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 B0n J0vi and Bizarro J0an J3tt 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.

]]> http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/index.php/2009/08/for-melody/feed/ 7 http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/index.php/2009/05/ill-make-brand-new-mistakes/ http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/index.php/2009/05/ill-make-brand-new-mistakes/#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 16:07:22 +0000 Abby http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/?p=802

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.

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.

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.

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.

I posted some pictures of my messy, messy, nothing is where it actually goes house. It’s extra messy because of the sleepover/spring break/let’s not make the children do chores attitude that’s going on this week. It felt false to kick the blankets/stuffed animals/toys out of the way before snapping pics like this:

That’s what the basement looks like every morning this week. Oh well. At least there are some sweet pictures like this to maybe redeem me:

How could I make these sweet girls clean up their bedding? What kind of a monster would I be? They’re obviously chillin’.

So I made a couple of pork roasts in the crockpot the other day and turned them into shredded pork bbq. It was yummy, but that’s not the point. Certain foods in my life are tied to memories of certain people. I don’t want to say that the food is the most important part of the memory and the person is just secondary, but it seems like my most vivid memories of people have to do with food.

Every single time I make a pork roast, I think of my ex-stepdad, Marc. When I was a junior in high school, he and my mom got married. Not only were we able to move out of our apartment up above Dave’s bar, but this marriage came with a Sam’s Club card and a dude that was a great cook. (Yes, those facts were more important to me than the fact that my mom was also able to get rid of that perpetually muffler-less Chevette in favof the Beretta of Hotness.) After 7 years eating frozen chicken patties, chili, spaghetti, canned ravioli, steak ums, and the like, I couldn’t believe it when I came home from a greuling softball practice with my friend Katie, “starving for death” as Maya would say and Marc had a pork roast in the crockpot. A pork roast with onions, potatoes, carrots and special seasonings. I instantly started drooling, asked him what it was, and then proceeded to eat half the thing over the kitchen sink. With my hands. Like an orphan. I’m pretty sure I grunted and hunched to warn the other animals not to touch my food. I can’t speak for Katie, but “scarfing it down” doesn’t even begin to describe what I was doing. I know for sure that I didn’t even take the time to put my softball glove down. It was still clutched in my armpit. I was starving for death and there was real food. And my stepdad is the type of person who doesn’t know you love him unless you’re eating his food. Especially if you’re eating it over the sink, straight out of the pot, which, as anybody knows, is the best way to eat food.

Here’s a mellow sample. He does less mellow, too.  And his own stuff. It’s all good. That reminds me, I saw a comedian once say, “I think it’s unfair that Neil Young can sing, play guitar, and play harmonica all at the same time and everybody loves it and he’s a serious artist and everything, but if he were to add a pair of cymbals to his knees, then he’d just be a moron.” Here’s my brother, sans cymbals:

In this picture: Tracey (almost 40), Abby (just over 30), and Mike (40+)

It was just a love-tap. All in fun, really. And I’m not just saying that in the way that hostages sometimes have to go on camera and read a letter that says, “I’m ok. My captors are lovely and I’m being treated swell. No hurry. They’re really nice. You should totally give them what they want, though.”

Yes, we’re going to Chesaning on Thursday for my grandmother’s “funeral.” We’ll be there for less than 24 hours, but we’ll be able to see my mom (she moved to West Virginia to be with my brother for a while so we didn’t see her during our last visit) and my old brother and his young family. (FYI, these are 2 of my brother’s sons reviewing Transformers: Energon at Kids Know Stuff). How could we resist a chance to squeeze those cheeks? We can’t.

So, I know you can’t tell it by that obituary link up there, but my grandmother had 8 kids and around 20 grandchildren and 14? great-grandchildren. And she leaves a legacy of verbal and physical abuse from which even my generation is still trying to recover (well, maybe you can tell that part from the teeny obit). My mom (and probably all of her siblings) did better than Grandma, and I hope my generation is improving on the last, and I hope the next generation does better still. Her death is strange for me. Only a few of her kids and even less of her grandkids were still visiting her on a regular basis. The rest of us giving up in favor of keeping our own mental health intact.

When I was around 19-22 or so, I visited her endlessly hoping for insight and change. And probably approval. That was the height of my Christianity and I felt Jesus would give me the strength and Jesus could help me love her and in turn help her love me. Even Jesus’ blood isn’t that magical.

I can’t tell you how many times I witnessed her tell my mother in scary seriousness that she wished my mom and every one of her “goddamn kids” were never born. I can’t tell you how many times I visited her only to leave feeling like my soul had been sucked into a black hole, beaten and torn apart, and then spat out in pieces with a smirk.  One very brief minute everything was lovely and the next hundred years of minutes she was tearing me or somebody I loved apart with a verbal attack that would continue even as I walked out the door in tears. I’m sure there was some kind of mental imbalance, but it’s hard to feel sorry. There are so many specific examples I’d like to share, but they’re all mean. I don’t have a single good memory of her except that she smelled of peppermint gum, and the fact that she was a school bus driver who would take her bus load of kids to the A&W on the last day of school for a special treat.

I rode her bus briefly in elementary school and I was in on one of the end-of-the-year A&W trips. Even at such a young age, I had a really hard time reconciling this woman who I knew to be completely mean, with this woman who was so loving to strangers.  As an adult, I would point to the beloved-bus-driver argument as the seed of hope that was the impetus for my many visits with her.  Anyway, I thought her death wouldn’t affect me at all, but it has of course. Just the fact that she had all of this family and managed to alienate and/or terrify the lot of us. It’s too much to go into right now, I’m afraid. Suffice it to say that I was going to create a post around this picture, taken when I was out of the house for 2 measly hours:

The post was going to be all “Jesus H. Christ, I was with her all day and she had to sleep with our wedding picture because I left for 2 hours in the evening! Come on! The neediness is exhausting.” And now I look at that picture and cry because I know I don’t meet her needs. I know I don’t try hard enough. And I have my doubts as to whether I have it in me to do better.

If my grandma took my sarcasm with her to the grave, I’m going to be pissed.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! My brother is 40. Don’t tell my sister, but she’ll be 40 this year too. In about 11 months. (My parents thumbed their noses at silly things like birth control and abstaining from sex for 6 weeks after the birth of a baby. “Pish-posh” said they, and then they had 2 babies in the same year. Dummies).

I like to tease my brother and sister about being born in the 60s since the rest of us (meaning their spouses and Bryan and I) were born in the 70s. My sister protests and thinks she’s as young as we are because she was born a mere 2 weeks before 1969 ended and her husband was born only 3 weeks into 1970, but the protest doesn’t stand. It was the 60s. Everything was different back then. And things that were around back then are old now. I didn’t make the rules.

My 40-year-old brother lives all the way in West Virginia now, but our grandmother saw fit to die yesterday* so her favorite grandson would have an excuse to travel to Chesaning so he could spend his 40th birthday at Dave’s bar playing Setback with his dumb ol’ buddies. Why yes, I did just spend 12 days in Chesaning, during which time my grandmother was in the process of dying and, yes, she actually did wait until the day after I arrived back in Columbus to die. Par. For. The. Course. Mikey was always her favorite. And for that, he’s a douche.

]]> http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/index.php/2009/01/my-brother-was-born-in-the-60s/feed/ 7