Dang, finding my Single-Parent sea-legs is rough. For instance, what on earth do you do when you are super-sick? I’ve come down with something, and it’s nasty. I don’t think it’s the dreaded flu, and I had a friend who is a nurse practitioner check me out (no insurance and all, oh yeah). It’s just a nasty chest cold.

But being asthmatic always compounds my colds. And this is proving to be a doozy. I almost fainted in the bathroom tonight from coughing so hard. So what does a mama do when there are three little kids in the house, and something happens to her? Jeffrey knows how to dial 911, but seriously, I have to think about all these things that never occurred to me before.

For now, everyone is in bed, and with any luck,  it will stay that way all night long. I really don’t need an abalone sucking to me all night. Here’s hoping it’s better in the morning.

• We spent all morning at the hospital, and after 4 X-rays, Abby’s arm and shoulder look fine. The radiologist said the doctor would have to verify, but that it’s looked good. *Whew*
• Someone from church has offered me a two-year old computer they have because they had to upgrade their business. I’m hating having to rely on others, but right now, I don’t have a lot of choices. I’m grateful.
• I made enough money this month to actually pay some of my own bills, on my own, with my own money. First time in ten years. It feels kind of good.
• Forecast is for snow here tonight, our first of the year. I’m so not ready for snow yet. It’s all me shoveling the drive and walks. Yippee. I guess that’s not a good thing, but the kids are excited.
• My soon-to-be ex-M-i-L send money for the kids to go see Disney on Ice next week. They are thrilled. If taking a Valium was funny and not heart-wrenching, I would make a joke about it.
• It’s almost knitting season! Hooray! For reals.
• I don’t want to push my luck, so I’ll stop now. Baby steps.

Abby keeps complaining that her arm hurts, and is insisting it is broken and I need to take her to the “hosible”. I’m watching her closely, and she did favor it the rest of the evening after the Shove the Mattress incident. She is also quite the drama queen, and heard me tell Jeffrey that he could have broken her arm with their horseplay. She glommed right onto that.  So… In the morning if she’s still gimpy I’m off to the Hosible.  Poor girl.

(Edit: It’s morning. She’s still gimpy. She’s definitely favoring it. Crap. I’ve got a call in to the doctor and am waiting for them to get her in. Crap. Crap. Crap.)

• I had a melt-down about  kids not listening, and then sat on the floor crying with all three of them in my lap. That’s 200 pounds of kid. In my lap. On the floor in the dining room.
• The kids bathroom toilet upstairs overflowed, but Beanie forgot to tell me. I found it when I went to run the nighttime baths and stepped in it. In sock feet.
• I threw the towels away that I used to clean up. I did. I couldn’t bear to deal with more poop.
• Someone who used to live here threw away all- yes, ALL- of our toilet plungers, and I had to borrow one from my 90 year-old neighbor.
• When I went to hang the towels up post-bath, the towel rack fell out of the wall. It wasn’t even lose. So of course it fell.
• My computer crapped out again- I have internet, but I have nothing else. I can’t do AR, AP or Invoice. I don’t have Word, and I don’t have any office aps.
• Jeffrey crashed on Abby playing Shove the Mattress in the playroom, and now she is telling everyone her arms are broken. As hard as I look, I really don’t think they are.
• Shove the Mattress is now banned. Forever.
• Beanie had bad dreams and decided the way to relieve them was to glue himself to my side all night long. Imagine sleeping with a 50 pound  abalone sucked to your side.
• I decided to ignore my life for the rest of the day and paint Christmas ornaments. It didn’t solve anything, but I sure felt more relaxed. Which does matter.
• I didn’t manage to get out of my jammies until noon today. I was working, getting kids off to school, filling orders and had a conference call with my web-designers, who are in DC. (new website coming soon!) But I couldn’t manage to get out of my pink thermal moose jammies. They’re my favorite.
• I cannot even think about Christmas yet, and yet it’s all my kids are already thinking about.
• I wonder what the next 24 holds? One day at a time, indeed.

CHICKEN BUTT!

HAhahahahaha… ha ha he he he… whew… ha… I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. I had to do something to relieve all the freaking tension and unhappiness around here. OK, in all fairness, it’s just me that tense and stressed, the kids seem fine. I mean, with all the chasing of poultry and holding of hens, they are super happy. It’s me that’s in a funk.

My super awesome techie guy brought back old Bessie and took the super computer (the one he built in 30 minutes? yeah, that one) Old Bessie had been to visit the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and her little chippy brain had been wiped. Only not- seems, much like Kate, there were bits and pieces of tiny little memories, and they would pop up at inopportune times- like, say, when I was trying to print an invoice, or some other unimportant thing.

In tears on the phone with Wonder Techie, he walks me through dowloading a patch and voila, Bessie can think in a straight line again. Which is good, because I sure can’t.  Also, with Bessie’s new lack of memory, all my programs are gone. No Word. No Quickbooks. I have my old files on a drive the size of my little finger, but no programs to run them on. Why? Oh well, you’re going to see what a genius I am- because I didn’t know those little disks were important, and I think I threw them away. Oh yes, you read that right.  I’m not a keeper, and I tossed them. Oh yeah. You packrats can lord it over me now.

Bessie can hobble along for a little while, but the truth is, I have to buy a new computer.

And that makes my stomach turn a flop and I feel like I’m going to barf. Because honesty, a newly single parent, getting no child-support, no alimony, barely scraping by (not even that yet, to be perfectly honest) and I have to find the cash for a computer? Oh hell.

Otherwise everything is great! Awesome! Fantastic. Couldn’t be better. Really. No, seriously. It’s super.  I’m fine…

CHICKEN BUTT!!

These pictures make me really happy. There isn’t a ton of joy around our house these days, no matter how hard I try and keep things normal. So this morning when a friend asked the kids over to play, and some of her chickens had gotten lose from their pen, Beanie was in heaven. The boy loves him some chickens, and he chased them around the yard until he wrangled both the freedom hens into his eager arms.

Their names were Stella and Big Mama. He floated on air the rest of the day… I’ll take the victories, small though they may be, wherever I can get them.

Aaaaaaand there’s that smile again. Dang if he’s not caught unawares, it just takes over his face…

Well, I’ve loaded up my Etsy shop with some of the patterns I showed in Houston. It’s not all of them, but it’s the ones I have on hand to ship now. I’ve written them for confident beginner quilters on up- and I’ve taken great care that my directions are accurate and clear. I’ve bought one-too-many patterns that left me scratching my head thinking “…what the…?”

All the patterns are drawn, written, composed and illustrated by me. I made the sample, and I’ve had each pattern tested by other quilters, as well.

If you’re interested, you can look here. Thanks!

On my left hand there is a pale band of tender skin where once a promise wound. My thumb keeps wandering over to twirl the band that is not there anymore. Each time I find it missing, my heart lurches a little and then I remember…

I took my wedding ring off today. It’s in my grandmother’s jewelry box, in the little white leather box it came in, so full of hopes and promises. Something about the act itself, of putting it away, when I imagined wearing it forever, has cleaved my heart anew. Today was a hard day.

Denied. I’m in a pickle. I know some folks think socialized medicine is worse than genocide, and some think it’s the answer to everyone’s prayers. I don’t know either way. Here is what I do know: I am a mother of three, and I have no health insurance. According to the little charts the health insurance companies use to determine if you can pay them through the nose to be covered on one of their plans, I am uninsurable. No one. NO ONE will insure me. Why? Because 9 years ago, my doctor found a pea-sized cyst in the middle of my brain. It’s been determined it is nothing, and I have had an annual MRI each year to make sure it stays “nothing”. So far, so good. But…

Because of this, and because I have had asthma since infancy (well controlled, I might add), I am utterly, completely without an option. When I say NO ONE will insure me, I mean NO ONE. The only possible way for me to get insurance is to remarry, and get put on a policy of my spouse.

That, my friends, sucks. It’s wrong. So we can argue all day if medical coverage for everyone is a death sentence to America, or if it’s a right, or if the sky is in fact green today. It doesn’t change the fact that I am screwed until somthing changes. And that is not right.

I’m raw. My nerves are shot, my voice is hoarse from crying. My muscles are tight and hot from tension, and I’m jumping at shadows.  Sadness is being roughly shoved out of the way by anger. Very, very righteous anger. What I am having to live through right now is the effects of the agency and choices of another. The only choice I made was marrying him and being faithful to him. I honored my vows, and I kept my promises.

But because of another, I get to look in my kids’ eyes and try and answer their questions. I get to try and parse together an answer that is neither all truth, because they don’t need and aren’t prepared for that, nor all lies, because they at least deserve to have me try and be honest with them. I get to pick up the emotional wreckage left behind because someone else finds it too hard to deal. I get to, because I am their mother. And I cannot carve out time to even feel my own feelings, because it’s all I can do each day to keep bailing this leaky lifeboat.

I am angry. I AM ANGRY.

I have kids who are taking out their emotions on me. They are acting out in every way possible- and to an extent, I expected this, but I was not prepared for how drained I would already be when it happened. It feels like everywhere I turn failure meets me eyes.

What I desire more than anything in the world is to be a good mother, be stable, and keep my kids’ lives stable. Yet at this point, because of the decisions of another,  I don’t know if I will even be able to keep my home. I don’t know what I will be able to hang onto. But with all another has taken from me, so many of my hopes, my other possible futures,  I refuse- REFUSE- to give up my hope in something better. I refuse to fail my children.  I throw down the gauntlet. I will survive this, and I will do it with my integrity, my  spirit and soul  intact. That cannot be taken from me. 

Just watch me.