Rambling Roundup

You know that feeling when your stressed and it seems like life just keeps piling up more crap to get stressed about and you want to just roll over and play dead with a blanket over your head until life finally forgets you exist?

I'm totally playing possum right now.

Under my roof I currently have a quadriplegic child with a raging skin infection. His cheek looks like it's about to fall off. I have a husband who has a broken ankle and is hobbling around like a geriatric one legged bum. And then there is Frac who's abdomen is being held together with tape. Tape! Not stitches. Not glue. Just little steri-strips that are threatening to fall off so that the wound reopens and his innards fall out.

Add to that and I can't stand up straight because of my crippled back and we have one healthy member of the family. And she's currently trying to kill herself by taking volleyball shots to the head.

And my dog needs knee surgery.

Life is awesome.

I should tell you, before you invest any more time reading this post, that I have absolutely no point in mind as I type this. I'm rambling.

That's Fric. Dressed up for Halloween, as get this: Me. She's wearing my grade nine grad dress and styled her hair and makeup after some of of my junior high pictures.

I'm still laughing.

Also, I guess hanging onto that dress (that my mother made for me) all these years finally served a purpose.

Ah, to be 14 with a corsage once more...

It's sad when you realize your 15 year old daughter makes for a better version of your 14 year old self than you ever did.

In other news, I've joined iVillage Canada and their team so that I may spread my inane ramblings even further. My first post is live and I'd love if you would go check it out so that the powers that be that hired me actually think there was some merit to bringing me aboard. Click here to learn whatI have in common with a rat farmer in Alabama.

Over on Babble Voices I've been busy with my blog Hogwash From a Hoser. I wrote a post about teenaged hoodlums. I know all about teen hoodlums because I was once a hoodlum myself. Not that I'd admit that in a court of law or to my children's faces. Ahem.

I also wrote about my hatred of Halloween and how this one particular holiday keeps kicking me in the arse. Between dead kids, exploding appendixes and people who refuse to give disabled kids in costumes any candy when they are trick or treating I'm giving Halloween the bird. And not the nice type of bird if you know what I mean.

Now, if y'all excuse me, I plan on spending the rest of the day surfing the net, laughing at Lindsay Lohan and eating enough ice cream that I'll eventually grow udders and moo.

In other words, I've got work to do.

What my daughter's future looks like. Poor thing.

Somebody Had Better Change My Bed Sheets

Five years ago when my husband decided to leave me, er, I mean, work away from home, I told myself our situation was only temporary and I'd see him soon. I told myself the quantity of time we spent together didn't matter as much as the quality of time we created.

Five years ago I may have been a bit of a raging dumb arse.

Half a decade later and I've decided I want quantity of time over quality. Because, frankly, I'm tired of solo parenting two teens and a disabled boy while being singly responsible for having to change the bed sheets every time my dog decides to barf on them. Which happens about every other night.

The upside to my husband's continual and seemingly perpetual absences is that I'm saving a truckload of money on razor blades. Personal grooming has flown out the window and our heating bills have been reduced. When one grows a yeti-like coat of fur one tends to stay warm. My glass is always half full.

Still, I'd rather have him home, zoned out beside me watching documentaries on insects or war (his two personal favourites) or lost to the cyber world of online gaming than 600 km away, where he has his own personal housekeeper/chef and the luxury of yak-free dog vomit-less sheets.

I'm petty and selfish that way.

I shouldn't complain really. I mean I just saw him a week ago. For three whole hours. 3 hours after not seeing him for 31 days.

Three hours.

You know what we did in those three hours? Nothing fun, I can assure you. He sorted through the rubble of laundry for clean clothes and I yelled at him that his sprained foot wasn't sprained but actually broken. "Why haven't you gone to see the doctor??"

"I did! Three weeks ago when I fell! They said it was sprained!"

"They're morons! You don't have to be a trained medical profession to see your damn ankle bone is practically popping through your skin! Get to the damn hospital!"

So he did. And what do you know? The ankle is broken.

The sad part of this tale, besides the fact my husband now requires orthotic surgery and is hobbling around on crutches on a painful break, is the fact I wasn't even able to lord it over him that I was right. Because he had to go back to work.

His damn job is robbing me of my gloating privileges.

Never mind that it allows us to put food on the table, a roof over our head and a computer for me to whine to the internets.

So when my husband called last night to tell me he'd be home this Tuesday night, I was a little giddy. I started to mentally prepare a honey-do list to hand to him the moment he walked through the door. His presence would mean I wouldn't have to be responsible for getting our daughter to a volleyball tournament half way across the province, the garbage would get taken to the dump, and I could sleep on freshly laundered sheets that I wouldn't have to change.

"Um, don't get too excited there Tanis. I'm only home for 7 hours. And then I am gone again."

Wait. Whaaa?

"Did you forget? I'm going on vacation. I have to leave at 3 in the morning to catch my flight to Vegas. Remember? My annual boys trip?"

Curses. I can begrudge the man a lot of things, like having a housekeeper/chef/ample free time but I can't begrudge the man his annual man's trip. Every person, regardless of his or her sex requires some good old-fashioned friend time.

"Seven hours?"

"Ya, and that's if traffic is good and I can get home quickly."

I mentally tabulated the amount of time I'll have spent with him before I actually get to see him for a whole day again.

"You realize that means in 62 days we'll have seen each other for 10 whole hours?"

Silence.

"That kinda sucks dude."

"Ya, I know. I'm sorry."

There is no reason for him to apologize, not really. We're lucky he has stable employment and we're even luckier that we have managed to remember that we still like each other through all the absences.

But still.

10 hours does not leave a lot of time to scratch things off the old honey-do list or allow for me to comfortably gloat that I am always right.

"I'll make it up to you. I'll bring you an awesome souvenir."

"Oh goody. I like things that sparkle. Or that are named Siri."

"Oh. Well then I guess I won't bother with that key chain I was planning on."

Good idea Boo.

Aim higher. Or at least spring for a matching tee shirt.

Either way, I'm totally not going to bother shaving my legs.

See? My glass? Still half full.

 

Straddling the Line

I couldn't reach him at first, separated by a congregation of friends and relatives, him on one side, me on the other, so I had to content myself with watching him. He was unaware of my presence and for a rare second I was able to witness the boy he has become without any eye rolling or clowning. Somewhere along the path of time, he has come to look like the man his father once was. I'd never noticed the similarities before.

I watched him smile freely to those around him and I waited for him to notice me. For a brief second, I worried my son would be teenaged enough not to care I was there.

I was wrong to worry. He is still boy enough to light up when he sees me. I fervently hope that never changes.

I had to stand on my tippy toes to put my arms around him and bury my nose in his neck. He turned fourteen and this was the first birthday where his body no longer fit alongside mine. Fourteen years was all it took.

He stood there, stoic, as my arms were wrapped tight around him and let me breathe in his scent. He smelled of boyhood, a perfume mixed of sweat, outdoors and innocence. I smelled of airplane and stress. He patted my back as I whispered apologies in his ear for not being the first person in the world to wish him a happy birthday, the first person to hold him tight, as I have always done in the past. It was the first birthday of his that I hadn't been there to witness his arrival in a new year.

In those few moments as I held him tighter than I probably should have, I struggled to reign in my emotions. The tick tock of passing time is loud in my ears and I am all too cognizant that my time in his life as an active participant is limited and winding down.

He's getting too old to need me the way he once did. I'm getting too old to feel this young.

I once worried about the man he would grow to be, but as he steps closer into his adulthood I no longer worry about that. I won't waste my worry on who he will become because I'm confident in whom he is. Instead, I'll worry over what the future holds for him and fret about not finding my place in it.

With yet another set of birthday candles blown out, my contract of motherhood closes in on expiration. As I stroke his hair I find myself wishing children didn't grow so fast. I squeeze my eyes firmly shut to hold back the prick of tears that suddenly threaten to fall as memories of past birthdays, skinned knees and dinky cars race through my mind.

He's a boy straddling the line of adulthood.

No matter how tall, or how old he grows, he will still always be my boy.

As my arms fell to my side, he bent down and kissed the top of my head. "I'll be back soon," he promised as he raced off to go play with the other kids.

I'm going to hold him to that promise.

As he races to his future I hope he remembers to wait for me.

Happy birthday kid. I love you more everyday.