Valentine’s – It’s a Date Whether You Like it or Not

It’s that time of year again.  Before the stores have even sold off and packed away the last remnants of Christmas the heart shaped doilies, naked baby angels armed with weapons, and proclamations of show thy love your love start invading the store shelves and are splashed across in-your-face displays.

Florists have the days already counted and tallied and marked on their calendars.  Counting backwards from February 14th one day longer than the longest living cut rose can survive and the flower prices leap into outer space.

It’s a highly commercialized so-called holiday that isn’t a holiday at all, created by card companies looking for a fat payday between Christmas and Mother’s day.  Ok, so that may be where the more recent trend came from, where you are vilified if you don’t spend hours picking out the perfect card to go with the $500 roses that cost $50 two weeks ago, chocolates, dinner, jewelry etc etc.

That’s not really where this madness began though.

In around the Middle Ages or so people paid homage to a (later sainted) priest named Valentine who defied the Roman Emperor Claudius II, a priest who continued performing marriages in secret despite the Emperor’s decree that no young men were allowed to marry.  Apparently not having a wife was supposed to make men better soldiers.  I don’t know about that. Spoils of war and all, I doubt many would turn down their spoils with the blood lust burning in their loins just because of the little missus waiting back at home that he might see in a few years if he makes it home alive.

Of course the Roman’s killed him for it.

Or it might be the other sainted Valentine (apparently there’s at least three), some guy who helped Christians escape the cruelty and torture of Roman prisons.  Jailed for his actions, he penned the first “valentine” note to his love before his death in the same prison he’d helped others escape from.

Of course, even back in the Middle Ages they borrowed from the past and their Valentine’s rituals were set around and taken in part from an earlier Pagan holiday – Lupercalia , a mid-February fertility festival.  Of course this was done in an effort to Christianize the Pagans and conform their beliefs to Christianity.

Ok, enough of the history crap.  The pressure is on and whether you like it or not you have a date with your significant other Feb 14^th.

Everyone feels the pressure to perform, to buy, and to take that one day to show their other half how much they appreciate them.

Some take it as a Do I Really Have To?  Others get downright hostile about it.  While others still sit moony eyed and waiting for their love to show them the love.

All in all it’s not so bad.  One day out of the year (not counting anniversaries) where you are reminded to show that other person in your life that they mean something more to you than, say, the couch.

It’s not like Christmas where you have to get second and third mortgages on the house and sell organs to come up with piles of money you can’t afford in order to avoid offending all your relatives, co-workers, etc.

Romance should not be mistaken with the size of your wallet.  If you can find something romantic and meaningful, you make for a happier relationship, may even get a little something, and are not out piles of money you don’t have.

Mostly we stopped bothering with all this stuff since the kids.  Oh, we still do the token cards and chocolates for each other and whatnot.  The kids take the cards for crafts and eat the chocolate, but it’s the effort that counts.

With the scarcity of babysitters and lack of family supports, tight finances, and kids that turn into crazed little apes acting up, fighting, and becoming extremely needy the moment they get the first whiff that mom and dad*might* have plans that do not include them, we’ve abandoned the idea of “dates” a long time ago.

Dates are numbers on a calendar.

This year we decided to do something different.  Don’t ask my why because it wasn’t my idea.  I’d rather stick to the let’s not bother and just hand off the token cards and chocolates thing than deal with the stress of juggling the hubby’s shift work, no spending money, and kids who are determined to never ever let mom and dad actually be a couple.

So, we’re trying the going out for Valentine’s thing.  It won’t be on the actual day, of course.  Shift work.  But we are going to try to sneak out for a few hours, maybe a late lunch or early dinner, maybe a movie instead, and pretend like we’re teenagers sneaking out on a quick date without the parents knowing, only the parents are the kids.

The Difficulty With Balancing The Work/Life Balance

It can be hard enough trying to juggle the work/life balance, requiring the special skills only a professional chainsaw juggler can master.

Doing it as a single-married parent (SMP) can be even harder.  For the parent picking up the slack at home while their partner is away or working shifts, it can be very stressful.

You have to do it all, like any single parent.  Getting the kids up and out the door, the mad rush in the morning to get everyone ready, lunches made, and kids’ backpacks packed that they were supposed to do the night before.  Spending the hours at work only to rush back to pick up the kids or get home to your latchkey kids.  You’re juggling making supper, cleaning, getting kids to turn that T.V. off and do their homework, and probably cleaning up something the cat or dog puked on the carpet.

You sit through dinner, wanting to rush, wanting to rush those slow eating kids, while hearing all the dramas of life in grade school and trying to help them resolve their problems (or if you have teenagers, watching them sit moodily at the table and getting the occasional grunt accompanied by a should shrug in response to your questions about how their day went).

Then you spend the rest of the evening cleaning, doing laundry, cleaning, dealing with the dramas and fights between the kids, and trying to get your kids bathed and into bed; if you aren’t out running around all evening taking them to sports and other activities.

So what makes it more challenging than just being a single parent?  You are not just balancing your life/work worlds; you are balancing those in one hand while juggling them with your partner’s shifting availability.

Without having the little pleasures in life you will go mad.  You know what I mean, watching your favorite show, schmoozing on Facebook or playing their mindless games, and whatever other activities give you that momentary feeling of escaping the rush and grind of life even though the growing mound of laundry is threatening to swallow you all, the dust critters under the couch probably got eaten by larger dust critters, and you can hear the constant clamour in the back of your mind from all the things you should be doing.

Sometimes you even have certain things you like to do on certain days.  For me it used to be popcorn, wine, and watching the new episode of Lost on T.V. each week.

But what happens when your schedule/needs and your partner’s just don’t mesh?  This has become our way of life with my partner on rotating shifts of days/evenings/nights.

We’re still working on figuring it out, how best to make it work, and trying out new solutions to the problems.  Of course, everyone’s situation is unique so what works for one may not work for another.

And if money is tight like it is for us, your options are limited even further.  You may not have those scheduled activities that give your life a more stable feeling.  You could be like us and find your and your kids lives outside of work/school revolving around your partner’s ever changing hours and availability just because that’s the only noticeable influence you have in your lives outside of school/work.

That can leave everyone feeling less in control, like their lives are as much a confused jumbled mess as a thirteen year old’s bedroom.

Sometimes it’s in the little pleasures that it hits you.  For us, our weekends mostly don’t mesh.  I work regular hours, days, Monday to Friday.  The kids and my weekends are like most others, Saturday and Sunday.  My partner’s ‘weekend’ usually happens during the week and in exchange for long shift hours and constantly rotating hours he has longer ‘weekends’.  Pretty much it’s always someone’s weekend, except the odd day out, but they seldom coincide.

For the kids this means I often have to say ‘no’ to having friends over on the weekend because my partner has to sleep all day to go to work. Unfortunately I also don’t have the money to take them out to get them out of the house.

For me it seems more like my weekend is relegated to those too short few weekday evening hours on the days my partner has a ‘weekend’.

It’s his weekend, he wants to relax, watch a movie, snack, and have a few drinks.  But, he doesn’t want to do it alone.  Hell, who does when you have someone right there to do it with?

I would prefer to take that time to sit back, relax, watch a movie, have a glass of wine  - on MY weekend; not when I’m frazzled, beat, and have to get up at 5:30 in the morning.  It’s just not the same when you take away that ‘it’s the weekend’ feeling out of your weekend pleasures.  It’s still just a regular work night.

The problem?  Well, it can’t always be the weekend, obviously.  I don’t particularly want to spend every night wallowing in front of the television having drinks while my partner keeps trying to get me to snack out with him on snacks I don’t really want.  I don’t have the time either.

When you take a pleasure and turn it into a daily obligation it’s only a matter of time before it stops being a pleasure; that weekend movie and wine becomes a slump instead of a relaxing pleasure.  It’s like finding something you really like and then eating it for supper every single night until you get so sick of it that you dread supper coming and having to eat it again.

And when you find yourself scheduling your ‘weekend’ on a workday and making the weekend a non-stop 2-day cleaning binge to play catch-up on the chores you didn’t do the rest of the week, well it just isn’t a weekend.  You can’t force the workdays to have that ‘it’s the weekend’ feeling of freedom knowing you don’t have to go to work tomorrow.  And you don’t get a weekend on your weekend because you’re working your keester off getting a week’s work of chores done in two days.  You don’t have time to sit back and relax for an hour or two.

It’s not about who is right.  Really, no matter which partner schedules their ‘weekend’ on a workday evening it means someone gives up their weekend.  Or if you share both weekends you have that slump of doing it every day that sucks the specialness out of the weekend pleasures and the household chores are abandoned until they revolt.  While some people have no problem with that, others (like me) just find sitting in front of the boob tube every night depressing. After a week of that I feel like a mindless gelatinous lump.

The trick perhaps is in finding the fine balance of making two separate lives mesh in one household.  There is no way around it.  The Monday to Friday 9-5ers are living one life while the person working shifts or travelling is living another separate life, in one house.

With the rest of the household living the 9-5, Monday to Friday life, and the kids needing that feeling of consistency, that reliability and dependability and stability of regular schedules, the other parent can end up being the odd person out.  Meanwhile everyone else’s lives are in constant disorder, trying to revolve it around the one person out.

You need to figure out how to keep the stable and scheduled life environment for the household while also being flexible enough that no one is pushed to the edges of the family and are left looking in as an outsider.

If we figure out what works for us I’ll let you know.

The Ugliness of Family

The ugliness of family dinners and holidays will always be there.  The old saying is true, you can’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends.

While you can choose who you will have for your partner in life, and too many people make the wrong choice for the wrong reasons, you cannot choose who your parents are.  You can’t choose your siblings, your cousins, or your aunts and uncles and all those other relatives.

Of course we sometimes make poor decisions in choosing our friends too, but that’s much easier to fix.

But can you choose who you associate with?

The pressure is on from the beginning and from all sides.

Family is family.  You are supposed to have that family bond.  It is supposed to be stronger than anything, unbreakable, and always there to fall back on as a safety net.

Anyone with a less than perfect family knows that isn’t the reality, it’s an ideal pushed on us all.

The reality is that sometimes family are the most rude, and who you most want to not associate with.

But the pressure is on.  It’s a holiday dinner and you are expected by family and society to show up and pretend to like each other whether you do or not.

That pressure brings together people who really shouldn’t be together, who’d rather be somewhere else like maybe getting a root canal without freezing or pain medication.

That pressure makes people grumpy, cranky, and downright ornery.

It brings out the best and the worst in people.

People fight about stupid things that really don’t matter.

They get nasty for no good reason on people who probably don’t deserve it.

In my family these dinners are best gotten over quickly.

I warn the kids repeatedly before going, on the way there, and as we arrive to stay away from certain family members.  Don’t talk to them, don’t try to play with them, and don’t ask them anything.  Just stay away from them.

I must spend the entire time there keeping myself between my kids and adult family members, running constant interference, protecting my kids from nasty verbal attacks they don’t deserve, as well as dealing with them when they do but the adult will go way overboard beyond what is acceptable.

Luckily my kids have developed a thick skin early on.  I protect them enough, but not so much they don’t know how to deal in a bad situation.

They face the threat of frighteningly loud and fierce verbal attacks from an uncle over things his kid may have done, not them.  But in his defence his kid is entirely perfect and does no wrong so if someone broke Grandma’s ornament it has to be my kid, whether she was even in the room when it happened or not.

Of course I am being facetious here.

My issues: 1. Find out who did it before you freak out on my kid.  2. If she deserves it, give her a reasonable scolding.  A large adult towering over a small child, spittle flying in her face as you bellow like an idiot in her face, plates rattling in the cupboards and walls vibrating from the volume, and  scaring the crap out of her is not reasonable.

And then in that moment when you let your guard down your kid makes a terrible mistake and tries to talk to or play with the wrong uncle.

A fifty year old man telling a small child to “Go bother someone who likes you” in a nasty tone of voice is just plain wrong in my book.

But I am supposed to blame the child.  She was wrong.

Although, I do have to ask myself how a small child is supposed to understand.  She goes to one house one day and the uncles there treat her with respect and courtesy even if they are getting annoyed with her.  They scold in a reasonable tone and only if she deserves it.

Then she goes to the other house the next day where a different set of uncles are mean, nasty, and completely unacceptably rude and volatile towards a small child.

Then again I suppose it is her fault, after all she does have two strikes against her even before she walks in door #2.  First, she’s a child, and second she’s the wrong person’s child – mine instead of the favorite son’s.

And so with Thanksgiving dinner over and Christmas soon to follow we can sit back and ponder the very wise words of a small child:

After a little heartbroken sobbing and a few “I thought he liked me”s,

this little girl pulls herself together better than most adults I’ve seen, turns to me very seriously and says,

“Why does he even have to be my uncle?”

And then she says softly,

“I just wish he could be nicer.”

I wish I knew, kid, I wish I knew.  And yes, I wish he could be nicer too.

It’s not mine!

Ah yes, the cry that repeatedly rings through the house, the call of the lazy and unwilling to do for ones self.

And then in frustration you find yourself stuck having to do it yourself while muttering oaths under your breath about what you’ll do with the stuff *next time*.

I think my day today actually started yesterday, that is how hectic things have been.

I pick up the kids at daycare, and as usual it takes no less than 15 minutes to get the seven year old to get her stuff together and out the door.

We’re in the car and the first cry rings out, “I forgot my shirt!”

Send her back in to retrieve her brand new animal sweatshirt that *all* the kids have and they just had to have (lucky for them they actually needed a few sweatshirts and got one).

We get home and as expected, the shoes, backpack, jacket, and sweatshirt go flying to land in a pile of rubble at the front door and she is gone out of sight.

No less than eight times I asked her to pick it up.  Put away the sweatshirt and hang up her jacket and backpack.

And then the nine year old is out of pajamas.  So, I tell her where they are, all freshly washed and folded and waiting to be put away.  At least six times I ask her to put them away, specifying “That means in your drawer not on the floor.”

You guessed it!  This morning they are still sitting exactly where I left them for her to put away.

And then I spot them.  Two school library books tossed carelessly on the floor at the front door where they will be walked on, kicked, and generally abused.

Twelve times I asked. “Who’s books are these?”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“Well, they must be somebody’s books.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“They’re school library books – Bone and Bad Kitty.  Someone must have brought them home.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“Ok, if nobody wants  them then I guess I’ll get rid of them.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“Nobody took them out of the library?  Nobody brought them home?”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“So, if nobody brought them home then I can get rid of them.  I’m tossing them in the garbage.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“Ok, so I’m getting rid of the books then, since they don’t belong to anyone at all.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“It’s not my fault if you get in trouble at school.  If nobody brought them home I can get rid of them.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“The school library won’t let you take out any more books if you don’t bring them back, whoever’s they are.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“Ok, so Bone and Bad Kitty are nobody’s books?  Nobody at all borrowed them?  Nobody brought them home? They’re nobody’s books?”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

“Ok, so I’m tossing them out then, since they’re nobodies books and nobody wants them.”

“Not mine!”

“Not mine!”

"Ok, here they go, into to garbage.  Bye bye books!”

“Wait!  Don’t throw them out!  They’re mine!”

Well, finally!  That was all I wanted.  Take ownership of responsibility for the books, admit they’re yours, look after them, and put them in your backpack.

Why Telemarketers Get My Goat

What can possibly be more annoying than getting an unwanted telemarketing call?  Just read on and I’ll tell you.

Apparently there is some unwritten rule that they must happen when you are (a) in the middle of eating supper, (b) in the middle of getting your kids to do something important like bathing, (c) on the toilet or in the shower, or (d) any other time it is entirely inconvenient to drop whatever you’re doing to race for the phone.

The Three Annoying Types of Calls:

Generally, we get hit by three main types of calls.

1.            The talks too fast to butt in forcing you to be a rude schmuck and hang up on them calls.

These are the ones who also generally think that any words sounding similar to “No thank you”, “No thanks,” and “I’m not interested” really mean “Oh please please please tell me more.  I’ll just totally die if you don’t go on for another 30 minutes on your products and/or services!”

They also are entirely unable to grasp that “No” means “No” and will try to send or sign you up for crap regardless of how emphatically you say “NO!  NOT!  NO I DON’T WANT YOUR F-ING CRAP!”

And to add that final insult to injury, they take on the injured tone and ask you “Why not?” as if you’d just told someone you don’t want to be their friend after all.

And, of course, some of these are the outright scams like the caller who tells you that they are calling on behalf of your internet provider because your IP address has been used for questionable online activity and you could face legal problems, but its ok because you are probably the victim of a hacker or virus and if you just give them remote access to your computer they can fix it all up (for a fee) ...  yeah, and I’m the  Queen of Sheba too and know darn well they could not possibly be trying to both hack me and bill me for doing it too.

2.            The dead air calls. 

Yeah, we’ve all had those.  You drop everything, dodge kids and dogs, leap over obstacles of toys and laundry baskets in a mad race to catch the phone ... and there’s nobody bloody there!

“Hello?  Hello?” you say, pause and wait.  “Hello?  Is anybody there?”  You pause again, listening for any background sounds, wondering if you just got butt dialed or a friend or relative’s toddler is playing with the phone, or if someone dialed and got distracted.

You half expect to start hearing the laboured heavy breaths of a prank caller or some kid to ask you if your refrigerator is running followed by the warning, “Well then you’d better go catch it.”  Both of which would probably grate my annoyance nerves less than telemarketers intruding into my home via telephone and trying to push crap on me that I don’t want.

And eventually you or they hang up with the sure knowledge burning angrily through you that you just wasted those moments on a freaking telemarketer spam-crank calling you with their automated dialler.

3.            The telemarketing machine calling me because I’m not even good enough for a real person call.

Yeah, it’s frustrating and you ask, “What?! I’m not even good enough for a real person to harass and annoy me?!  You have to send a flipping machine to do your dirty work?!”

But they are, at least, the least annoying of the three.  You don’t feel guilty for hanging up on a machine, and you don’t waste time talking to dead air.

And then things turn from annoying to ugly.

After days of repeated hang-up dead air telemarketing calls at home – one per night every night at about the same time and all originating from a different long distance number ...

... and this despite the fact we are registered on the National Do No Call List ...

I am now getting harassed on my freaking CELL PHONE!

Yep, not only am I now having to drop everything and race to answer the phone (and this is a number that almost nobody has and is used only for calls from immediate family members or for the kids school or daycare to reach me anytime anywhere), but I am now also PAYING PER CALL TO ANSWER AND HANG UP ON A FLIPPING TELEMARKETING AUTO-DIALLING ANSWERING MACHINE!

To top it off, I’m not on an unlimited monthly plan or anything like that.  I’m paying prime $$$ for those handy but expensive per minute pre-paid minutes that are more economical for people like me who rarely use their phone.  And if this keeps up, I’ll have to go buy more minutes because they’re getting used up a telemarketing pre-recorded auto-dialling machine.

You got it!  I’m paying to be annoyed and harassed by a machine spewing out a pre-recorded message!

Silly me, I thought since cell phones cost the consumer money every time they answer it, they were legally off limits to telemarketers calls.

Apparently Air Miles Canada (or so the recording claims to be) has a very important message that I need to spend $$ just to listen to.

I wonder if they get a cut from the cell phone company.

Anywho, while I have to chose between turning off my cell phone and missing an important call from my kids’ school or daycare or wasting my money hanging up on telemarketing machines, I have added the cell to the do not call registry – for what its worth.

Since they’re calling me at home too and I’ve had that phone on the list for a few years now, I already know the registry only works for the ones who chose to follow the rules.

Labour Day Camping and Itsy Bitsy Creepy Crawly Things

It's the Labour Day long weekend, the last long weekend of summer, and I we did it single-married-parent style.

Camping with the girls this weekend started with a bang.  Okay, maybe a lot of bangs.

With ...

- some shrieks and screams

- a lot of Raid

- calls for help

- a seven 7r old girl grumbling “all right, where is it?  I’ll get it

- frantic emptying the counter, more Raid

- 7 yr old declaring “oh, its one of those ones.  Those are the bad ones!”

- a Kleenex box (not the Kleenex tissue)

- EEKK!  It’s dropping to the floor!

- grab a shoe!  No not my shoe!  Scrap the shoe, we have no daddy shoes!

- demand to know where there’s a cop with a gun when you need one

- mashing it into the wall in the corner with Kleenex box – omg not working!

- 7 yr old and me mashing it into the wall in the corner with the broom handle about 2000 times

- 7 yr old inspects “Yep, it’s mushed into the wall” and returns to her movie

- another scream

- ZOMBIES!  It’s alive!  Zombie spider!  It’s gone!

- 7 yr old rushing to the scene too late

- smushed it with a shoe

- “Aw mom!  Not my shoe!  Spider guts on MY shoe?!  Clean it off!”

- “No way, you clean it.  It’s your shoe!”

- indignant 7 yr old, “It’s your mess, it’s your problem.  You clean it.”

- grudgingly go outside to wipe shoe on ground.

- We high-5, do the dance, girl power!  OOOAH  OOOAH OOOAH!

- 7 yr old makes me carry her back to bed (wait a minute!  I’m juggling one de-spider gutted shoe, a broom, flashlight, and a 7 yr old?!

... and girls rule and spiders drool.  We killed the beast and lived to tell the tale and I had to scrub the entire stove and counter top.

The 9 yr old pointedly ignored us through the entire ordeal and will probably deny any relation to us in the future.

When Did Training Bras Become All The Rave for Pre-Tweens and Younger Tweens?

The tweens - that finicky age where the child’s maturity level is nearing that of the teenager with all the insanity and none of the hormones, and yet is still miles apart at the same time.  At least they like to think their maturity level is approaching that of a teenager.

They are trying so hard to act like grownups while they are anything but, and that shows no better than when it’s either bath time or you ask them to clean their rooms.

When Did Training Bras Become All The Rave for Pre-Tweens and Younger Tweens?

When I was in the 8 – 12 year old range, I don’t remember the training bra being a big fashion need.  Nobody made a point to saying, “Hey! I have a training bra!”  In fact, I don’t know of anyone who actually got one before they started developing something to put in it.

I wasn’t begging my mother to let me have a training bra, I was fighting for the right to wear blue jeans – something my mother considered dirty farmer clothing good only for the farm fields and not suitable for a girl in the city.

Flash forward to now and it’s started for us in grade three.  Grade three!  With the wee little flat chested children still years from growing anything and the most important fashion accessory has become <dun dun dunnnnnn> The Training Bra!!  

Apparently everybody who’s anybody has one!  And with a nine year old going into grade four, it is the absolute end of everything social life related for her because she doesn’t have one.

This isn’t the 8 to 12 years olds with the emphasis on close to 12.  No, these kids are the pre-tweens to early tweens.  Kids 6 to 9 years old who think this is a fashion must have.

The nine year old regales me with stories of who has and who’s growing, and as I see these very same children around town I wonder what world she’s living in because they are all as flat as a pack of two year olds.  In fact, the one girl who does sort of have something isn’t growing boobs, the kid’s just fat.  I’ve seen boys weighing in the same with bigger boobs.  Hell, I’ve seen toddlers with bigger fat rolls on their chests.

Even the younger daughter now thinks she has to have bras because she has friends younger than her who have them.

With children determined to be older than their age and maturity, do you go ahead?  Do you buy the training tool for something that isn’t even there to train?  Do you buy the leash and dog biscuits to train a puppy you don’t even have?

Or do you cling to that last vestige of their childhood, reluctant to let them grow up before they (and you) are ready?

The nine year old is already pushing for The Talk!  While I have been willing enough to divulge some of what she should expect with the coming puberty, there are some things a nine year old just isn’t ready to hear yet.  She questions and demands, asking if I’ve left things out and she is certain that I have left out some big mystical secret of womanhood.  There are a lot of those secrets I’ve left out, but I would have less appealing names for them.  Nothing mystical or wonderful there.  We will have that discussion before that part comes, but there’s no point in scaring the crap out of the kid before she’s mature enough to understand.

As a parent on a limited budget with two growing kids in need of so many things they actually do need, I think I’ll be committing the fashion faux pas of the decade and hold of on buying those as yet entirely unnecessary items - The Training Bra!!