Grant. Actually, there are a few of her songs that choke me up… so I generally avoid listening to them unless I have the emotional stability to handle it. If Deirdre puts it on it’s usually when we are alone and she is kind enough to ignore it or I have my sunglasses on and hope she doesn’t notice my voice cracking as we both sing along.

5. I sing. I’m not professionally trained because my mother was a professionally trained singer who actually cut a couple of records back in the 80′s and let’s just say she would not have tolerated anything that might remotely feel like competition. My singing was kept to Christmas pageants at church and the occasional karaoke night after I had a couple of drinks. My vocals are saved for lullabies and my children unless it’s Christmas time and the whole family joins in. I don’t do microphones… ever.

6. Before my sister got all strange on me, we actually were researching building our own drive-in movie / restaurant. We used to have 2 drive-ins here in town but both have been shut down. Kind of sad, really. I grew up going to drive-in movies and sitting in the back of my dad’s truck.

7. I used to love to write. My mother wanted me to be a children’s author. She picked apart every story I ever wrote, none were ever “cute enough” to her satisfaction, now I can’t finish a story to save my life. Clearly, there is a psychological thing going on here and I’m not exactly interested in exploring it.

8. Any Willie Nelson song reminds me of my grandpa. He used to call Willie “Ol’ pigtail” and every time we got in the car to go somewhere grandpa always started singing, “On the road again…”

9. I never really liked my grandfather’s second wife. I’m not even sure if she’s still alive.

10. I hated beer until I was pregnant with Rowan and actually began craving beer. No, I did not drink while pregnant but I boy did I smell a lot of beer while I was pregnant. Now I’m a hopeless convert.

Okay, so I’m supposed to pick 5 people to bestow this upon…

Dayle @ Sin City Mom
Chickie @ Skittering Thoughts
Marissa @ Marissa Turner
Trish @ Not Your Typical Granny
S @ Simply Sneaky

You might notice if you have read much around here for very long, that I’m a bit Joe Friday, “Just the facts, ma’am.” That’s not exactly true 100% of the time, but what really is?

Sometimes I prefer facts and running down situations and the order of events to vomiting up all the uncomfortable emotional feelings that I experience during these events. Over my life I’ve had to be tough in many situations. I’ve learned to be hard the hard way. I prefer voicing anger to voicing hurt, it’s easier and it involves fewer tears and certainly far less vulnerability.

You know how they say that a cat who lets you pet its’ stomach is a cat that trusts you? I don’t expose my stomach, let alone allow someone to touch it. I also have always identified far more with cats than with dogs.

So, it’s easy to claim to be venting and purging while I run down histories and current events. The truth is that sometimes the emotions don’t get purged. They hang around long after I’ve hit the publish button and set forth another stream of expletive laced electrons.

I accepted Princess Twatface as a friend on FB.

I don’t know what that means. It probably means more to me than it does to you and what you might not understand about that is that I don’t have very many family members or people who live in the same town as I do on my FB. I prefer it that way. The truth is my online activities have always been my own. My own little world and I decided who I wanted to allow in. I know that sounds ridiculous given the very essence of the internet but it’s my illusion of comfort and I plan on maintaining it.

And, yes, God knows I keep lists of who can see what and when… but I don’t trust that either, so I try to be careful.

The new revelations have made S.O. and PT comrades in arms so-to-speak. For him, it’s a “work friend” for me it’s an entanglement I never wanted. He can keep a distance… meanwhile she can go home (and I know this isn’t the case it’s just a stupid example!) and listen to ridiculous stories about me growing up, my grandparents, and the small portion of my life that I hold very near, dear and borderline sacred.

My cousins (PT’s husband and sister-in-law) were two of my favorite people on the planet next to my grandmother. Those family vacations in the mountains with my parents (still together), grandparents and cousins (the afore mentioned two) are some of my most treasured memories. The kind of memories where you can still smell the breeze blowing over the lake, feel the sand between your toes on the shoreline, and the taste of peanut butter spread on graham crackers. Dreams of my grandmother have always involved that lake and the forest around it.

When my grandmother died the only people I wanted around me were those two cousins. I doubt they felt the same about me. They were 12 and 13 while I was 8. Sometimes that age gap felt like an eternity to me. The term hero worship probably doesn’t do it justice. I remember late nights following our grandmother’s death telling stories about my grandmother and each of us taking turns laughing until some reminder jabbed us and one by one we’d lean on each others shoulders sobbing until someone said something funny enough to break through the grief and the next story would begin. We were simply too young to completely bear the enormity of the loss thrust upon us.

Even 6 years later, living at my grandparents house my cousin would come by and eventually he’d break down and cry. I lived there in the middle of my grandmother’s world, he was a visitor with no grandmother to visit. I remember seeing him cry and feeling like my heart was breaking for him.

My older cousin (the girl) taught me to draw, read The Chronicles of Narnia to me and gave me a treasure trove of phenomenal books and stories that I have shared with my own girls. Her brother (the one married to PT) taught me to skip rocks across the lake, climb rocks, and get into trouble. No one ever made me laugh as hard as those two did when they would recount various exploits, adventures, and troubles they had gotten into.

Once my parents divorced things where never the same. My mother was promptly ostracized by her family for divorcing – even though both of my uncles were on marriage #2. My mother is no saint… but they aren’t either. Those men are guilty of some pretty horrific atrocities. The worst sort, actually. From beating wives and children, to rape, and worse.

When I was pregnant with Julien, my mother in one of her freak out moments called my cousin and told him that I was being held against my will by my father. He hopped on a motorcycle and drove three hours at night, in the winter, through an icy mountain pass to get to me and make sure I was okay. He didn’t attend my wedding to S.O. although he was invited. His sister did and her husband (at the time) was my wedding photographer.

The contradictions here are bizarre and they seem even more strange as I look back at them. Drive three hours to check on me… don’t show up at my wedding.

My other cousin is now buddied up with my mother. She used to try to engage Deirdre in conversations, take her out for coffee – and I trusted her. I trusted our past, our relationship, and my belief in her being an honest upfront person. She was basically spying for my mother and when she couldn’t get Deirdre to sway to the dark side – she dropped her like a hot potato. I haven’t heard from or spoken to her in over a year.

Turns out she no longer speaks to her brother. And the two of them? At just a year or so apart in age had always been closer than close, the very best of friends. They protected each other from an abusive father and cold, nasty stepmother, they provided a shoulder for each other to cry on… and now? The two don’t speak because one of them has a relationship with my mother and the other knows my mother for what she really is.

Now I’m sitting here on the fringe wanting nothing to do with anyone from that side of the family… and my husband works with PT. We run into them at the local home improvement store, she was kind enough to drop a bottle of wine off at my house yesterday just because she thought I might like it.

But no word from him.

In fact, he’s talked more to my husband than he has to me in the last ten years.

He’s friendly with S.O. they laugh and crack a joke when S.O. has to meet PT at her house for work stuff. He knows S.O. is married to me… and he’s never reached out. Not once.

I’d like to… because I see pictures of him and I remember my grandparents and it’s almost like there is a little piece of them still there.

But it comes back to that cat analogy and I won’t reach out. Too many times I’ve reached out and had my hand slapped in return. And, of course, the ultimate, that the feelings aren’t similar and aren’t returned – and that would hurt most of all.

We’ve had our ups and downs with Scarlet. All in all, I’m very happy with my son’s choice in women. Scarlet is here every weekend and most days after school. She’s definitely a part of the family and I really do feel like she’s one of mine.

Over the last couple of years I’ve realized some of my shortcomings where communication is concerned. I can also look back to my childhood and see where some of those come from. It’s not a lack of desire to communicate better or assertively, it really comes from a place of extreme anxiety when dealing with difficult topics.

I’d like to hope that our family can work through issues instead of having one issue fester and explode until it comes to weeks or months of not speaking. Not that I have a particular issue or situation in mind. At the moment anyway.

Yesterday I had the extreme displeasure of actually listening to Scarlet’s mother throw another one of her temper tantrums. The woman is very careful to appear to be some loving, wonderful, but tough mother. She’s very big on appearances. Unfortunately, she doesn’t quite get that when she is on the phone screaming at her daughter people even a room away can hear her.

It’s not the first time, it’s easily the 20th time I’ve had to listen to her scream at Scarlet for little to no reason. She has a knack for making a .5 into a 10 in no time at all. She also fully knows Scarlet’s every button and achille’s heel – since she so cleverly installed them with years of abuse.

I sat across the room watching Scarlet tear up, attempt to appease, beg and then be subjected to verbal abuse including but not limited to calling her names (bitch) swearing (fuck this fucking that, etc. etc.) and so on and so forth. If Scarlet attempts to react maturely and rationally (and I’ve heard her do so and would be pleased if my children responded to me in such a manner) her mother darts the other direction telling Scarlet that she is NOT Scarlet’s peer but her SUPERIOR and that she will ALWAYS be her SUPERIOR and that Scarlet is not to talk to her as if they are on an equal level.

Scarlet is eighteen. Her mother constantly tells her that just because she is eighteen is absolutely NO reason to think that she (her mother) does NOT control ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.

She won’t allow Scarlet to apply for financial aid for college because she finally admitted to her that she’s been fudging on her taxes for years (and on the taxes of other people’s that she prepares) and it could get her in a lot of trouble.

Scarlet has been told (from a very young age) that she will never be as smart as her mother because half of her genes are “stupid” since they came from her father (the ex-husband). Scarlet is underweight, has severe hormonal issues due to this and her doctor told her to gain 5 pounds. When she gained 3 her mother waited until they were in the car and began berating Scarlet for being “fat” – the girl has a dancer’s body. She’s tall and leggy.

Yesterday after calling Scarlet atrocious names she hung up on her. Then 10 minutes later called back to scream at her and tell her “not to cry” because she wasn’t going to have her playing some “oh poor me act” in front of Julien – AND – that JULIEN was NOT to give Scarlet ANY sympathy at all.

That’s the one that broke it for me. I was nearly on the phone with the woman. If she wants to treat her daughter like garbage – that’s fine. But it will be a cold, cold day in hell before she thinks she’s going to order MY BOY around. She hasn’t seen angry or violent, but she’s about to.

I talked to S.O. and the two of us talked to Julien who then discussed it with Scarlet. We both think it would be in her best interest if she moved in with us. She practically lives here anyway and, unfortunately, her mother isn’t the only problem. She has a stepfather (who she is forced to call “dad”) who has gotten inappropriately grabby with her, is abusive (has broken her mother’s nose) of her mother, and has gone after Scarlet physically. The last time was last summer when Scarlet finally told them that she was going to call the police and that S.O. and my dad would be over to pick her up. The coward (stepfather) backed down then as most men like that do.

I’m attempting to encourage Scarlet to thoughtfully create an exit strategy that will allow her to keep her things (clothing, etc. since her mother has that sort of temper) and not make the final move until all of her bases are covered. We’ve already researched and found that if she has been forced from her home due to abuse, etc. that she would be granted financial aid for college right on the spot.

S.O. keeps pointing out that maybe we have gone through all the garbage with our mothers so that we have some sort of insight to provide to someone else. I haven’t really gotten into S.O.’s mother much… maybe I will later on. Suffice it to say she’s almost worse than my own mother.

I’m so tired of the “mama drama” it’s all around me and it seems I keep having to deal with it in some way, shape, or form on at least a weekly basis.

I think sometimes that depression “hole” kind of sneaks up on you. I can be tripping around my life, wiping noses, counters (not with the same cloth, thank you!) and doing laundry thinking, “wow, shit is so not as shitty as it was this time last year!” and then – whammo. I find myself at the bottom of the hole with an emotional equivalent of a busted leg and I think, “Holy shit. I so did NOT see this coming!”

Like Mother’s Day. I woke up Saturday feeling uncharacteristically bitchy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m familiar with traditional bitchy, but this was a bitchy that I don’t like. I detested everyone around me no matter how nice they tried to be, I was angry and had no idea why.

Sunday morning I received a very thoughtful gift from my kids. The second I saw it, I hated it. I convinced myself it was ugly, horrible, and for the love of God why couldn’t they have put it in a gift bag or wrapped it nicely? I thanked them with all the sweetness I could muster up and I returned to my bedroom.

I sat with my back against the headboard, knees curled to my chest, angrily flipping channels and sobbing. My phone was screwing up – again and I threw it across the room watching the back fly off one way the battery another and the phone land face up in the middle of the floor.

S.O. tripped upstairs later, “Can I get you something to drink?” He glances at the floor, his blue eyes twinkled a bit, but he kept a somber look on his face. “Was that what I heard thumping up here?”

“Probably.”

He left and returned with a pint of beer. Then he sprawled across the end of the bed on his stomach and pretended to be interested in anything that was on television. He seemed unmoved by the constant channel changing and didn’t appear to notice that I made it a point to put it on every sort of show he might dislike – much like a child testing boundaries, I was testing his patience.

It’s times like that when he amazes me most. He faced the television, impervious to my jabs, sipped his own beer and occasional glanced back at me to ask a question.

“What got you so sad today?”

“Sad? You call this sad?” I said… fighting back tears. Somehow it almost made it all worse that someone would try to care or be interested in the black, tarry, ugly mood that had overcome me.

Mother’s Day has never really been about me. I’ve been a mom for 18 years and it’s never really been my day. Usually I’m scrambling around helping make a nice dinner, even with S.O. and the kids shooing me away and attempting to convince me that they were also doing this for me.

Nope, I’ve always focused on my mother for Mother’s Day. I don’t remember last Mother’s Day. But, I hope I don’t forget this one.

By the time I could manage to make it downstairs S.O. was grilling chicken, the house was clean, the kids had all disappeared (S.O. sent them on a last minute errand) and I ventured out to the patio…

Just in time to see a batch of the ugliest, blackest clouds ever rolling in. It was as if the weather was going to match my mood and see who could hold out the longest.

It wasn’t a bad evening. My dad and stepmom came by for dinner, there were lots of laughs and the all the usual family dinner stuff.

The next morning I woke up embarrassed and ashamed but all the while knowing that I didn’t exactly have a lot of control over what had happened to me. These “mommy issues” run deep and just about the time I think I’ve dealt with them something knocks me on my ass again. But, about the time I get knocked on my ass I get something hand delivered by the universe plopped into my lap. Usually it’s nothing more than a good reminder of why I don’t have her in my life anymore, sometimes it’s more satisfying than that.

S.O. has spent most of this week working with my cousin’s wife. I think I’ve referred to her as Princess Twatface in the past. Her dad owns the company that my mother’s boyfriend is supposedly taking over and of course my mother’s bf is S.O.’s boss.

Turns out – Princess Twatface isn’t so happy with my mother.

See? My mother is hanging out with my cousin’s mother. That would be my mother’s EX-Sister-in-Law. So while everyone at the company knows my mom and boyfriend have their relationship and my mom works for boyfriend as well – seems my mother then shows up at family functions (funerals, Easters, etc.) with my brother and his father (the guy my mother lives with) as if they are a perfectly normal family.

My cousin doesn’t get along with his mother. Having to deal with his mother now buddied up with the aunt he hates makes it even worse.

Turns out that PT and my cousin were convinced that she was going to lose her job because my mother started working at the company (when your dad owns the company what do you have to worry about? But, whatever) they also thought that S.O. was tight with my mom’s boyfriend and was sent out on spy missions to keep an eye on PT. Seriously. WTF? Soap opera central here.

Two days of heart-to-heart talks and it turns out that a lot of the shit we thought was being directed at us over the last year, PT and my cousin thought was being directed at her. And? Some of the bullshit emails I received from my mother and statements she made on her blog about “coming clean” with the men in her life – might have been inspired by PT complaining to boyfriend that he and my mother had no right putting her in the position of having to put up with them at work and then my mother and her other family at personal family functions.

Are you keeping up with any of this? Is any of it making sense? I’m not trying to be cryptic here as much as I am actually trying to be somewhat brief and not get stuck in a giant recant of all the past year’s activities. Feel free to leave questions for further clarification in the comments – I promise I will answer.

Somehow this has all managed to work out in our favor because S.O. and Princess Twatface in their mutual dislike of my mother and support of their spouses have now sort of joined forces and begun backing each other up. Thus, my mother’s manipulation along with boyfriend (the boss) isn’t going to get so far any more. Especially given that Princess Twatface’s daddy still owns the company.

I’m not entirely thrilled with PT but I think I’ll learn to tolerate her a lot more since she sees through my mom’s bullshit now as well.

I clicked a link somewhere and ended up finding an old “friend” from high school on FB today. That link ended up to more linking and so on and so forth. I soon found myself in a quagmire of faces from my past some with interesting lives and some with uninteresting lives. I found people on other people’s friends lists that I never would have imagined because I was in on some of those smack-talking sessions.

I found the ex-best friend, mentioned here and I was momentarily thrilled because she’s far fatter than I am. Okay, that was petty and shitty, I know, but she slept with my ex-husband so I think I’m entitled to some snark here or there. That is a whole Jerry Springer chapter of life I would prefer to forget.

I tripped through and saw other faces, faces of people I was close to for several years (years before high school even). I lost an hour or so, gave myself a headache, and managed to dissolve any vestige of self-esteem I have been trying to muster for years.

Okay, maybe not that bad, but kinda.

It’s just strange to see the same groups of people still socializing, knowing I used to be a member of those groups and have somehow been completely forgotten. /needless ego rant.