Sundays with Stretchy Pants

Dear Melodie,

It was lovely to see you again in West Virginia. Mike and Tracy love you and PJ, and we can see why. Congratulations on selling your house. I understand why you’re sad about it, though. A house is a very emotional thing, especially when you built it yourself and brought a baby home to it. I hate to see such a sweet person sad even for a minute, so here is something to cheer you up:

I hope this picture of Bizarro Jon Bon Jovi and Bizarro Joan Jett going to prom gives you a good chuckle.

Sincerely,

Bizzaro Jon Bon Jovi’s Little Sister

P.S. I know he sings really well now, but back then he would put his earphones on and sing along to whatever, and the heinous sound made me cry in terror. It sounded like famine, disease, misery, poverty, and painful death. He could play the guitar, though.

Dear Mike,

You can’t tie a dirty sweat sock around my nose, wait until I fall asleep and put horseradish in my mouth, flick me on the back of my head with your sausage fingers that feel like a small lead pipe, pull the arms of my sweatshirt in such a way so you can tie the ends together and then I can’t move my arms, stick your nasty feet in my face while you giggle with glee and I scream in horror, and you can’t eat all the good cereal in one sitting all the way from West Virginia. So there.

Love,

Abby

P.S. Thanks for working so hard on your singing cuz now you rock the house in a big way. I can’t even believe it, but it’s true. I love you! Don’t hurt me. I only posted this for Melodie and you know you want to bring her joy.

I like to write. I find it healing and I find it extra healing when I have an audience who says in words or just by reading my posts, “You’re not alone.” I find it super extra healing when someone in the audience says, “Your writing has helped me.” I don’t write about secrets. In fact, I haven’t written about things that aren’t well-known to friends, family, and even acquaintances. There isn’t anyone who knew my family who doesn’t know our struggles.

Is it selfish to be so concerned with my mental health that I would put my family’s pain on my blog? Perhaps. But my mental health is so important to me because it directly affects my children and my husband. My kids are my favorite people. My husband is my best friend. I owe it to them to deal with my life in the best way I know how. If my mental health is poor, my children have a poor life and my marriage sucks. If my mental health is good, my children have a good life and my marriage is good. It’s a simple equation.

I use sarcasm and humor to make light of the tough parts of my life, but everybody knows that right behind humor, there’s pain. I make light of the issues I’ve had with  my parents and my grandmother in order to bring them to light so I won’t be stuck in the darkness of emotional paralysis and denial. It’s denial that makes it impossible to heal. It’s denial that causes our health problems. It’s denial that causes us to repeat these cycles. We all love our children and it’s a basic biological desire to want them to have a better life than we had. I’ve had a better life than both of my parents and I know that the experiences I complain about don’t even scratch the surface of what they had to deal with. Where my mom and dad had practically insurmountable mountains to climb, I only have a few small hills. Still, they’re my hills and sometimes they’re steep. I walk those hills and I get blisters and sometimes it feels like my canteen is empty and my tongue is swollen with thirst and the pain is too much and I want to stop. I will always struggle with the habits that come along with experience and DNA. But awareness is the best tool I have.  Awareness of my failings, both inherited and learned, can only serve to bring about healing. Awareness is my Blister-Block and the fresh cool water that fills my canteen. Of course there will be issues that I’m not aware of, brand-new mistakes that my children will have to deal with. Of course. And then they’ll work it out on their own blogs or on a talk show or in a magazine or a book and it will all be fine because they won’t be in denial and they won’t repeat my mistakes when they have their own kids.

My parents know that it’s sometimes hard to be their daughter. They don’t deny that, but they also have a sense of humor. They have a sense of understanding. They know how important it is to make sense of my story in my own way so I can give my kids a better story. They’re not going to disown me. They might cringe at some of the things I write, but they’re not going to throw a  fit and demand that I take this pain and tuck it away so we can watch in horror as it oozes out of me in destructive ways when I’m parenting or when I’m trying to be a decent wife.

I now have the distinct honor of being the first of my generation to be disowned by a small minority of my mother’s generation because of things I wrote on my blog. I’ve totally been dooced, family style. I honestly thought the “You’re out of the family!” rhetoric would have been buried with my grandmother, but that shit don’t die unless you kill it and you can’t kill it if you act like it’s not there, which brings me to my oft-repeated bottom line: It helps me to write about it. And what helps me,  helps my kids and helps my marriage. And that, my friends, is priceless.

Some “bird” left a giant poop streak across my big ol’ living room window. The one that I can’t reach from the ground and don’t have a ladder tall enough to reach. I hate Nature. Of course it wouldn’t have pooped on the big ol’ window that I can reach from the ground. Maybe I should be glad it didn’t because then I’d have to be out there cleaning it right now instead of blogging about it. Maybe I won’t throw a rock at it. From the size of the blob, it has to be a giant bird thing. Stupid giant bird thing.

I was cleaning my house until I saw that bird’s abomination. I know everybody poops, but when the poop gets smeared on the window, that’s cause for alarm. That just ain’t right.

I was cleaning and cleaning because my ex-stepmother is coming to visit today. Is that weird? Maybe a little bit, but I don’t know. It seems ok since she was with my dad for, like, 20 years and she’s my kids’ Grandma-type person. It seems like such a waste to have put all that effort into deciding to cut her a break once in a while after I grew up and got over the fact that my mommy and daddy weren’t married anymore. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, but whatever. I’m just going to go with what works and so far that seems to be keeping both ex-stepparents in our lives. However, I always like to make it clear that there will be no attempts at blending with brand-new steps.  I probably only make that clear on my blog, not in real life because that would call for confrontation and, well, you know. I’ll always be pleasant, but distant. The end. In fact, my dad is coming for a visit next weekend, along with his girlfriend and I will be pleasant because, let’s face it, I can’t help it. I’m just pleasant. But there will always be distance for a couple of reasons:

1. I’m not a child. I think it’s different as a child. I lived with my stepdad and I lived with my stepmom for a while. They saw me graduate from high school, they saw me get married, they saw me become a mother, and I believed that they would all stay married forever.

2. I know that the next wife/husband won’t be around forever, so I don’t want to waste my time. I have enough friends. I have enough mother figures. What I don’t have is time to invest in a person whose presence in my life is based on the whims of an emotionally stunted person.

I’m super excited  that my sister and her daughters are catching a ride down here with my dad. Since this post is kind of a downer, I’ll just give a big WOOT! to Tracey, Taylor, and Riley. We’ll rock out. I promise.

Anyway, Bryan, the kids, my ex-stepmom and I are walking the Race for the Cure together. She’s a survivor so it’s kind of a big deal. I have a grandma and an aunt who died from the stupid breast cancer, and I don’t think that needs to happen anymore. Dying of breast cancer is so over, I mean it! And tomorrow I’m gonna walk with 30,000 people who feel the same way. And even though it’s just a 5k, I predict I will be just as hungry and thirsty as I was after the half marathon. I will require food. And I will need to be watered. With beer.

April is just a month full of celebrating around here. Well, celebrating and saying things like, “Really? Is this how old we are? Do we have kids who are going to be 10 years old on Friday? And did we just celebrate our 13th anniversary on Monday? There must be something wrong with the maths.”

The maths are wrong, baby, cuz your hotness is rockin’!

Easter was lovely, except it needs to last much longer so my family can stay much longer and we can have, like, an 8-day feast instead of a weekend binge where we drink and eat too much and hurt ourselves. If we knew it would last longer, we could pace ourselves. I promise we would pace ourselves. My sister and I discovered that it doesn’t really matter what kind of wine a person drinks. If that person drinks too much of it, that person’s belly gets mad at them and punishes them. In other words, it’s not the quality, it’s the quantity. My sister-in-law is wise and she knew that already. She and my brother and brother-in-law, along with Bryan, were able to go to the Ohio Deli (as seen on Man vs Food!) and eat and eat on Saturday, while my sister and my mom and I stayed with the kids. Well, my mom stayed with the kids. Tracey and I just laid around and said, “Shhhh!” But now we know. Damn.

My Columbus friends were able to meet my family and that was lovely. I felt like I should be more nervous about it for some reason, but I wasn’t because Kristen, Dawn and Lynne are just Ohio versions of me, my sister and my sister-in-law. I don’t branch out much in my friendships. And the husbands? All of the husbands are beaten down by perfect matches for their loud and lovely wives, so we love all of them, too. Even my brother. I never found the bellybutton lint he hid here, but I have a feeling he hid it on my pillow. Just thinking about it gives me chills. Or, maybe he unscrewed the screen on the showerhead and put it in there so I shower in lint leavings every morning. Ew!

With that, I’ll leave you with another disturbing image. Everybody knows that My L1ttle Ponies love Easter. I just didn’t know how much they love it until I walked in the bathroom and found this little filly enjoying Maya’s Easter basket. In front of the mirror. Seriously, H@sbro, who designs your baskets*?

*I didn’t buy this basket. My mother-in-law bought it for Maya 2 or 3 years ago. I didn’t even notice what the little pony was doing until I saw her watching herself in the mirror with that look in her eye.

P.S. Don’t ask me what Maya’s basket was doing in the bathroom. Nobody wants to know.

In honor of Jesus’ death, let’s everybody take a moment today and ponder the fact that He loved everybody. And then got crucified for it. I’m going to be more like Him and take the shunning that comes from being inclusive like the bad-ass that He taught me to be.

While I  ponder this (and, perhaps, draw parallels between my life and His), I’ll be waiting for my mom, my brother, my sister-in-law, my nephews, my sister, and my brother-in-law to come visit. They’re all coming today! And staying for Easter, when my Columbus friends and families will join us all for brunch. And I’m going to pretend that I gave up sugar for Lent and eat it like I haven’t eaten it in 6 weeks. There will be baked goods; Oh, yes. There will be baked goods. And then they’ll be gone like a baked goods rapture. Poof! Amen.

Saturday night, my brother is playing and singing at Gresso’s from 9:00pm-1:00am. Bryan and I find it difficult to stay up to watch a half-hour tv show these days, so we’ve scheduled some naptime on Saturday so we can stay up. You should do that, too, and meet us there. It will be fun, I promise. He sings some Kings of Leon and some Neil Young and some stuff I don’t know because I’m not hip and some more stuff I don’t know because I’m not that old. (He was born in the 60s, so his musical frame of reference is way different than mine.) Some people think he’s good, but I’m not going to say that because he used to tie his dirty sweat sock around my face and gag me with the stench of his sweaty, hairy feet. And also when he and my sister babysat for me, they would wait until I fell asleep and then put horseradish or mustard in my mouth. Bryan thinks we have a lock on the bedroom door for other reasons, but really it’s because of the trauma of waking up to a mouthful of horseradish while two giggling teenagers fall all over themselves snorting with laughter and wiping the tears of hilarity out of their eyes. I hope they had fun. Idiots.