Thursday, September 25, 2014

I really don't have anything clever to call this...

...so here we go.

Lately, I have been feeling like my house is a metaphor for my life. It is cluttered, cramped, disorganized, unruly. There is ALWAYS something I have lost, and no matter how hard I try, no matter how many days I work until I am cranky & exhausted, I can't get it together or stay on top of it.

Y'all, I have HAD IT with losing things. And losing random things. We have 1/2 of any number of toys of the kids', we have 6 out of 9 gears for Baby J's gear toy. I have 1 out of a  set of 2 shirts. I can't find my senior pictures, the folders where the 2013 financial information is, the ticket stubs from the first football game of the season.
It fills me with an angry resolve-a "fuck this, fuck that, I am going to FIND this shit if it fucking kills me" sort of resolve. And I walk around angry, grouching at anybody who makes the mistake of talking to me. Things always appear, they always have, but the process is an angry one.

And of course, spending time cleaning, organizing, tidying, sorting, etc. being the neverending process, I think about how much time I am spending with Baby J. Enough? I think so. I feed him and play with him and do stuff with him. Take him places. But always that fraction of Mommy-guilt creeps in... "am I doing enough?"

Then of course I remember Alex & Bub being babies. I worked nights when Alex was a baby so I spent all day with her. I didn't work when Bub was a baby so I got to be home with him. I remember taking care of him, but not playing with him as much as I remember playing with Alex or the way I play with J now. Let me tell you... thank God for digital photography. I have thousands of pictures of my kids in all stages of life-and I can look at them any time I want to. So little effort, so little time spent in order to have the pictures... having a digital camera and a computer to look at the pictures is one of the technological advances I am really and truly grateful for.

(Let me interject here-if you don't already... BACK UP YOUR DATA!! It takes no time at all to burn a DVD or copy things onto a thumb drive.)

Hmm... where to next? Money. Money sucks, y'all. If you didn't know that Jason lost his job in May, well... he did. It appears they replaced him while he was out on FMLA and then when he came back afterwards, found "reasons" to write him up and summarily fire him. Fair? No. Right? No. Did they do it anyway? Yes. So we have been subsisting on unemployment compensation for the last 4 months. Comes to a whole whopping $13000 a YEAR. Do the math. It is by the grace of God and knowing our landlord well that we still have a roof over our heads. He is a blessing. He's a jerk and I complain about his lack of doing ANYTHING, but he's a blessing now, so I guess I oughta shut the hell up. We have just enough to squeak by-my parents have helped us with big things-and for that I am grateful and blessed. I will never be able to repay them in their lifetime unless we win the lottery, so I hope they will be satisfied watching us pay it forward and take care of our children if and when they need us.

To wit... we have decided that if our financial situation does not incur a drastic change by the beginning of 2015 we are moving. Away. We can keep just existing here, squeaking by, providing a mediocre life for our children. We have to do more, do better, be better so they can be better.

I am tired of being good, feeling like I am trying to do good, being honest, forthright, helpful, productive in my own way, etc., just to feel like the universe is continually shitting on us. Enough is enough. I am tired of the light at the end of the tunnel being an oncoming train.