I’m officially not a fan of mother’s day.  I’ll tell you why – Craig’s mom is a mother, and that woman is definately not something to celebrate.  Also, the fact that she’s a mother and I’m a mother means we have something in common, and the fact that I have something in common with her makes me a little ill.

Maybe I’m harsh, maybe I’m unforgiving, maybe I’m mean.  That’s irrelevant though, because she’s worse.  She’s passive aggressive and conniving, and when you put those two things together in a big, loud, overbearing package, you’ve got a force to be reckoned with.

Sandy says it’s a full moon, and that could be causing the forces of the world to be coming down on me a little harder than usual.

A week ago, Craig suggested that he take Connor and Elly to his mother’s house for Mother’s day.  It would give me a “break”, and I could get some much needed rest and relaxation.  Now, keep these important things in mind: 1) Elly is 5 months old, 2) Elly is 5 months old, and 3) Elly is 5 months old.  For one, that means that a “day of relaxation” would require me to prepare for this fabled day for a week or so, pumping and storing breastmilk for my infant child at any point I could find “free” to do so.  She needs to eat every 2-4 hours, more or less, so I’d need to find time between feeding her to sit down away from her and Connor both, just to make even more milk for her, but this would need to be perfectly timed to be both useful (milk is actually produced), and not detrimental (doesn’t piss off Elly the next time she wants to eat).  That sounded like a really fun thing for me to worry about for a week just so Craig’s mom would be happy.

So, say I got all of this milk ready so that Craig’s mom could see my children and her son on Mother’s day.  Now, I’m at home, worrying about how the idiot furball dogs that Craig’s parents own are most likely biting my son and growling at my daughter in between barking their fucking heads off and… ok, just fucking worrying about everything… supposedly relaxing.  After three hours, I’m trying to relax still but something’s happening in those food bags that I used to call my breasts.  They tingle, itch, and feel like they’re too tight in my bra.  I wait another hour, relaxing as much as I can in between pacing around because I’m pissed off that my kids are at their idiot grandma’s house on my special day.  Now the food bags hurt.  OH YEAH!  I forgot!  Elly is 5 months old, and is a breastfed baby, and that means… YEP!  I STILL HAVE TO DRAIN THESE FUCKING THINGS EVEN WHEN SHE’S NOT AROUND!  This isn’t something I can just stop doing one day because my husband and his mother decide I’m supposed to be enjoying my day alone while they mess up my kids!

Ok, here’s the last, and possibly most important, reason why the fact that Elly is 5 months old is important to why I don’t want my children going over to Craig’s mom’s house tomorrow.  I JUST PUSHED A HUMAN OUT OF MY BODY 5 MONTHS AGO.  And that wasn’t the first time that I grew something inside my body for almost a year and then pushed it out of a tiny hole not exactly meant for expelling large things on a regular basis.  I thought that if anything, the clear vision of me doing that so recently would really stick out in Craig’s mind – I’m an amazing woman deserving of celebration at least one full day a year.  Craig’s mom, on the other hand, did that only once, as recently as 31 years ago.  In fact, in the past 10 years or so, she hasn’t done much for her son other than cause unnecessary guilt, stress, and disgust on occasion.  Once in a while she tries to purchase some love or attention.  So yeah, going to her house, or the mere suggestion of it, pissed my off royally.  That fight was fun.

Then today, Craig was at the table yelling at Connor to eat his lunch, when he casually but ever so subtly louder than he had been speaking, mentioned to Connor that he was stressed that he had to tell “Murphee Munga” that we weren’t going to see her tomorrow and that he “was going to send flowers” but he didn’t and now it’s too late.  Now, the reason why the flowers are significant was that in our argument in the week prior, I had become angry also because Craig was going to spend $50 on sending a bouquet via Proflowers.com for his mother’s gift for Mother’s day.  I firmly objected for several reasons, the most important of which is our current financial situation.  We just refinanced our house so that we can afford to stay living here, and he wanted to spend extra money on a big present that would be thrown away in a week.  Stupid.  Stupid to get flowers for his mom, stupid to get flowers for me!  Flowers are stupid, unless they’re randomly bought in an impulse buy when you’re passing by a flower shop and thinking about someone you love.  Then they’re good.  All other obligatory times, flowers are stupid.  I suggested that Craig actually think about his mom, about what she would like, purchase it, and give it to her near Mother’s day.  Perhaps the following weekend we could go see them, or invite them over, and he could give her a gift then.  I even looked online for a gift and found a cute little RV bird feeder that I’m sure Craig’s mom would just love to hang outside their little trailer door on one of their camping trips this summer.  Craig didn’t follow through though and buy the damn thing.  It was $19.  I’ll go as far as to reprimand my husband for spending our money frivolously on his mother, I’ll search for presents for him for his mom… but I’m not his mother and I’m not going to go buying his gifts to other people for him.  He’s a man, and he needed to do a little of that work, but he didn’t and that’s his damn fault.  Not mine.

The long-winded point is this: Craig mentioned to our Connor something completely meant for me – and in one short but extremely passive-aggressive statement, he pissed me off past boiling.  Now all that I want to do is drive to MY mom’s house and relax with my parents and my kids all day, but that whole idea is just totally shot – I couldn’t take my kids to see my mother after screaming about going to Craig’s mom’s house for over a week.  We’re just stuck here tomorrow regardless.  Honestly, I’ve been so pissed off today that I’m not sure how I’m going to handle tomorrow, and I almost wish I could just sleep through it.  If I could just lower my expectations of life to a low enough point that these things wouldn’t matter to me anymore, I think I’d be a happier, or at least mellower, person.

This is a long post.  I’m a tired mom.

G’night.

I had a new thought today, and I have to keep blaming things on my pregnancy hormones, but sometimes things can’t be so easily shrugged.

Maybe we should just concentrate on Craig going to CRNA school?  Maybe if he’s doing that, and he becomes a big fancy CRNA, I could stay at home with my kids for a while and do what is right for them, and for me, for a short while?

Is that SUCH a crazy thought?  I mean, I know I want to be a midwife, but it will mean more care for Connor by other people, other people I don’t trust and that don’t have my child’s best interests in mind.  I’m dwelling.

So the truth is, I have this ONE simple task to do at work today before Ravneet gets here, and I keep procrastinating because I really really really can’t get Connor out of my head.

I’ve posted quite a bit this week, and I don’t really know how I’m finding time to do it.  Perhaps it’s in waiting for huge databases to restore that I find a quiet moment or two to reflect on how much I hate it here.  Yes, yes, that’s it.

I talked to Craig a while ago about discussing moving Connor into the bigger kids room at preschool instead of being stuck in the little kids room.  I also briefly mentioned a few days ago that maybe I would consider talking to Scott about working a day or two a week after I deliver this baby, part time, just from home.  I don’t see a whole lot of action on Craig’s part as far as getting financially stable before this baby is born, so of course, my options are to sit by and wait until the roof caves in, or go and fix things myself, metaphorically speaking of course.  So I suggested this new option, which probably I should have kept to myself so as not to give him any glimmer of hope of getting off easy on this one.  Anyway.  My mistake.  So I’m talking to him about Connor being at preschool in the bigger kids room, and he said something like “Well, especially if you’re going back to work after this baby’s born, we’re going to need some childcare.”  GOD DAMN IT.  I’m NOT GOING BACK TO WORK AFTER THIS BABY’S BORN!  Maybe, possibly, I’ll work PART TIME, after about 4 months off, and that’s only a MAYBE right now.  I mean, I don’t want to!  I don’t want to AT ALL!  And I don’t want Craig to think I’m going to, because whenever he is given ANY slack, he takes it all and doesn’t work hard enough to do things good for our family (like MAKING MORE FREAKIN MONEY TO PAY THE HUGE STUPID BILLS.)  I flew off the handle at that comment, probably a bit more than necessary but I’ll attribute it to the pregnancy hormones and the fact that I have a really yucky stomach ache that won’t go away.  I hate men.

SO THEN.  I’m looking at the stupid status messages on this Pandion thing at work, and people generally have really stupid ones, like “Oorayhay orfay ednesdayway” and other random shit.  But one person has “Thinks using the EEADDR studr was an error.  Address user record would have worked.”  And although that doesn’t mean anything to anyone but people in this god forsaken office, that’s enough to really make me mad.  And I’ll explain.

Everything I do here involves generalized crap that everyone can just steal and use at will.  They think it will work because I wrote it, and for the most part, it does.  HOWEVER, I am human.  And I do make mistakes, silly mistakes, stupid mistakes that I can’t blame anyone for except my own stupid self.  AND I DO, I take the blame for errors, I fix them, I republish the scripts people are stealing and everyone, for the most part, is happy.  THEY SHOULD BE HAPPY, because if they had any fucking clue what goes into the scripts I’m writing for them, they’d know that I saved them hours and hours and hours of work.  Work that, if given the chance, I would gladly throw right back in their smug faces and smash all around so they can’t BREATHE because of the work that I’m doing for them.  But no, I do my job, and I do it as well as I can (though lately I’ve been spending more time blogging and studying than working, I’ll admit).

So this little stupid comment about something foreign to everyone but us is extremely frustrating, because what it means is this: some turd in this office has had his plans for some asinine testing paused temporarily because something doesn’t work in the code I wrote.  This thing that doesn’t work in the code I wrote is complicated, and it doesn’t work not because I didn’t write it correctly, but because in the basic software itself, the developers decided not to allow a certain function.  This function is necessary for what I’m trying to do.  So now, I have to figure out 1) how to do what they want me to do, and 2) how to ask the developers how to do it, without pissing them off for asking for something that would “never happen”.  So, this thing that will “never happen” is apparently happening en masse for the client that this dummy with the status message is working on.  And he wants someone else to fix his problem.  Poor baby.

I know that’s probably all Chinese.  The gist of this all is this: people here suck.  They don’t even realize their laziness, or that their complaints are so minuscule and obnoxious it’s almost more effort to make my ears listen to their complaints than it is to fix them and get on with my life.  And THIS is another reason why Craig’s comment about me coming back to work made me furious today.  I DON’T FUCKING WANT TO, NOT TODAY, NOT TOMORROW, NOT EVER.  I do, because it’s necessary.  Someone else in this marriage HAS to take the responsibility for doing unwanted things once in a while.

Overreaction. That’s what it was. But I think I have plenty of good reasons to overreact today.

I woke up at 6am to Connor crying about wanting to watch Blue’s Clues and drink some milk. It was sunny outside already, so I guess I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he was confused and doesn’t realize how friggin early 6am is. I need to make better curtains for his room so that this doesn’t keep happening. He made me shower with the door open, demanded his milk immediately when I got out, freaked out a billion times when I helped him put his pants on because they were “uncomfortableing him”, and somehow we managed to make it out the door. I forgot the following: my lunch, my backpack, my waterbottle, and Connor’s trike. Apparently it’s the “Trike-A-Thon” at school today.

We got through it all. Connor smiled when I left preschool, so I don’t think he totally sensed my increasing frustration toward this poopy Tuesday. He ate breakfast well and was dressed comfortably, and I was taking him to a safe place to play and have fun with friends (and learn a little too!), so I felt OK as I walked back to the car.

Then I called Craig. He told me some story about how he’s getting out so late today because his patient had a bout of bradycardia at shift change, and they were going to have to pace her, and blah blah blah. I actually think that’s how his conversation ended. He’s tired though, since he did just work a 12 hour shift, so I also gave him the benefit of the doubt. I mentioned that it’s the Trike-A-Thon at school today, and we forgot Connor’s bike. Then he said “We’re such bad parents.” And I overreacted. I mean, c’mon! I am the one to drop him off at school 95% of the time, and then I also have to go to work right after (if Craig’s dropping Connor off, he then gets to go to Lowes or somewhere fun and do house stuff… not I!) So even if he’s joking by making a comment about parenting skills, it’s a shitty thing to do to a pregnant woman with about a zillion other things to worry about. I do not need to second guess whether or not I’m a good parent, right in the middle of going to school (and taking very difficult classes), working full time, and entering my second trimester of pregnancy. Shitty shitty shitty.

How about this? You’re a bad husband! Other women on our block all have stay at home lives, where they can teach their children and pay attention to their children without having the extra worry of paying the gas bill or buying groceries. I’ve got way too much responsibility to be also worrying about whether I’m going to scar my child for life by forgetting his Trike. At least I remembered his lunch. Here I am, pregnant, and without food. Without water. I guess there’s a cafe downstairs, and cups in the kitchen, but I’m trying to make a point. I guess I’m not succeeding.

And then Linda asked me to write a WHOLE GOD DAMN FUCKING JOB for her to find anyone in the Pactiv database with a $123.74 adjustment to claims, because one of her retards forgot to enter that shit on the stupid spreadsheet that they’re working on. I fucking refuse.

Sorry. Tuesday.

I’m crabby today. And I’m not exactly sure why… well I am sure why but as of yet, I can’t post anything about it. Soon though. But here are the random reasons that I’m extra crabby, and though this is bound to be boring, it’s going to make me feel better.

There’s no water in the water jug. For more reasons than I can count, I refuse to drink the water from the taps in this building, because I’m sure they’re laced with arsenic and lead. And I don’t like arsenic and lead flavored water, so the water machine being out of service really bothers me. I need water. I guess I’m going to go downstairs and buy an earth-killing plastic water bottle full of water, likely from a different tap somewhere else, but at least it’s not these taps.

People are huge geeks around here. Their nerdiness is gross and frustrating, because they all think they’re really cool. I guess it’s expected in a computer programming environment for people to talk about computer games and XBOX shit like it’s real life, but to me it’s just SO infuriating how removed from the real world they are, and how isolated I feel. I feel like I’m an old person for reading the New York Times instead of www.thinkgeek.com for the newest dumb toy to buy. And I must be a big fat momma for talking about my kid instead of the newest Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto game. Or a lazy old wife for not wanting to play softball with a bunch of fake shitty assholes.

I don’t want to participate in the food thing today. I initiated it by asking Scott if he was going to do it again, and I guess he is going to because he’s buying Pizza House pizza today. Pizza House is some snooty Ann Arbor restaurant – and I know it’s snooty because Casey has a big thing for an item on their menu and that is a sure sign of snootyness. I guess it’s good pizza, but I can’t taste anything anyway. And I hate it how people get their little picks in, just for going into Scott’s office and schmoozing with him. I guess I could have, and I’m just mad that I didn’t do it early enough. Because maybe they have soup at Pizza House. I want soup.

I’m mad that Craig’s working tonight. I’m mad that soccer starts tomorrow and I feel like shit and I have to take Connor to it and Craig’s just going to sleep in all fucking morning.

I’m annoyed that Mike keeps on putting little comments in his status message about his canceled marriage – like I give a shit that it all fell apart!  I wouldn’t marry that creep either!  And I sure as hell don’t want to read about every little aspect of his life; that his wedding was called off, that his house is going to be foreclosed, that he’s moving in a day, that he got drunk over the weekend… please!  Spare us the news!  WE DON’T CARE!!!