phatDonna

This past weekend was The Blathering, and oh my, was it grand.

First and best, I got to spend three days with my lovelies Shelly and Erica. I always forget it’s possible to laugh as hard as I laugh when I’m around these girls. We ate Greek food, we shopped, we did nails. Friday was fantastic.

Friday night we went to The Blathering Living Room to meet everyone. It was so much fun! Everyone I met was lovely and it was such a kick to meet in person people I have been communicating with on Twitter for a while. After the party we headed downtown for a drink or two and even caught a glimpse of my pseudo boyfriends in Mysterious Ways. We got home at like 10:30 but stayed up gabbing in our pajamas until 2:30 or so. That was awesome but it was also stupid because I had to get up for work at 6:45 on Saturday, and I managed to wake up the whole house in the process.

Saturday I took the girls to The Alamo Drafthouse for fried pickles and to see The Ides of March (which was FANTASTIC!) I took a nap but no one else seemed to be able to. Napping is my super power, I think we all know that. Then we met Julie for dinner and then headed back to the Blathering Living Room for more gabbing with everyone before saying goodbye. And even as tired as we were, two of us managed to stay up until 2 am again.

Sunday I had to say goodbye to my girls and it was so sad. Even the pets sulked for a day or two. But the knowledge that Shelly will be moving to Houston in the very near future has helped me keep it together. Shelly, Erica and I will be three hours away from each other, and Becky can choose whichever city has the cheapest airfare and can come see us often too.

If there is a Blathering next year, I’m totally going to go.

Today I dragged Bridget into the Christmas store in Downtown Disney so that I could procure one particular item for her Christmas enjoyment – an Advent calendar. I wanted one that was re-usable and did not include candy.

I don’t think it comes as any surprise to you all by now that I love Christmas. From the day after Thanksgiving until December 24, I am the happiest I am all year.

But being divorced with a kid makes things strange to say the least. This will be the first year that I won’t see Bridget on Christmas. Perhaps not even on Christmas Eve, depending on how The EX and I work this out. I won’t get to do Santa with her. I won’t get to leave out the cookies and milk with her. And yet I still have to do all the things that normally get me giddy about Christmas. I still have to put up a tree, decorate the house, shop for and wrap presents. I even have to do some baking because Bridget loves to help me do that.

Being in that store today, hearing the music, inhaling the scents, just made me sad.

I have no idea what I’m going to do for Christmast this year but I am fairly sure that it won’t be going to Dallas to see my family without Bridget. I just don’t think I can handle it, a family Christmas thing without her there. I don’t want to see my niece and nephew basking in the Christmas glow if Bridget isn’t there to bask in it, too. I suppose that makes me petty or selfish because I know my family would want me to be with them. I just don’t know. I’m not sure which would feel worse – waking up in the midst of a family Christmas without Bridget, or being home alone with no celebrations at all.

Maybe I should just go somewhere completely unrelated to Christmas. Maybe I should go sit on a beach in Mexico or something.

Maybe I should stay the hell out of Christmas stores when I’ve been off my meds for four days.

I had the weirdest dream the other night and I’m still puzzling over it. I’ll give you snippets because put together it makes no sense.

1. I was throwing at party at my parents’ house while they were out of town. I have no idea if in the dream I was living there or if I was  teenager, or why this was happening.

2. I was very upset for some reason and the sense I got was that the party was in an effort to cheer me up.

3. The Pioneer Woman was there with a strange man, not Marlboro Man. Turns out that this was a ranch hand with whom she had been having a raging affair and was in the midst of leaving MM for, but they were working out the details of splitting up, because she didn’t want the public to know.

4. When she realized that we all knew that she and this ranch hand were doing the horizontal hula, she made a hasty exit. But the ranch hand stayed and was trying to help me clean up from the party. He was quite a gentleman. And quite cute. I told him I could see why Ree was into him.

5. Carrie was there, and had a terrible slip and fall and hurt her head. We had to call 911 because I was sure that she was really dying. Only it was raining really hard and the town was flooding, so the ambulance couldn’t get to us and they wanted me to drive her to hospital. I was afraid to move her even though she was walking around and telling me she was fine.

I often think there is something truly wrong with me.

“We’ll begin with the airing of grievances.” (One of my favorite TV lines of all time.)

I’m in the midst of a Disney vacation with Bridget, for those of you who haven’t yet seen my zillion FourSquare check ins and multiple Facebook updates and hadn’t already caught wise to that fact.

Y’all, it’s hard. It’s not been my favorite Disney trip ever.

First of all, I am a dumbass. I spent 15 minutes on Saturday night counting out all my pills for the five nights we’d be here, putting them in a smaller, more manageable container. Then I left it sitting on the kitchen counter. That means that oh, maybe tomorrow, my brain is really going to start feeling the effects of no anti-depressant and will start to give me the weird little jolts every now and then. My temper will be short. I may cry at the drop of a hat. Fun for me! And fun for Bridget.

Bridget is very excited about this trip, but I’m just going to come out and say it. She’s being a little bit bratty. But she’s five. It’s her job to push her limits, to see how far she can push me before I push back. It doesn’t help that she is SO! EXCITED! ABOUT! EVERYTHING! and has bundles of energy, coupled with the constant stimulation. It’s all normal, but it’s hard to deal with alone.

The past two trips I’ve had Mrs. Irritation and her family with me. That meant two adults to talk to at dinner and while we pushed strollers through the parks, plus another teacup human for Bridget to gab to all the livelong day. Today as I was pushing the stroller through the World Showcase at Epcot, I actually thought to myself, “I’m bored.” That is the one thing that you are not supposed to feel at Disney, I’m pretty sure.

I’m also not thrilled with my travel planning this time. I got a really great deal on a hotel/airfare package staying off Disney property, something I have never done before. It seemed like a good deal at the time. It’s not. First of all, not staying on property means no Magical Express from the airport to the hotel. I had to rent a car because Bridget needs a carseat and we can’t just take a taxi. Add $200. Not staying on property also means that I can’t purchase the meal plan (or get it for free, like they sometimes do this time of year) so tack on meals at about 30% more than you’d pay on the meal plan. So far I’ve driven to one park and had to pay $14 to park the car. Ouch. And you all do not even want to know how much I paid for 4 days of park hopper tickets for one adult and one child. I’m fairly sure when you book a package, you get a discount on your park tickets. Or at least you don’t notice how much it costs because you’re already paying so much. Financially I haven’t come out ahead on this deal.

And when you consider that had I stayed on Disney property, the transportation situation, both airport and between parks and the hotel, all would have been better, I’d be staying in a nice hotel. Now, I know that some of you out there think I am a princess. And maybe I am, if that means that I want to stay in a hotel that has all its furnishings in working order and feels clean. This place does not meet those criteria. The shower drips. The wi-fi didn’t work until today. The tub stopper doesn’t work so I can’t give Bridget a bath – she has to take a shower, which she hates. But honestly even if the tub worked, I would not feel comfortable letting her sit in that bathtub. The air conditioner in our room runs constantly and it’s still damp in here all the time. It’s a million small things wrong here. But, it was cheap. The one good thing I will say about this hotel is that the staff is so friendly and helpful.

Did I mention that the last person who drove my rental car was a man who obviously wore a lot of cologne and the scent is imbedded in the seat belt, so when I wear the seat belt, it rubs off on me, making it so that’s all I can smell for the rest of the day? Yeah, that’s fun.

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Even with all that annoying stuff, and wishing I was at the Polynesian right now, I’m so happy to be here with Bridget, making these memories together. She has no idea that our hotel sucks or that I want to gag in the rental car. She is just thrilled and I love to see the look on her face every morning when she wakes up and remembers where she is and what we are doing that day. Bratty as she can be, she does appreciate this trip. I can tell by the way she launches herself at me several times each day and says, “I love you, Mommy!” And even if I don’t have one of my BFFs here with me all the time, I got the chance to spend time with my oldest friend in the world today, and tomorrow I get to meet up with another friend for lunch with Tigger and Pooh.

But next time, and there will be a next time, I will go back to staying on property. Missing out on all the Disney touches is kind of sad. Who wants to go with us next year?

I have been so ridiculously busy for the past few weeks! It sneaked up on me really. I had no idea it was happening until I was knee deep in it. I’ve been so lucky for the past five years to have been a stay at home mom to Bridget, and I never had to work around the kind of schedule that moms who work out of the house have had to deal with. I never thought I was cut out for that or that I could handle it. But lo and behold, I am doing it.

Here’s an example of what my day looks like:

Wake up at 6:45 and get Bridget fed and ready for school. I try to do this with a little drama as possible so that she doesn’t start off her day in a snit. We leave the house at 7:45 in order to make it to her school no later than 8:30. With normal traffic I drop her off at 8:15 or so. Then I get home about 8:40. I eat breakfast and either immediately jump into work or I take a shower and tidy up the house a bit and then jump into work. I work pretty much non-stop until 4 or so, although sometimes I take the equivalent of a lunch break to run an errand or take a shower if I didn’t get to do it when I got home. Then I try to tidy up a bit more, do some laundry, figure out dinner, or run other errands. I leave to pick Bridget up around 4:30 but she never wants to leave after school care, so it takes 20 minutes at least to get her out of there.  We get home by 5:30 and then hopefully I’ve had dinner pre-prepped or it’s something fast and easy. We eat and she has a tiny bit of time to either play or watch a little bit of TV while I clean up dinner, and then it’s up to bath at 7pm, then stories, and I’m hopefully downstairs to work again starting at 8pm. If she has homework or Spanish vocabulary words to learn for the week, we squeeze those in there somewhere too.

I’m exhausted just typing that.

And let’s not forget that part of the commitment to Bridget’s new independent school is a lot of volunteer time. Last week I spent a total of 5 hours at her school book fair, then attended a Parent Association meeting. I’m also on a Parent Association committee and theoretically the chair of another one although no work has come my way with that one yet. I’m not sure how I’m going to make that all work out.

Today, Bridget’s class had a soccer game versus the other Pre K class and parents were invited to attend and cheer the kids on. I just couldn’t get to this one. I had work and to take the cat to the vet. I wanted to go. I wanted to watch all those tiny four-year-olds playing soccer in their little shirts they decorated with the team logo they came up with. But it just didn’t work out. And she let me know when I picked her up that she was not happy I wasn’t there.  (The EX was there so it’s not like no one was there to cheer her on.)

I know I can’t get to everything. I can’t say yes to every request for time and materials. And I’ll have to figure out what the balance is between what calls for help I answer – the school as a whole (book fair, PA committees, etc) or Bridget’s individual class. I’m already trying to find a day when I can go read her class a story or do a cooking project with them. There is an International Fall Festival at her school that needs lots of help the week after next. I will have to carve out some time to do something for that.

I guess this is the new normal. It’s not bad, it’s just such a huge change for me. And we all know I don’t deal well with change. I’d love to make an appointment to go talk to my therapist about it , but I think it’s pretty obvious that I don’t have time for that.

I’ve had a rough weekend. One of the worst in about two years. It’s over for now, things seem to be heading back to a good place.

But I want to say something here.

I have spoken badly about The EX here and on Twitter in the past. I thought that I was simply venting to my community, and it’s true that I was doing that. But I was also putting things out in the world about Bridget’s father. Things that she might one day read, despite the fact that I will take great pains to keep this blog from her when she learns to read and operate a computer. Those are things that should never be read about one’s parent. Everything I have written has been my own personal feeling and of course was my own side of every issue. Should she ever read those things, it would unfairly color her opinion of her father, who loves her dearly no matter what happened between the two of us.

I own the fact that venting on the internet is not the same thing as calling someone names in your Hello Kitty! diary. I should have known better.

I wanted to publicly apologize to The EX for putting such negativity out into the world. My own venting and healing is not worth causing any damage to Bridget’s relationship with her father. I have removed every post that I could find that spoke negatively of The EX and from now on I will keep any frustration I feel towards him offline. He deserves that respect.