Hum dee dum

One of my neighbors hand-delivered an invitation for a benefit she’s hosting tomorrow night for some girl in a vegetative state who needs, uh, something that costs money. “If you can’t get a sitter, just bring [Little Girl]!” It’s $100/plate and lasts until 9. What do I do? Do I have to go? She was all guilty-trippy about it. “Last year we raised over $33,000 and saved her life, and she’s in trouble again!” I mean, I don’t want this girl to die, but, uh…well I’m just not in a benefit-attending kind of circumstance, you know? And with Little Girl? If we don’t go, do I have to turn all the lights at the house off? They’re across the street.

But while we’re talking about neighbors, another one said we can use her pool anytime, and she’s there only a few weeks a year! Score!

We’ve hit a snag in my residency application for Sweden: my name is wrong on the paperwork. I’m not sure whom to blame–evidence suggests my husband forgot what my middle name is, or at least didn’t notice when the Swedes got it wrong. We aren’t apart that much, buddy. Speaking of him, he’ll be in Antwerp and Brussels for the weekend. As for us, we may or may not go to the library.

Sort of smoothed things over with my mom, mostly by insisting that, no, my interest in having my dad come visit was not prompted by a desire to shock my grandparents to death in order to get the insurance money. Yes, she really said that. I had no idea I was such an evil person. Plus that’s not even a good plan.

Space

Now that we don’t have any friends or activities Little Girl and I are kind of spending too much time in just each other’s company. Sure, we go to parks and run errands and pass other humans at the beach and there have been a few social engagements thanks to neighbors, but for sustained interaction we are stuck with each other. I get impatient, she gets whiny. I am sure I speak for Little Girl when I say it would be nice to have some variety. I miss my friends, and judging from Little Girl’s requests to go see some particular ones of hers (she always phrases this as a desire to go to their house for snacks), she does, too. But it’s just the two of us, all the time. Sometimes I want to, uh, get some time apart from Little Girl so we can do our own thing, something I’d never understood before when people talked about it, since we were always so busy and surrounded by others. I feel guilty for wanting some time off, since Little Girl really is a sweetheart.

Today we were supposed to have a play date with a local woman and her kids, but she canceled. A friend was going to visit with her kids this week, but she canceled. The two mothers’ groups I found around here meet mostly far away, off the island. This past holiday weekend we were surrounded by flocks of families gathered together and it kind of threw into relief how few we are, how alone. And, after a month of this, it’s kind of lonely. The vacation feeling, the need to decompress from the move and all the rest of it, has passed, and we’d both like to socialize. But how do you make friends when everyone else around you is just passing through on vacation? When we’re just transients ourselves? When we have no schools or jobs at which to meet people? Now do I finally get why some people talk about motherhood as isolating. Though I guess in my case it’s more about geography than life stage.

Part-time husband

Husband just left for Europe for two and a half weeks. After he rolled out of the driveway, Little Girl’s lower lip stuck out, and she said, “Daddy wanna cook my food! I so hungry.” Unfortunately, she’s going to have to stick with my cooking. Then we went inside and discovered the filthy bottom of Pudding, the cat, and I got to bathe her in the sink–all by myself.

Even when Husband’s in the country these days we’re still on our own most of the time due to our dual-state marriage. If there’s something disgusting on the carpet, I’m the only one who can clean it. If a wrench is the answer, I’m the only one who can wield it. If it needs to be purchased, I’m the only one who can run out to the store to buy it. On the upside there’s less laundry and fewer dishes. And the sex is hotter since it’s rationed.

It’s really not so bad. I know when Little Girl was younger if Husband was out of town I would freak right on out about having to do the whole evening routine on my own, but now we’re a little more like a team and it’s manageable–sometimes even fun. Other mothers express dismay at these long absences, but you can get used to anything, and it’s actually quite the awkward adjustment when he comes back to town for the weekends. I get mad when he doesn’t acknowledge my primary-source knowledge of life around here, and he gets irritated when I have trouble falling asleep with this new person in my bed. When he’s gone it’s all that’s best about single parenting–no one to negotiate with, no one to judge–without the worry about supporting us financially. But it’d be nice to be more of a unit, rather than puzzle pieces sometimes scattered apart. Someday.

Renovation from afar

…which is really the only way to do it. When we do eventually get to Sweden we are, as I’ve mentioned, buying the ancestral family home, and my in-laws are getting an apartment in the city and a little lakeside stuga (cottage) for the summer, as per the universal custom for retirees. It may even be a requirement to receive your pension, ha ha. Anyway, the house Husband grew up in has many wonderful qualities, but none of those qualities has anything to do with the bathroom or kitchen.

I don’t believe the kitchen has been updated since the sixties (and it was built in the thirties) and the countertops, I don’t know what the hell has gone wrong, but if you run your fingernails along them, stuff gets under there. Ew. The kitchen needs help. And behind the kitchen is sort of an unused library-type room, and we want to take out that wall and make it a kitchen-family room deal. Easier said than done of course!

There are also only two half-baths in the house and a shower stall in the basement. This isn’t nearly as unpleasant as it sounds–the basement is really warm and clean–but it is, we’ll say, not my preference for the long-term. We want the upstairs bathroom to have a tub and shower, which requires a lot of plumbing work, and we want to renovate that whole bathroom while we’re at it. It’s really old and really small, and while we aren’t gonna make it bigger, we want to make it better. Plus, Sweden (as a nation) has this deal going where they’ll pay 50% of your renovation costs! So my in-laws are going to oversee the renovation now to take advantage of this, and so they can enjoy it, and we’re going to pay for it and pick things out. We’ve been spending a lot of time on the IKEA and Ifö and Svenska Badkar etc. websites and pouring over all kinds of measurements in centimeters and millimeters and figuring if this tub can fit there and if that lighting fixture can go above that and…well it’s a nice distraction, frankly, and I don’t even have to put up with the contractors! Another bonus: the exchange rate between Swedish crowns and dollars confuses me so much that I am unable to fret about costs!

Record-keeping

When Little Girl was born I started writing those popular monthly letters. “You are getting so big! You are learning how to X! I love you so much!”–you know the drill. (Over on the left there you can find their category.) Then sometime after she turned one the letters stopped materializing, and the notes I would make for them, like this from 21 months:

watches our mouths to see how we say words, starting to repeat what we say a lot, ask what things are
playing with baby doll a lot—checking diaper, feeding it, giving it something to drink
“no” to every question
very independent at the playground, can climb ladders on your own
likes to wear headbands and take them off

stayed notes. But then the lists got to be, somehow, too much work, and I would instead occasionally email myself virtually meaningless, at this remove in time, information, like this: “had a dream, asked for a video in sleep.” What? And these days I don’t even know how many months old she is to begin with (even though I know as of today she has just three months to go until she turns three, the math is way too hard) and have given up the whole enterprise.

I guess I’ll just have to piece together the rest of her childhood from whatever I was complaining about in my blog.

This and that

No updates on the mom stuff. I sent her a not-all-that-apologetic-but-polite email and haven’t received a response.

Weirdly, I have two friends in their late thirties in their second trimesters of surprise pregnancies who are on blood thinners and are in the processes of readying their homes for selling and moving. Huh. Husband is living with one of them (well, not just with her, that would be odd; with her family) and will, after she and the kids move out of state next week, continue bachin’ it* with her husband at their house (they’re keeping their furniture for staging purposes). The husbands work together and their house is near our old house, so it’s pretty strangely convenient all around.

Shortly after arrival, I become infatuated with the biking-distance Montessori school. We went on a tour. It was very impressive. Little one-year-olds selected an activity (“work”), put it on a table, focused on tonging shapes or whatever for dozens of minutes, then carefully put it away. It’s like they were drugged. And the school had violin classes, Chinese, gardens, art, Spanish-only teachers in every classroom. I became sad Little Girl would only have the opportunity to go there for one year, and promptly filled out an overwhelmingly complex application for one of the few available spots. I also gave them money.

Then I realized that being here was causing me to become confused about my socioeconomic class. Tuition was almost 7k, not including all kinds of fees. I’m not about to pay that kind of money to “educate” a person who is perfectly happy pushing her tricycle around in the backyard for hours at a time chattering about bugs and birds. I don’t even think preschool is necessary, certainly not fancy preschool, to begin with. So I declined the opportunity to take the next step (pay 100 bucks for Little Girl to talk to one of the teachers to figure out what age group she should be in, something I could tell them for free). School can wait. Hopefully we won’t even be here for much of the fall. Not that the general public appears interested in purchasing our house.

My friends never call me here. Sucks.

Thanks to the neverending miscarriage (still not at zero with the hCG, folks) I have now met my maximum of 6k out of pocket for the year. I am considering elective surgery on my arthritic toe, as well as following through with the recommendation from the maternal-fetal specialist on seeing a hematologist to pin down, via expensive testing, exactly which life-threatening blood clotting disorders I have, since bloodwork suggests I don’t just have the blah blah blah they knew about before.

If you could get free medical care, what would you go for?

* Not the looking for sex while the wife’s away definition. I mean, to the best of my knowledge. One can only assume.

Unjust

When we were making the arrangements to move down here my mother mentioned something about how my dad wouldn’t be able to visit the beach house. I dismissed it at the time, figuring she couldn’t be serious. I mean, we are living here. He is my dad. He’s Little Girl’s grandfather and they adore each other. But when, today, I mentioned that my dad might time his annual summer visit to coincide with Husband’s parents’ trip here, which we’d just planned, I learned that, yes, my mother is that insanely controlling. She told me that my father “cannot come here until [she is] dead”, and that she did not want him benefiting from her side of the family’s good fortune in any way. She didn’t want him stepping foot on floors her grandparents paid for and getting a “free vacation.”

It was an unbelievably unpleasant conversation which ended when she told me that anybody would agree with her, and I couldn’t come up with anything safe to say to that. And then I cried. Because I love my dad, I’m close to my him, and I want to see him, and I want him to see Little Girl. And if I don’t get to say who is allowed to visit me here, then how is this my home? It makes me feel even more unstable. It’s unfair. It’s crazy. Plus, am I not a grown up?

I love being here. Except when I talk to my mom. Then I suddenly can’t wait to get the hell out of the country, pristine beaches be damned.

Some might suggest I just do what I want anyway but I don’t want to suffer the repercussions. I mean, we want and need to live here, for now. I suppose my mom thinks–and knows–she can get away with shit like this is as she has in the past. The car we never asked for and never use that she had my grandparents hand down to us? My dad wasn’t allowed to drive it when he visited a few years ago and he had to rent one. When we were making up our wills when Little Girl was born? My mom kept interrogating me to make sure our money (which, yes, some I have gotten from my family, but we also have, you know, jobs) wouldn’t eventually trickle down to my father. Things like that.

I know my parents have a rancorous past, and I believe my mom when she tells me how tough she had it with my father, and how he didn’t support us, and she had to go live with her parents. I have my own issues with my dad’s moving to Alaska when I was but six (among other things). I mean, if you really want a close relationship to your kid in Georgia, that’s not the most reasonable spot to seek out. But having known my mother, I, frankly don’t exactly blame my dad for wanting to get some space between them. Talk about a vindictive and controlling personality.

She makes me feel like a powerless kid in an uncertain world. Even though she’s letting us live here paying only utilities the rent is almost unbearably high.

Island living

You know, I’m not so sure I want to move to Sweden anymore. This whole living-on-a-tropical-island thing is pretty nice. While I still have to do everyday things like visit the post office and put away the laundry and work remotely at night, the majority of our time is spent at the beach, biking around lagoons, visiting playgrounds, and enjoying tourist hot spots at marinas where live music plays and gentle winds rustle palm trees. For that matter, gentle winds rustle palm trees in my yard. I can go lie on the hammock anytime I want and lose myself in it. It’s a perpetual vacation. Who would choose darkness and snow and foreign languages over this?

Of course, I can’t exactly bring this up with Husband, who’s hammered out an agreement with his job through the fall to be there in person just three days a week, and who is very stressed about work and selling the house and the car accident aftermath and all that, and who is basically getting himself through this period by getting psyched about moving to Sweden. He’s totally thrilled that his brother, and his pregnant wife, might have finally found a house in the little village we’re supposed to move to, too, and likes to talk about how great it will be when we’re all there. And here I am, trying to figure out, even if we do move to Sweden, how long we should stay there before moving here again. Because it is NICE.

But natural beauty isn’t, I suppose, the main way people decide where they live. How did you end up where you are?

Notes from the housing market

In the past few weeks that the house has been on the market, at a shockingly low price which is 10k less than we paid seven years ago, two sets of folks have come by. But they have, sadly, not been suckered into buying our lovely and well-maintained house which, unfortunately, is in a bad spot. Here’s what one of their real estate agents reported:

“They really like this house, and the price, however, they are debating the
power line situation [they run behind our yard, making it super private!].
Mrs. purchaser didn’t like the buzzing she could hear
when standing in the backyard. Mr. purchaser grew up around high tension
power lines and doesn’t have a problem with them. However, Mrs. purchaser
is the SOLE purchaser! (enough said). It has not been totally eliminated,
but they are leaning towards another home instead.

The price on this home is awesome for the space and condition, but I would
think the power lines are your primary draw back.”

Nothing I can do about that!

Husband has been camping there sometimes as he’s still working in Atlanta (other times he’s with friends, and he may start renting a room), and he says it’s very depressing to be in the silent house. I mostly just get sad looking at the picture of Little Girl’s empty blue room. But hey! I never have to mop that huge kitchen again in my whole entire life! Hooray!

:)

Good things

The librarian gave me a card without making me jump through residency-proving hoops! We are hard-hitting library users so I was having a hard time not being able to check anything out.

The weather has been perfect. 75, sunny, breezy. Granted I am depressed so I want to do more sitting around inside than is warranted, but we are enjoying it.

Got a package in the mail yesterday. Came upon it as we were returning from the beach. Shit, what did I buy on the internet? Saw the return address. Oh no, did I shop at Gymboree in my sleep? That sounds bad. But no! It was a gift! A pretty little sundress for Little Girl from my boss!

Little Girl is having a wonderful time. She runs for miles in the surf. She eats a ton. She is being completely catered to. I ask her what she wants to do, and she says park, or snack, or video, or beach, and I almost always say yes. One day, after making her do boring errands with me, she directed the next few activities–down to what she ordered at the restaurant I had not planned on visiting. This might not end well but is fun in the meantime. I guess it’s because I feel bad for all the upheaval. And there’s been some yelling. Now I’m trying to focus on her.

We had a fun playdate with a local and her two little girls, and I didn’t get lost driving there!

Bad things disguised as good things:

The horrible arthritis in my toe that was really bothered by wearing heels at Easter and makes each step painful is getting somewhat better!

I think perhaps with a few more rounds of carpet cleaner I’ll be able to get the dog shit stain out of the oriental rug!

We’ve learned more about the varieties of storytime available at the local library. Well, what we learned was that it is disorganized and various children’s nannies are way too hands-off and made things unpleasant, and they also show a video, which is exactly the opposite of why we go to library storytimes, but, well, it was something to do and Little Girl liked it!

Little Girl has the language skills to tell me that she’s scared to use the potty because of her sores down there stemming from horrible diarrhea after the move (poor stressed-out princess). Hooray for talking!

Unbelievable

My pet rabbit just died. My mom took her (Inga) when I was pregnant, so had her for three years, and I had her for four years before. And last night she was, well, dismembered. By some creature. While in her well-fortified dog run/cage. Somehow. They didn’t find any of her in her home, just some fur, but they did find…pieces…in the yard. Wow. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. How sad.

I’ve been trying to figure out which of the bad things I’ve done in my past incurred the karma that seems to be ganging up on me now. I’ve pretty much settled on what it was, though it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it now–and no I am so not going to tell. Just remember the pain I caused and hope this Spring makes us even.

Though I’ve started meeting people here the trainwreckiness of my life right now makes it hard for me to make real connections. If someone asks me if I want more kids, I can’t help but think of my miscarriage, and then try to avoid the topic or, even worse, one late afternoon with wine last week, broach it, then regret that. If someone asks me what my husband does for work, I can’t help but try to explain about his visiting on weekends, travel to Europe, and how that travel was postponed for swine flu. If someone asks me why we moved here, I can’t help but want to go on about drug dealing neighbors and moves to Sweden. It seems like no topic is safe from my abiding unfortunate weirdness at the moment. When I’m on the phone with my old friends I have to ask them, “What was the last piece of bad news I shared with you so I know where to start?”

Certainly if I were to meet me at the park, as a group of nice women did today, if I were to be truly open, I would weird myself out. So I am (which is hard for me) circumspect. I try to keep the topic on the other people. I try to be mildly funny, but bland, and watch what I say, and bring up little that invites follow-up questions. Act normal. Don’t want to be too much myself. And that’s no way to live.