Thanksgiving Post

Funniest thing that happened at Thanksgiving this year....

A* and I went to his sister's house for dinner. When we first got there, I took off my coat and gave it to A* to hang up in the closet. As I was standing there with my coat, waiting for him to take it, I noticed A*'s five year old nephew staring at me. As soon as A* went to the closet, Nephew slides up to him and says in a whisper, "Does she always tell you what to do?" A* laughed and said, I'm sure, something about yes, I do always tell him what to do. Nephew says, "Yeah, D seems pretty bossy. I would do something about that if I were you."

Five years old!!!

Halloween for Perverts

I was reading another blog the other day and it made me think of a situation from my childhood and hey, where is the best place to air all your dirty laundry? Why, the internet, of course, where no one or a million people could read it. There is a painful, fuzzy memory in my past that I have only shared with a few people. Mostly this is because I can't remember every single detail, and sometimes I have questioned if it really happened. Following a conversation with my mother, I am sure that it really did happen, and with the clarity of validation I am ready to share the incident with The Internet.

I was always really into Halloween. I won the costume contest every single year at the neighborhood Halloween party at the high school. I put a lot of thought and imagination into my costumes... I never wanted anyone to be the same thing as me. A very important part of my Halloween tradition was going to "FS" every year (* name has been changed to protect the innocent *). FS was a store dedicated to costumes and was, to my child's eyes, the greatest place on Earth. No matter what crazy idea I came up with for a costume, FS was able to make it happen.

I don't really remember the exact age I was at the time of this story. I would guess around six or seven. My mom and I were making the annual pilgrimage to FS to pick out my costume, and I was jumping out of my skin with excitement. I had a vauge idea in my head that I wanted to be a mime, but didn't really know how I was going to go about achieving it. I knew that the friendly people at FS would know just what to do.

Our helper for the afternoon was a younger man, probably in his early twenties, with glasses and light red hair. He was eager to help us, and started spouting off mime ideas left and right. He started going up and down aisles, grabbing props and masks. I followed him gleefully, thinking of the shiny silver dollar I would win as first prize in the costume contest. My mom was more sedate, stopping to examine things more closely. Soon we left her in one aisle and went down another. We were standing in front of a wall of masks, and the man was earnestly explaining something to me. I remember that I took a step closer to the wall, looking at what he was talking about. So now I was in front of him, and he was behind me. Without even a break in his endless stream of conversation, the man put both hands in his pockets, and then, with his fist still in his pocket, he took that fateful step towards me. Now he was really close, but I was still looking at masks and didn't think anything of it. Still talking, he began to rub my backside through his pocket. I mean, his hands were still in his pockets, but he lifted them up enough to start stroking my behind. With his hands in plain view, no where near anything inappropriate to anyone that walked by, this man was fondling me. He rubbed and rubbed, while all the blood drained out of me and I stood there dumbfounded.

Thankfully, my mom chose that moment to loudly proclaim that she had found the "perfect" hat, and I ran to her. The man followed behind me, and like nothing had happened took my stuff up to the counter and rang us up. My mom paid for our purchases and we exited the store, the man calling out a cheerful good-bye as we left.

This whole time I was just thinking, "I know that was wrong, I know that was wrong," but I didn't know what to do. I thought that for some reason my mom would be mad at me for what had happened. I thought that maybe I had done something to provoke it. I thought maybe it was normal for grown men in the Halloween shop to touch their young customers behinds. Hey, I was only seven, and nothing in my sheltered little world had prepared me for this!

On the drive home, my mom sensed that something was wrong. She asked me, and at first I was reluctant to say anything, but she persisted, and eventually the whole thing poured out of me. I remember that she got very quiet, and told me that she needed to talk to my dad. She assured me that it was the right thing for me to have told her, and that I didn't do anything wrong. Just the fact that she wasn't mad at me was enough, and I was calmed. We got home and my mom pulled my dad into the kitchen with her. Before I knew it, we were all back in the car and heading up to FS again. I begged my mom to not make me go in the store, and she told me that I NEVER had to go in that store again if I didn't want to. She asked me if it was the man that was helping us, and then her and my dad were out of the car and into the store. I couldn't really see what was going on in there. I could see the tops of their heads over the shelves, but I couldn't see what they were doing. Within ten minutes, they were back in the car.

"He'll never bother anyone again," my mom reassured me, and now I know that this is because he was immediately fired after my parent's told the manager what he had done.

We never talked about the incident again.

I hope that wherever that man is, someone is rubbing his bottom while he tells them not to, and I hope that he remembers the little girl that he violated so long ago. I want him to know that a large part of my innocence was lost that night, and I never really looked at Halloween in the same way again.

Putting Things in Perspective

We always think that we have the worst problems in the world, and that no one could possibly be putting up with all the shit that we are. At least, I sometimes am guilty of doing this. Today something happened that made me take a step back and think.

As you all know, A* and I recently moved into a new apartment. We had gotten all of our stuff out except my books (about 6-8 boxes) and our Christmas decorations. These we were planning on picking up this weekend and taking to my parent's house to store, since we have no room in our place. We had left these things in the basement of our old apartment until we could get over to my parent's house. Well, we are lazy asses, and instead of doing this as soon as possible, we kept putting it off. We figured that the landlord didn't even have our keys back yet, so there was no way that someone else would be moving in at least until we did that. We were wrong. Sometime over the weekend some new tenants started to move in, and they threw everything that was in the basement away. I had been saving those books since my childhood, anxious to share them with my own children someday. And some of the Christmas ornaments were very very special to me, given to me by my mom and other family members, not to mention A* and I's "First Christmas Together" ornament, which was really important to me. I sobbed and sobbed about the loss of these things. I knew I couldn't blame it on anyone but us, but it still didn't make it any easier. I was pretty devastated.

Then I got to work this morning and there was an email in my inbox from an old high school friend. She was writing to tell me something shocking. One of our mutual friends had married a military man and moved to California to live on a base there. Her and her five year old son were living there, waiting for her husband to come back from Iraq. Yesterday her husband, along with four other men, was killed in Iraq. The couple has a little child and they had just celebrated their five year wedding anniversary together.

Now my friend is twenty five and a widow. I can't even imagine the pain she is going through. I have been numb all day, sending prayers and thoughts her way. I just keep thinking of that poor little boy, who will never know his father, and her. She is in a strange state, all alone. All of her family and friends are here, in Ohio. I don't know how I would even get through something like that. I don't even know what else to say about the whole situation, it is just so tragic I don't think there are any words.

I have A*, and my family, and my health, and a warm place to sleep at night. So I don't have some old books and Christmas ornaments. What is really important in life?

It really put things into perspective for me. The things that we get all worked up about everyday don't really matter, when it all comes down to it. We should be thankful for every moment, every kiss, every exchange of laughter that we get from our significant others, and I definitely am.

Please keep my friend and her fallen soldier in your prayers.

Sorry Mom!

Let me start off by saying that I love my mother more than anything in the whole world. She is an awesome wife, mother, and friend to both me and my brother and my father, and has managed to keep our family together despite many obstacles. She is someone that I admire above all others, because she was a single mom for many years and I would never have known if she hadn't told me later that sometimes she had to do people's laundry for extra money, or that one year she didn't have any money for Christmas presents and wrapped up a bunch of her old stuffed animals from my grandma's attic and given them to me from "Santa". She is one of the strongest, funniest, warm-hearted people I have ever met, and I thank my lucky stars every day that she is a part of my life.

With that said, I am going to tell you one of the moments that I regret SO much. When I was in high school, my mom and I were tight. We were more like best friends than mother and daughter... though as she always told me when I was angry at her, "I am NOT your friend, I am your MOTHER, and you will treat me with respect!" Anyways, most of the time we got along great. Well, my junior year of high school, the people that sold class rings came to our school and handed out a bunch of information about them. I wanted a class ring badly, and took all the stuff home for my mom to look at.

My mom poured over the brochures. She told me that it was a lot of money for us to spend on one thing, but she could see how much it meant to me so she was going to spring for it. But she didn't feel comfortable just writing out a check for hundreds of dollars and then handing it to her sixteen year old daughter without ever actually speaking to the people that were receiving the money. During lunchtime, the class ring people had set up a booth in the cafeteria, where students could drop off their checks or look at rings. My mom dropped the bomb...

She wanted to come up to school, at LUNCHTIME, and talk to the ring people.

I was mortified. I told her, in no uncertain terms, that it would be the end of my social life, that I would never hear the end of it... "D's mom came into to school! She was the only parent there!" At this age, I didn't even want my mom to drop me off at school, much less come in and be there at the busiest time of the day, the virtual center of high school life. I cried, begging her not to embarrass me by showing up. I told her that I would be damaged for life if she subjected me to this humiliation.

But in the middle of my heartless rant, I never stopped to think about how this would make my mom feel. The poor woman was already shelling out money for a ring that she knew very well I wouldn't wear in a year. And besides, I think she was genuinely blindsided, being that we had such a close relationship and all. She didn't understand why I would have such a problem with this. And all I could do was bawl and beg her not to be seen in public.

She didn't come to school, by the way. She gave me a check and I did the whole process by myself. I ended up with a huge ring that I wore for a little over a year, and now it sits in my jewelry box under the sink. But I never forgot the look on her face when I had that outburst. I knew that I had broken her heart, just a little.

I know that someday I will have kids, and that someday they will tell me that I have to drop them off two blocks away from school, or that I'm not allowed to come to their game because I am "so uncool". And this will be fair payback.

I think that forever I will feel just a little guilty about hurting my mom's feelings like that. I grew up a little that day, and so did she. I learned that I had the power to make my mom feel like crap, and that wasn't such a good feeling.

I'm sorry Mom!

My First Love

Besides Davey Jones from the Monkees, as I watched his show faithfully in reruns on Nickelodeon every day after school. No, this was my first real crush.

His name was Doug. His mom and my mom happened to work together and be great friends, so we got to spend a lot of quality time together. Doug wasn't the most handsome boy in the sixth grade, but he had a large and inviting smile and a sense of humor that was unchallenged by any of our classmates. He wasn't afraid to look stupid, and I think that is what I loved most of all. He was the type of boy to get into our dog's cage and bark at us, just to get a laugh. We used to play all sorts of made up games, games that I was too embarrassed to play with any other friends because I felt like I was too old. Doug didn't care about stuff like that. We played a version of house where we were a young couple in college, breaking up frequently and "driving our cars" which were really Doug and his brother's bikes up and down the street. We played Doug's favorite, doctor. But don't get any dirty ideas... he had these toys called Wrestling Buddies, which are really just dolls for boys, and he would poke holes in them and pull out the stuffing with tweezers, performing surgery and wrapping up their arms in old T-shirts as casts. I was his co-doctor. We also went swimming together, watched movies, and once he even spent the whole week at our house when his parent's were out of town. ** an aside... this reminds me of my most embarrassing moment, which has to do with Doug but I will save it for another entry. **

I was hopelessly in love with Doug until the fateful day when I went to an amusement park with him, my best friend, and his best friend. All was going fine, and we were riding ride after ride, when suddenly Doug pulled me aside. He asked me if I thought that my friend would "go out" with him. I was crushed, absolutely crushed. But I held my head high, watched as Doug and my friend rode the ferris wheel together and held back my tears. They did end up going out together, for quite a while. I was loyal to my friend, though, and put my crush away. I was pretty successful, after a while.

In the eighth grade, Doug's father got transferred and they were moving to Texas. The day before they moved, Doug and his mom came over to say good-bye. Doug and I hung out in the back yard for a while, and then his mom called that it was time to leave. Doug hesitated, then said to me, "I used to have a crush on this one girl, but her mom and my mom were friends, so I never asked her out. But I really, really liked her." Being socially retarded, I asked him who the mystery girl was. He grabbed me unexpectedly, hugged me tight enough to make me gasp for breath, and whispered, "You." He ran into the house and I never saw him again.

Doug, wherever you are, I had a crush on this one boy, too.

Birthday Weekend

Thursday, which was my real and honest to goodness birthday, was spent at home. A* and I decided to wait till the weekend to celebrate. The girls at work, though, decorated my desk and bought me an ice cream cake, some cute socks, and a plant. I didn't have the heart to tell them that any living thing that I touch will most likely die. A* called and said that he was going to stop and help a guy from his work pick up a cabinet before he came home. I exploded, yelling at him that it was my birthday and all I wanted to do was spend the evening with him and how dare he not come right home, blah blah blah. Turns out, as I found out later, he had planned on stopping to get me some flowers in order to surprise me. I felt so stupid. Can we say, open mouth and insert foot??
Friday I awoke long enough to puke, call off work and then was back in bed for the remainder of the day. A suspicious flu shot may have been the culprate, though the nurse who gave it to me swore that I would not get sick. It could have been the shot, or it could have been another virus, but whatever it was, I was out of comission for the day. I tried to blame my bitchy behavior from the day before on the illness, but no one bought it.
Saturday was "my" day. A* and I went to breakfast, went to the library to get me some new books (always one of my favorite activities), and then went... shopping!! I can't tell you the last time that I went shopping for myself. It was glorious. I haven't been able to find a winter coat for ages, and I finally got one. I got two new bras, which is a miracle in itself. I have rather ample breasts, and I have the hardest time finding bras that don't pinch me or have my boobs overflowing out of them or that don't leave huge dents in my shoulders. This was also the reason for not being able to find a coat... none of them would zip up over my boobs!! Sigh, but I finally found one. I also got four extremely cute pairs of underwear, fuzzy pink slippers, and Tinkerbelle pajama's. It was wonderful. Then A*, my best friend and I went out to dinner together. I have to tell you, I got the hugest cream puff I have ever seen in my life for desert. It was the size of a large dinner plate. Obviously, A* and I gave it the old college try, but even the pigs that we are couldn't finish that thing.
Sunday, a day that I should have spent doing the laundry that is right now waiting like the devil in the back of my car to go to the laundy place, my family came over to see my new apartment and then we all went out to lunch for my birthday. I heart my family. Laughter and good food ensued, and it was a great time for all. I always have a good time with my family, no matter what we do.
Now it is Monday, and that was my birthday weekend. I guess I go back to being just me now, as opposed to the Birthday Princess I was claiming to be last week.

But damn it, I am really, really good at being the Birthday Princess.

Happy Birthday~ I Hate You

I have never gotten along with my stepmother. She was all right when I first met her, but in retrospect I think that she was just being nice so that she could reel my father in. Once she had him in her clutches, the gloves came off.

I was seven years old when my dad and her got married. I was very excited, because I got to get a new dress and lacy underwear and socks. And oh, I loved that dress. I felt like a fairy princess in it, and twirled and twirled until I was almost sick. But guess what? When the wedding was over, I wasn't allowed to keep the dress. She confiscated everything, right down to the lacy socks and underwear. Now, the woman has no children, so why in the heck did she need to have that dress? To hang in a closet? This was just the beginning.

I never did anything to her satisfaction. I didn't dress right, I didn't hold my silverware in the correct way, I didn't speak properly, I was too loud, I complained too much, I always wanted something, etc etc. Keep in mind that I was still only a kid. My most miserable memories are of sitting at my dad's kitchen table as she lectured me about eating what was put in front of me. I was always a picky eater, and she made weird stuff that I had never even heard of. I would sit there and stare at my plate with a huge lump in my throat, knowing that I couldn't swallow. Her dog would sit under the table and scratch at me with his claws, and if I said anything or kicked the dog off of me, I would get berated. Finally the last straw came when I called my mom in the middle of the night, sobbing hysterically because I was scared and she wouldn't let me in their room. I didn't want to stay there, just wanted the comfort of knowing that someone else was right in the next room. But she told me to get back in my own bed, and I did for a couple minutes, but I was so scared. I called my mom and she came to pick me up right away, and that was the last time I spent the night at my dad's.

As the years went on, my dad and I worked out a system where we could see each other but I wouldn't have to see her. We started going out to dinner once a week together, and that was fine with me. I got to see my dad and I didn't have to be uncomfortable. I only had to see her on holidays, and I would just try to avoid her. Once I was eighteen, I didn't have to go over to my dad's family's house anymore, so I never saw her.

The final blow to our relationship (or the shreds of it that were left) came when I was about to be a freshman in college. When I graduated high school, my dad had told me that he would split the cost of school with my stepdad and my mom. Then he said he never said that, so I understandably got angry and didn't talk to him for a couple weeks. It was the middle of week two when the phone rang, and it was her.
"Why aren't you talking to your dad?"
I told her that I didn't think this was any of her business.
"You ungrateful little brat. You get everything handed to you and you don't even appreciate it. I have no respect for you, and you are really hurting your dad's feelings."
I retorted that I didn't care in the least what she thought of me, and things went on in this vein until I hung up on her, as she was calling me a bitch. At first I was really proud of myself for standing up to her, but then my true nature (the sensitive, never say a bad word to me one) came out and I burst into tears. To make a long story short, my mom called her back and told her in no uncertain terms to never call her house and talk to her daughter that way, and finished up the conversation by saying, "You better hope I never run in to you in a back alley," to which the stepmom said "Oh, I'm scared" and my mom said, "You should be." and hung up the phone.

So ever since then I have avoided all possible contact with the stepmom. For my own mental state. But my father insists on pretending that the stepmom and I are just "different" and that we could really get along if we wanted to. Yeah right. So every year on my birthday he forces us to go out to dinner and pretend that we like each other. Last year, she didn't say anything to me the entire time, including Happy Birthday. She glanced at me once and said, "So, at home, do you, like, cook?" and A*, bless his heart, piped up and told her that I was pretty much the next Emril, even though in real life I hardly ever enter the kitchen. That was the only time she addressed me.

Tomorrow is my birthday, so tonight? The dinner. I am dreading it more than you could ever know, but out of respect for my father, I will bite my tounge and get through it. At least A* will be there, and he always keeps me entertained after these things by making fun of her and telling me how much of a bitch she is. That is why I love him so.

It's only one night, right?

DONE

We are done, done done moving!! It took all weekend, it took long hours, sweat and tears, but we are there. We didn't even start packing until Friday night, stayed up into the wee hours of the morning cramming everything we own in boxes, and were up again the next morning as the sun rose to take the first load over to the new place. By the time we got back again, reinforcements had arrived in the form of two of A*'s friends from work... or, as I like to call them, angels. Anyways, seven billion trips later we had everything at least IN the new house, but it was all stacked together in a big jumble of our lives in the middle of the floor. The next day we tackled the huge pile and were finally able to sit down. After that we hung up pictures and decorations, and then I felt like we were home. Can I tell you that I absolutely LOVE this new place. It is so cozy and homey, and smells yummily like vanilla, thanks to a new Glade Plug In. I am very happy. Things went so well, eerily well. I keep expecting the bottom to drop out, because nothing ever goes this well in our lives. I know that is a negative outlook, but with the way things have gone in the past I just have to expect it.

Moving injuries? Only two, both experienced by me, of course. The first took place in the Big Pack. I was on my hands and knees, pulling things out from under the bed, when my arm gave out and I toppled forward, smacking my head on the hardwood floor. A huge bump appeared and a mammoth headache. The second injury was when A* and I were trying to manuever our bed frame out of the door. Now, keep in mind that A* insisted there was no need to take the frame apart, that it would definitely fit through the door. Well, it didn't, and he had to take the front part off. When we were squeezing through the doorway, I got caught between the frame and the door and scraped a couple layers of skin off of my back. But I was fine! I rebounded! Because we were Moving!

Next time, I promise, not another rant about moving. I just wanted to let you all know that we did it, we're in and settled, and now we can get back to the regularly scheduled programming.