phatDonna

I am a sleep hog. I honestly think that I require more sleep than the average person. Eight hours is my minimum. My favorite thing about Friday nights used to be the knowledge that I could snuggle down in my bed and know that I didn’t have to wake up to the alarm clock the next day. Of course, having a kid changes that because they don’t care that it’s Saturday and still get up and want things at the regular time. I relish sleep. And when I’m sad or upset, my sleep is usually not affected at all. Sleeping and eating are my two go-to comfort things.

A year ago, when the EX left me, even then, my sleep was not disturbed at all. I moved in with my parents for a month, and still my sleep was not disturbed at all. But after a month, Betsy and I moved here and my sleep went to shit.

I’ve tried so many combinations of things. OTC sleep aids, melatonin, prescription sleep aids, deep breathing and relaxation/meditation exercises… I’ve had some success with each of them, but each option has its own drawbacks, and the fact remains that I don’t want to require a pill to go to sleep every night for the rest of my life. Most nights, I know that I am tired. My body is tired and I can feel it. But when I turn the light off, my mind just will not shut off.

When I finally do fall asleep, I am usually plagued by weird and unsetting dreams. I often wake up sweaty very early in the morning, and if I go back to sleep, it’s usually not long enough to be helpful. And then Betsy wakes up and I hear her through the monitor, and I know it’s all over.

The weird thing is that I can sleep like a log during the day. I used to allow myself to nap during the day when Betsy would nap. I figured if I couldn’t get my sleep at night, it was better to get it at some point. When I would nap, I would sleep really hard, have vivid and unsettling dreams, and then have a hard time waking up. Napping or not napping doesn’t really seem to have any effect on whether I can sleep at night. I cut out the naps no matter how painfully tired I am during the day, and it hasn’t helped me sleep at night at all.

It really should not be this hard to just fall asleep.

If you read my site through a reader, then you probably haven’t seen the button over on the sidebar for SweepsU.com. Go ahead, take a minute and go check it out. I’ll wait.

hum dum dee dum, hum dum dee dum….

You back? Good.

OK, so I am in the midst of my free seven day trial on SweepsU, and I am already planning to subscribe. Why, you ask? Because entering contests is some seriously addictive stuff. The site aggregates about a bajillion and a half contests from all over the webosphere for your perusal and helps you track them and enter them. And it will even help you remember to enter those contests that you can enter more than once. I love this site!

And I’m not going to lie, I feel confident I’m going to win something because after the year I’ve had, I deserve to win something, even if it is a year’s supply of peanut butter.

So you should sign up for the seven day trial. It’s no obligation and you don’t even have to give them a credit card and then remember to cancel, which is totally stellar of them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have my eye on a free iPad…

I’m Donna, and I’m learning that life and motherhood are never what I thought they’d be.

Ten years ago, I figured by now I’d have two or three kids, be living in a dream house with my husband, and be happily doing arts and crafts with my delightfully spunky yet always obedient children, while squeezing in charity work and tennis lessons around yoga classes and cocktails with my girlfriends.

Life just never works out how we planned, now does it?

I battled infertility and was lucky enough to have a beautiful daughter, who is definitely delightfully spunky yet hardly ever obedient. She will remain an only child.

My husband left me a year ago, which knocked the wind out of me for a good long time.

I rarely go to yoga class, although I do sometimes get to have cocktails with my girlfriends. And I still don’t know how to play tennis.

My house is usually messy.

The point is that perfect is a myth, and the sooner we all realize that, the happier we will all be. There is no perfect mom, no perfect marriage and no perfect life. Being a parent is amazing and wonderful at times, and at other times it’s maddening and infuriating and humiliating. And messy. Did I mention messy? But without the lows, how could we ever appreciate the highs?

I hadn’t thought before about my blogging goal, or my voice. I just wrote about what happens to me. But I’ve sensed a theme in what I write about – that it’s ok to be real. It’s ok to be sad, happy, silly, grumpy, chubby, skinny, giddy, goofy, messy, horny, sleepy, PMSy and whatever else you feel on any given day. I figure if I show all my sides, dark and light, other people might be able to cast off their own search for perfection and just live in the moment as it is.

I don’t have a large community of readers, but that’s not why I blog. I blog for the relationships and the support. I’ve found such amazing love and support from my online community. I will never be Heather Armstrong, and that’s ok with me, because I feel like I make a difference in the lives of my readers in some small way. I know my readers make a difference in my life every day.

Having kids is not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. Swistle posted yesterday about how you know if you want to have more kids, and my answer was that I had to ask if I wanted more babies or more children. And while I loved the baby stage, this toddler/preschooler bullshit is for the birds, and so NO, I don’t want any more children. Mainly because I think this kid is going to be driving my blood pressure sky-high for the next eighteen years or so.

Lately, the issue that I have with Betsy is what the flip to do with her during the summer. Everything I think up to do with her is shot down by the knowledge that she will make the experience miserable. If it’s not the pool or the playground, she will bitch, moan and complain about how she doesn’t want to go, that she wants to stay home and watch TV. So I have to physically force her to get dressed (I have actually had to sit on her to stop her arms and legs from flailing around so I could dress her) and get her into the car. By the time I settle myself behind the steering wheel, I am done. Wrung out and about ready to list her on craigslist. Or if the destination IS the pool or the playground, I dread it because she refuses to listen to me at these places, and has no regard for her own safety. So I am constantly chasing her around warning her not to run around the pool, no you can’t go strolling down the bike path because you might get run over, no you can’t get in and out of the pool at random, no honey, you don’t have your floaties on so we can’t go in yet blah blah blah. If we make it through the pool outing with minimal gnashing of teeth, she invariably pitches an unholy fit when it’s time to leave. Her teeth could be chattering and her lips blue and her fingers like ten little prunes on sticks and she will still scream at the top of her lungs that she does not want to go. She has gone so far as to get back in the pool without her floaties while I’m in the midst of putting on my cover up for the walk home. That not only made my blood boil with anger at her, it scared the shit out of me. At the playground she has been known to refuse to come down from a play structure and has made me climb up after her to carry her down, while she screamed and made the other parents think she was being abducted.

Movies are an equal disaster most of the time. Last week in Dallas, because it was really hot, we  had no pool available to us and we were hard up for entertainment, I took her to see Despicable Me. Before the previews started, she ran up and down our row. I didn’t really mind because we always try to sit in the very back row, and we were the only people in the row. Plus everyone else was there with kids, and I figured they would understand letting her run BEFORE the movie started. But this time, she wouldn’t settle down when the previews started. About 30 minutes into the movie she demanded to go home. So that was $25 well spent, right?

Sigh.

The thing I don’t understand is that I NEVER let her get away with anything. I discipline her. I don’t spank her often because I hate doing it, and it really has no effect on her. But the taking away of things she loves works, as does time out. But when she’s in social situations, she simply cannot control herself. She knows in advance what the consequence will be and she just doesn’t give a shit. The popular wisdom is that if you give in just once, the kid will keep testing you to find out how to get you to give in again. But the things is – I NEVER give in. She is just determined and hopeful enough to think she can keep trying and find my weak spot.

And no, she doesn’t seem to act this way with EX I don’t think. He doesn’t mention it, so either she doesn’t, or he’s too guilty to complain about it to me, the person who is with her 80% of the time.

I know that all I can do is continue to explain to her the behavior I expect of her, not expect more from her than she’s capable of giving, keep being consistent with consequences, and keep giving her chances to prove she can do it.

I can lock her in the house until then, right?

I’ve been struggling with the question of what to do with some of my marital goods. Specifically, my wedding dress and my wedding rings. I’ve had a few different opinions expressed about what I could or should do with these things.

So here’s the thing. I am a very sentimental person. Very sentimental. I can’t wear my old watch, because EX gave it to me for my birthday in 2005. I’ve just bought myself new perfume, because although I love Marc Jacobs, I asked EX to pick out a perfume that he loved for me to wear, and now the smell of it makes me sad.

The engagement ring that EX bought me is beautiful and it was exactly the ring I wanted. It is platinum, with a 1 carat princess cut diamond and baguettes on either side. As years went by, EX started to notice that contemporaries of ours had much larger diamonds than I had, and said more than once that he wanted one day to buy me a bigger ring. I told him absolutely not – this was the ring he bought and put on my finger when he asked me to marry him and nothing else could ever be my wedding ring. If I had ever lost that ring, I would have been devastated because, even though it was insured, no ring would ever be THE ring he proposed to me with. The emotion and sentiment attached to that piece of jewelry was irreplaceable.

But now? The emotion behind that ring, the feeling attached to it, is gone. Yes, it was there at one time but he doesn’t feel it anymore, and I’m starting to not feel it. And I think I am going to get rid of it. Some people have suggested that Betsy should have it, and she could have it reset, and that it might have some meaning to her. I just don’t think so. She will have no memory of her parents being married, so she can’t have any nostalgia for it. Even though she’ll never be party to any of the negativity that I feel about her dad, she also won’t have any notion of the love we had for each other either. Our marriage is really a nonentity to her. Plus, the fact of the matter is that it’s mine. It’s not hers and she has no specific claim to it. Also, I think that getting rid of it will further my healing in some ways. If I can take the money from that ring (although I know I won’t get its appraised value) and put it into something that is just about me, perhaps my trip to Venice and Croatia in the fall, I will turn something sad into something happy.

I’m also going to donate my wedding gown to the Goodwill store. Again, I just can’t imagine Betsy wanting to wear a wedding gown from her parents’ failed marriage. It’s a beautiful dress, it was THE dress for me when I chose it, but I’ll never do anything with it, I can’t stand to look at it, and someone else might get some joy out of it without the baggage I have.

In my head I’ve made these decisions. We’ll see how long it takes me to put my plans into action.

Last week I went to the eye doctor and because I’m a new patient, I had to fill out all the stupid paperwork. One of the questions was who they should contact in case of emergency. I can’t imagine what optometry related emergency there might be that would require them contacting someone on my behalf – perhaps the puff of air in the eye actually does cause my head to explode one of these days? Anyway, I had to think long and hard about that question.

Of course I used to always put down the EX for this everywhere I encountered it. But now that’s not a good idea. Except, is it? I mean, if my head did explode while Betsy was at preschool, it makes the most sense that he find out immediately so he can step in and take care of her.  But then again, I don’t want him at the hospital or anything. I could put my parents or brother, but they live too far away to do anything in a hurry. I ended up putting my friend S. I hated to do it, because she’s got a kid and a job and other stresses in her life. But what are the odds of my head actually exploding? I know that if it did, she’d gladly ditch everything and help. And she knows how to contact the EX to get him to step in for Betsy.

And then I realized that I totally need to have my will and advance directive redone. And who is going to deal with all that crap for me?

All I know is that this is an awful lot of thought to have to put into a stupid question on a stupid form at the eye doctor.

Where did this strange new blog title come from, you ask?

When I was about twelve years old, my dad announced at breakfast one morning that he had had a very strange dream the night before. He dreamed that he and my mom had a second daughter, who looked just like me and was also named Donna, but she was chubby. And she was mischievous, always breaking things or getting into trouble. We laughed about that, but it soon became a running joke in the family whenever something had been broken mysteriously or spilled, or a mess made and not cleaned up. Fat Donna must have done it.

In college, I made a good friend who for various reasons, some drunk, some sober, decided that we should both have alter egos. We decided that this could be mine, someone who unapologetically broke rules and gave the world the finger, metaphorically speaking of course. So I chose Fat Donna’s persona, but she had to be PHAT and not FAT.

I kind of like that for my blog, because this is the place where I can write, vent, be a crazy person, and if I mess up or offend anyone, I can always say Phat Donna did it.

Welcome to the new site. More interesting content is coming soon, but I’m glad you made it here. Go ahead and add me to your readers!