Comparing Apples to Agent Orange -- How Not to Be a Dick

One of the most solid pieces of advice that any person anywhere will ever hear is never to compare their last relationship to the one they're currently in. It's just bad news all the way around. But we're also human beings, so we're going to do exactly the opposite of the thing we're not supposed to do.

As a rule -- at least this time around -- I don't compare The Fiancee™ to The Ex. There's no comparison. The Fiancee™ is far and away the better of the two. I may reflect back on the previous relationship to make sure I'm not repeating mistakes or clearing out the detritus from some leftover baggage, but I usually don't compare.

Until I had a baby with The Fiancee™. Ever since I had The Bean, a constant thought runs through my head, "I wish I'd had The Trolls with The Fiancee™". He's such a fantastic and remarkable father. He's hands on. He reads. He listens. He's all the things The Ex isn't. Every time I have to send The Trolls off with The Ex, I cringe and count the seconds 'til they're back home with us, because The Ex is just a shit.

(I'm probably going to regret typing that last sentence -- and then publishing it in a public forum -- especially if The Trolls ever find out I have a blog, but... well... First Amendment and all that).

But really why I take to my blog is not to extoll the virtues of my beloved, but to speak to all The Exes out there. Call it Sady's Rules for Not Being a Dick and Everyone Will Be Happy.

1) Visitation: the children should always come first. Sure, every now-and-again there are going to be times when you have to work late or you need a break, but as the non-custodial parent, when you have an opportunity to see your children, you should take it. You shouldn't blow them off for, oh I don't know, a tour (you're a forty-year-old wanna-be rock star who is never going to be a famous musician. Just come to grips with that already, wouldja?)

If you can't make a scheduled visit, call the other parent NOT the children. Messages like that should not be delivered to or through the kids.

If you need to reschedule a visit, call the other parent NOT the children.

If you want to see the children, call the other parent NOT the children.

Stick to the prearranged schedule unless there's an emergency. Schools frown upon unexcused tardies and your ex gets really annoyed having to wait around for you.

2) Call the children: by all means, call the children. Regularly. Several times a day, even. There's no need to speak to the other parent if you're just calling to say, "hi." 

But if the other parent needs to speak to you, the polite thing to do is take the call. If you don't want to talk to your ex, that's fine. Shoot him or her a text message. He or she would probably prefer it since he or she didn't want to talk to you, either. Talking to your ex is a necessary evil when you have children together.

3) Scheduling a visit: as a matter of fact, you do need to speak to your ex if you want to see your children. Your ex should not have to keep the children's schedules indefinitely open in the hopes that you'll find time in your schedule to see them. I know, I know. You hate feeling like you have to ask permission to see your kids, but you know what? You do need to make sure that they don't already have plans. Suck it up, Cupcake.

4) Don't trash talk: sure, you hate your ex. She or he hates you, too. That's why the two of you aren't together. Keep the trash talking between you and the voice in your head. The children don't need to be caught in the crossfire.

5) Child Support: I've got news for you, Buttercup -- child support is necessary. You don't get to arbitrarily decide that you'll buy the kids something in lieu of paying child support. It doesn't work that way. Child support goes toward the cost of raising children and, in most cases, doesn't even begin to cover what your ex has to pay toward their cost of living. Children are fucking expensive.

And if you think you're just spiting your ex by not paying, well, think again. You're just a dick that likes to hurt your own kids. NOT paying child support prevents your ex from doing things for the kids -- like get them braces or pay for sports.

It's not "extra money", by the way. It's money that is very, very needed. But even if it is extra money and your ex chooses to spend it on hookers and blow, he or she can. He or she has already paid the mortgage, the light bill and put food in the children's bellies. You're simply paying your ex back a small portion of what he or she has already spent on the children.

And let's just address this while we're at it: your ex cannot ask his or her parents to help. It's your job to support your children.Your ex's current is not responsible for the financial burden of your children, either. He or she does it because he or she loves your kids -- and you should be goddamned grateful for that and not take it for granted.

Oh and side note: if you can afford to take time off from work to go on fucking tour, you better make sure that you've paid your child support. Dick.

(Item five is especially touchy for me, since The Ex -- who only is required (by our mutual agreement... for now) to pay $300 a month for two kids hasn't paid a dime since October 2012. All points covered are all arguments he used to justify not paying).

6) Don't be super-happy-funtime-parent: Seriously, just don't. Don't be the parent that the kids get to have all the fun with while your ex is the one that has to make them eat their vegetables and do their homework. Because, you know what? The next time you have a weekend with your kids, your ex may just send them over all hopped up on Mountain Dew and bags of sugar. You'd deserve it.

7) Don't be a dick to your kids: don't say things like "you're just like your mother" or "you're stupid" or "you're fat and lazy." Saying those kinds of things is a sure fire way to get yourself a one-way ticket to The-Kids-Are-Permanently-Busy-and-Can-Never-See-You-Again-ville.

8) Blending families: make sure that the children have a place of their own in your home -- especially if you're living with someone who already has kids. There's nothing quite so sure to guarantee to make a child require years and years of therapy as one or both of their parents making their "biological" child feel like a red-headed step-child.

9) Do what you say you're going to do. And don't argue about it if it's not convenient for you anymore. You made your bed, now lay in it.

Oh Internet! You just keep doing you. Thoughts on #unplug

Let me go on the record as saying that I'm as about as old school as you can get and still be even mildly NOT 78 years old. I have Facebook. I have a blog. I even have my own [never updated] web site. But I don't tweet, skype, tumblr or any of that crap. I probably should if I want to get my business off the ground, but I'm kind of lazy and it seems like figuring out what the hell the hashtag is for would take up more time than I'm willing to give it.

Besides, I'm pretty sure the lifespan of anything on the internet is about 35 seconds. So I'm holding out for the day that Twitter becomes Myspace.

But then again, the Internet is hopelessly self-absorbed and Twitter hit the nail on the head by pandering to that element.

Dammit. I guess I'll have to figure out Twitter. But not before I get fully vested in the newest Internet meme: #unplug.

Let me throw an addendum to my previous on-the-record by saying that I REALLY love the concept of this. In case you're not familiar with the how to, here's the premise:

1) Realize that you're hopelessly addicted to anything Internet-related and powerless to your addiction.
2) Seek to make amends to anyone you've wronged.

Oh... wait. That's AA. Moving on...

The premise behind unplugged actually IS acknowledging how hopelessly plugged in we are and how we've kind of lost touch with reality. For instance, every night, The Fiancee™ and I sit on the back porch having a chat and a smoke theoretically catching up about the day and figuring out what the game plan for the night is. But if you were to look through the sliding glass door, you'd see both of us more engaged with our devices than each other. Neither of us are big Internet addicts, but the Internet has kind of stripped us of our ability to have a meaningful dialogue. Or even an unmeaningful dialogue.

It's made it impossible to have an uncomfortable silence.

That's not right, y'all. Not right at all.

So  point of unplugging is to pick a time frame (a day, week, month, etc), pick a day to begin it, let all your peeps know you're going off line and then DO IT. Only use your phone for calls and texts. Leave the TV off and your laptops unplugged. Go out and explore a city.

Talk to real live people... in person <---that's the part that terrifies me the most. I live in Florida; people are scary here.

Afterward you can plug back in, but maybe not so much this time. Or maybe you can plug all the way back in, but schedule unplugged moments. Or maybe you'll become a hermit and never plug back in again... until the History Channel shows up with a camera crew to film you for an episode of Mountain Men.

I'm totally down for this because, for real, I'm not that plugged in ANYWAY... and maybe unplugging will help me get over my agoraphobia (I'm pretty sure the only way I'm getting over that is by moving out of this shit hole of a state).

But the irony... the supremely delicious irony of #unplug is that it's an INTERNET MEME. Unplugging has a damn hashtag and people have been tweeting about it. I'm blogging about it. It's a Google+ discussion (or whatever they call it on Google+ I can't figure Google+ out). I expect it'll be showing up in my Facebook feed any day now.

Oh, sweet precious Internet. Never change.

Vagina. Vagina. Vagina. Uterus.

That blog title is likely to get me some hits, don't you think?

I come from a long, long line of fiercely independent women. I wouldn't go so far as to call it entirely feminist, since we were "feminists" long before that was an actual thing. On my mother's side, we were frontierswomen, blazing trails and breaking laws as we saw fit. My great-grandmother graduated summa cum laude and was a Fullbright scholar and Guggenheim Fellow. On my father's side adversity was overcome and my grandmother, despite having to leave her beloved church because of it, divorced her abusive husband. Before that, she raised six kids while working three jobs to support them.

None of us has been dependent on a man. Ever.

When I first became a mother, I wanted sons. Girls are a pain-in-the-ass (we really are) and I wanted nothing to do with them. I was and am determined to raise my sons to be feminists, to understand and appreciate womanhood and the strength that women possess; to be in awe of it instead of lusting after it.

Aside from the occasional booby jokes, the evidence shows that I'm doing OK in that department. The Monkey is friends with more girls than guys and has a healthy respect for girls. The one girl he has a serious crush on, he won't ask out because "he'd rather have her in his life as a friend than ask her out and risk losing her." The Nugget says things like, "I'm going to make sure my sister only has boyfriends that love her."

Not that she'll need protecting, but it's nice to know that The Nugget is already polishing his guns.

Anyway...

As I got older and American society has degraded back into thinly veiled misogyny, and after birthing a daughter, I realized that merely teaching my sons to be in awe of women is not enough. To raise them to be feminists is not enough. To be loyal and good to their mother and sister is not enough. But I don't know what "enough" is.

Because I'm scared, y'all. I'm scared that women are allowing themselves to be subjugated again. I'm terrified that my daughter's reproductive choices will no longer be rights that she can decide on for herself. There's a distinct possibility that we're heading back to a time when women went to college to find a husband rather than get an education and have a career. As it is, more often than not, women have to choose between having a family and having a career.

That scares me. To no end.

I'm going back to work full time on Friday and leaving The Lady Gray with a nanny. It breaks my heart to have to do this because I'd so much rather spend all day trying to make her smile and now I'll be paying someone else to do that. But that has nothing to do with not wanting a career. If I did end up quitting my job to stay home with her, I'd spend her nap times trying to start up a freelance copywriting/advertising business with a side of hand-made goods on Etsy. Shit... I'd do that even without a baby at home.

Here's the thing, I go without sleep to get work done. I wake up with the baby in the middle of the night. I cook. I clean. I pay my bills. I make more money than The Fiancee™. He gets home from work and waits for dinner to be made. He spends a few precious moments with the baby and then he's in bed and asleep, usually, by 9:30 every night.

This isn't to say that The Fiancee™ is lazy or I'm better than him, but more to say that, as a woman, I'm more capable of getting shit done than most men. Countless studies prove that the tendency for men to think linearly puts them at a disadvantage to women, who can think in broader terms and tackle more at once.

Either that scares men or it makes them think, "Shit. Well, I can just sit back and let her handle it all." Or maybe it's a combination of the two. And it's the fear of the almighty vagina that has the collective man figuring out ways to shut our power down. They're starting with our right to choose what to do with our own bodies -- as if we're so much breeding stock for their holy seed. And now they're going after our right to work, saying that women going out to the work force began the degradation of American society.

The Fiancee™ wants another baby. I don't. I'm not having another one. End of discussion. If, perchance, I did get pregnant again, I would terminate the pregnancy. Because it's my right to do so and I don't want to put my body through that again. Carrying The Lady Gray took a huge toll on my body. I'm still recovering from it and it's not an experience I'd like to relive. He'll be pissed and it might be a breaking point for our relationship, but my right to choose not carry another pregnancy to term is mine alone to decide. As soon as he stops masturbating, I'll let him have a say in my reproductive decision-making.

But here's the really scary part -- women are allowing this shit to happen! We're more concerned with looking good to men than we are about being relegated to the kitchen. How in the hell did that happen? Actually, I know how that happened. 

All of this disjointed blogging is to say that we need to raise our children to fight for the equality of the sexes. It's not enough to raise our sons to be feminists. It's not enough to teach them that a woman's reproductive choices are hers. It's not enough to teach them how to cook or to love their sisters. We need to teach our daughters that the fight for our rights is never ending. We need them to not be complacent. We need to teach them that pink was originally a boy color (it was. Look it up). And we need their first word to be vagina.

 

If I click my heels three times...

The only downside to going home for a visit is the raging homesickness that I feel for weeks afterward. Sometimes, like after my last visit, it doesn't last terribly long. Other times, it'll take weeks for it to ebb. Methinks this is one of those times where I'll be longing for home long after I've left.

Sweet Lady Gray was thoroughly doused with much love by her extended family. She also got to spend some time in the hands of the women (her great-grandmothers) who are so important to me and, hopefully, have enough life left in 'em to last long enough for her to actually remember them. I hate the thought that she might only know them through pictures.

The Trolls are still up north for an extended visit with their side of the family and I miss them terribly. I miss their noise and their smell. I even kind of miss their mess in the living room. OK, I'm lying about that last part. It's actually quite nice not having to fight with them to pick up their mess.

But on the topic of homesickness, part of me doesn't want it to go away. Part of me wants it to hang on for dear life so that the fire of my "Two Year Plan" doesn't turn into a slow burning cinder. I want the fire to rage. I want to be motivated to scrimp and save so I can get the hell out of Dodge. That's the hardest part for me. I'm such a hedonist that depriving myself of instant gratification for a long term goal is incredibly difficult. And every time I go home, I come back to Florida thinking that THIS time I'll get my shit together and save some money, but then something shiny tempts me and there goes the Massachusetts fund.

But not this time. This time I'm determined to get back home for good. No, seriously. I am. If I have to, I'll drag The Fiancee™ kicking and screaming with me, but we're going. Because who wouldn't want to be surrounded by this all the time:

My cousin, KadyRose, my Aunt Moe, The Monkey, my Aunt Kathy, and the Nugget at Mt. Tom Ice Cream

Sweet Lady Gray enjoying real grass while watching her brothers play wiffleball. Notice her monkey toes?

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!"

Time Flies When You're Busy Staring at Your Baby

I admit it: I'm one of those sappy, stares-at-my-babies kind of moms. Seriously, I make some REALLY good looking kids. It is physically impossible to NOT stare at them. Each one of 'em had/has one of those baby smiles that light up a room and I would and will do anything to see that smile. It just slays me!

My baby girl is officially two months old today. I don't know how that happened. I don't know how she got so big, so fast when, clearly, all I do is look at her.

At her first baseball game. Of COURSE she's rocking a Red Sox onesie.

Experiencing her very first photo bomb, courtesy her biggest brother.

She's knows she's adorable. Also, she hates dresses and will take any opportunity she can to poop on them.

Even her metal scream is adorable.

Seriously?! How can you NOT want to see that face EVERY SINGLE MINUTE?!

Happy birthday, Baby Girl! You light up my world, my heart and my soul. I am grateful for every single solitary second I have you.

I'm still not sure about all the comma rules, so probably shouldn't be lecturing about punctuation.

Saturday night I had the pleasure of seeing at least 15 minutes of The Fiancee's nephew in a high school stage production of "Oklahoma." I would've seen more, but The Lady Gray decided that she wanted to voice her opinion about the production, so I excused myself to allow her to rant all she wanted... in the car.

While pacing in the vestibule, waiting for the rest of our group to exit the auditorium, I happened to notice the signs for one of the bathrooms:

Girl's

Bathroom

(some [probably poorly punctuated] Braille)

Really! This is in a HIGH SCHOOL, y'all! Supposedly a place of learning -- even if not of the higher variety. How in the Hades could this have gone unnoticed? What one lucky girl gets to use this bathroom? Do they have a vote each day? Does the prom queen get to use this bathroom or does she need to find the one that is properly punctuated?

Apostrophe abuse makes me itchy in a big way.

But I probably shouldn't have expected anything less from a school that has intentional textese graffiti all over the entrance. 

Textese makes me break out in hives. Really is it SO difficult to put in the extra letters? We're not paying by the character anymore, People! You can spell the whole word!

This is what scares me about the world I'm leaving to my children. I remember when "ain't" wasn't actually a word. Now it's in the dictionary! We're deliberately dumbing down rather than holding our offspring to a higher standard. Instead of making our kids work their asses off for a trophy, we're handing them out like so much candy to soothe their little wounded egos. 

What. The. Fuck. Is. WRONG with us?!

Look. It's our job as parents to wound our children. No, seriously. It is. (Side note: my mother can now die happy that I admitted that). Because it's our job to teach our kids that the world is a tough motherfucker and she takes no prisoners. I would love nothing more than to save my kids from every heartbreak and hardship they'll encounter, but I would be doing them a disservice. Just like I'd be doing The Monkey a disservice for telling him that his crap-tastic, half-assed paper about the 1936 Olympics was good enough to hand in rather than making him re-write it (I let him off the hook when it would warrant a C. But only because I was tired of arguing with him about it). Or if I let The Nugget hand in his math homework with every answer wrong because "Mrs. Kling will go over it tomorrow in class". 

NO! It's my job to torture my kids and make them sit at the table 'til the job is done. It's my job to yell at them. It's my job to paint a bleak picture of the kind of future they can expect if they continue to accept mediocrity as the standard.

But I'm wicked hard-pressed to enforce these lessons when the schools around here allow apostrophe abuse to go unchecked and humor textese, because my kids will know I'm full of shit. They'll know that the world at large accepts half-assery and they will be able to out-argue me. And I won't have the safety net of the world giving them their comeuppance because the world is all, "Meh. I'm too busy watching Breaking Amish. Catch me at the commercial."

I'm the kind of exhausted that parents of a newborn are. Oh wait...

The Lady Gray decided to switch her schedule from nights to days, so was up a goodly portion of last night. Not to mention the fact that we're getting some stormy weather around here and, like my middle child, she's a baby barometer, too. Cranky and fussy, she is, and I just feel so badly for her.

She's down for a nap now and I'm hoping that it will last long enough for me to hop in the shower and then put my contacts in. Oh, glorious contact lenses! How I've missed you. While I do look pretty fancy in glasses, I can't help but reflect on Dorothy Parker's assessment of them:

"Boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses"

Which makes me feel decidedly un-sexy. Not that my usual uniform of a tank top and jammy bottoms helps matters much. Or the lack of make up, post-natal acne and hair tossed into a very unattractive pony tail. It's a wonder how The Fiance™ can even think of having another baby.

All of this rambling is to say that I have to leave in a couple of hours to go get The Nugget and take him to his orthodontist consultation. Yes, dear readers, it is possible that I will have another one in braces soon. But in the mean time, I'm enjoying to quiet of the house and doing my level best to ignore the pile of dishes that need doing and the laundry that needs folding. Because I'm tired and I'm supposed to be honoring that and sleeping when the baby does, instead of gulping down a cup of coffee (the one a day I'm allowed while nursing) and fighting the urge to sleep.

Because time moves too quickly these days and before I know it, I'll be returning to work full time and trusting my baby with someone else. Not an easy thing for this mama to wrap her head around, even if I am leaving her with an aunt and uncle her love her to the point of worship.



Edit: Guess who just woke up? I'll get to that shower later, I suppose.