The will to clean

I went to a meeting today without any underwear on under my pants.  They were all dirty.  I got my bra out of the hamper.  Okay, I lied.  I picked it up off the floor.

My house is a fucking wreck.  I seem to have lost the will to clean.  

I like

When you keep snuggling up to me while we sleep.  Even though it bugs the crap out of me.

The cat came back

I made it to day 4, but then I stumbled.  This is how it usually goes.  I’m embarrassed that I can’t even make it a week.  I make it a few days and then I always seem to find a reason to succumb.  

I start out thinking I will just do it one time.  Then two times.  And so on.  

My excuse this time?  Mr. got food poisoning and was throwing up for three hours straight.  I felt helpless. He was seriously pissed off at the world.  I knew it wasn’t about me, but his anger still felt so wounding.  

I smoked during the day, breaking my previous rule of not smoking until Mr. gets home from work.

Technically, he’s not at work though. Unless it’s his new job to projectile vomit for hours on end.

Third day

This is my third day not smoking pot.  While I realize this is no big deal for others, it is for me.

This is about the time when I start feeling like I have an itch, but don’t know where to scratch.  Like I’m suddenly dwarfed by this big empty space in my life.

I don’t even know how to explain it, except to say that I don’t know what to do with myself without it.  It throws my rhythm off.  I feel unmotivated.  I feel unmotivated when I’m smoking pot too, but this is a less comfortable version.

Uncomfortable.  That’s part of the problem.  I almost feel like I could handle it if I was puking my guts out and dealing with the shakes.  But with pot addiction, withdrawal is so subtle.  It makes it easy to ignore, to push my viewpoint to the other side of the blackboard.

Which I would gladly do except my lungs are really fucked up.  They hurt every day.  After only three days of not smoking, they feel a little better.  My sinuses don’t hurt.  I can breathe through my nose.  Is it enough to keep me sober?

I feel really alone.  Those people I smoke with aren’t interested in me quitting.  They love me, but they have a whole system of rationalization for their usage in their heads .  Even the Mr.  I can’t disagree with their reasons either.  I think pot helped me through some tough times, was a life saver.  Maybe it’s doing that for them too.  It just isn’t working for me anymore.  They are also the ones who tell me that you can’t get addicted to marijuana.  Umm, okay.

Then there are a whole slew of friends and family that don’t even know I smoke at all.  My mother would probably equate smoking pot with slamming heroin and freak out.  I’d get fired if my employer knew.  

I feel myself leaning toward it.  We have some here, and I could spark up right now.  I can feel the rationalizations bubbling in my head.  I’ll just do it this once.  I’ll just do it once a week.  I can’t stop.  I don’t know how much longer I can last.  The longest I went without smoking was 8 months once about 5 years ago.  It was kind of awful and I gained 60 lbs.  

I don’t know what to do.

Pearls of wisdom

Dina says: Why don’t guys realize you have to be a Ken to get a Barbie?

Mother’s day

On Mother’s Day, I woke up early and left the Mr. sleeping while I went to get lattes and flowers for my mom who we were going to dinner with later that day. When I got home, I found him crying.  He said, “I thought you left without me.”  Then he said, “I hate Mother’s Day.”

Mr.’s mother is currently serving 1 to 20 for shooting and killing her boyfriend during a fight.  They were somewhat estranged before this happened, but now he refuses to have anything to do with her.  He won’t even open the letters she sends him from prison.  

I wish I could say she was a good, but confused person.  I wish I could say that she didn’t mean to kill him, didn’t premeditate her actions, didn’t have any other choice.  But I can’t say those things with any certainty.  I know she’s had problems, serious problems, for a long time now.  

People don’t understand why he won’t talk to her, and I think that makes it more difficult for him.  He’s had friends and family alike chastise him for abandoning her.  I know he feels he has no choice.  

You have to understand, she’s like a tornado.  She sweeps in and sucks things up.  It’s not enough to just love her, she wants him to agree with her, she wants him to take her side.  She involves him.  No matter how he tries to stay out of her many dramas, she drags him in anyhow. After years of trying, he has just closed the door completely.  

I’ve spent nights myself wondering how to solve this puzzle, this sad connection that needs to be healed.  I see how this hurts him.  I try to stay neutral, but it isn’t always easy when she pulls some of the stunts she has.  Mostly I wonder, what made her like this?  She’s clearly mentally ill, so I wonder is any of this really her fault?  Yet she made choices.  It’s all so complicated.  

We have boxes of baby clothes that she carefully embroidered his name on, toys she hand-sewed for him and photos of her holding him lovingly.  A beautiful 20-year-old girl with a tiny boy.  You can see the pride in her face.  She never beat her kids or put them down.  She acted out and that impacted them, but it was never directed at them.  It’s always been her against the world, but I can see how she let them in her inner circle so that it could be her and her kids against the world.  I know she loves him.

I sometimes think this time she is behind bars might be a good time for the Mr. to reconnect with her. It is relatively safe.  She can’t come barreling into his life the same way anyhow.  After staying quiet about it for a long time, I finally asked him if he wanted to try to talk to her.  He said it will only turn out the same.  

I still save all her letters for him in case he changes his mind.  

I like

All your nicknames for me.  The Mrs.  Baby.  Stacks.  Dear.  Little Lady.  My One.  Weedy Gonzales.  Hot-a-naughty-miss.  Naughty.  Pretty.  Poke-a-hot-ass.  My Lady.  M’lady.  My Liege.  Liegey.        

Bitch

I just met with my old boss to get her help on a project I’m working on.  What I was hoping was that she would be willing to talk to some of her business contacts about sponsoring the program.  What I got was her criticizing my ideas and drawing big slashes through all the information pieces I created and saying things like, “This really needs work.”  

She kept taking the pen right out of my hand.  So I was sitting there trying to memorize what she was saying while I rummaged through my bag for another pen.  This happened twice.

I left her office with a ache in my gut.  Now I’m home smoking pot and wishing she were dead.  Okay, maybe not dead.  Maybe a size 14 (which I would love to be myself.)  In addition to being insufferable, she is one of the only 45-year-old women I know who is a size fucking zero.  Once, I went to lunch with her and she ordered a cup of broth.  A CUP OF BROTH.

She claims Senator Orrin Hatch once groped her.  She claims a lot of people once groped her. Anyone who doesn’t, she claims is a homosexual.

She was one of those bosses who goes through assistants like Kleenex.  I pride myself on being able to work with difficult people, and I was able to work with her mostly by ignoring her abrasiveness.   She liked me, but God help you if you got on her bad side.

I was so terrified to tell her I was quitting that I lied and told her I was moving to another state.  After I’d already left the job, I told her the move fell through.  

I attended the meeting with another colleague.  As we were leaving, he said, “God, she’s a bitch.”

Yeah.

Pearls of wisdom

Trey says, couples should never share computers, cars or bedrooms.

Best friends

I just had a big shouting match on the telephone with my best friend, Trey.

I won’t bore you with all the details.  We were heatedly discussing mom’s rights (hmmm, guess whether or not Trey has kids?) but it got cranked up a notch when she accused me of hating mothers.  

Then all hell broke loose.

I love mothers!  I just don’t think I, and the other taxpayers, should foot the bill for every mother to stay home with their children for the first two years.  Ever heard of something called personal responsibility?

Trey believes this passionately, deeply and completely.  And it really bothers her that I don’t believe this passionately deeply and completely.  BECAUSE I’M NOT A MOTHER, FREAK.

Trey is a mother activist.  She has a successful mommy blog where she writes about the danger of barbies and porn.  She’s forever signing petitions and writing letters to legislators about maternity leave and family planning, blah, blah, blah.  She loathes Disney Princesses more than Beelzebub himself.  

Sigh. She wasn’t always like this.  

I remember the Trey who took ecstasy and danced the night away at the local gay disco.  The Trey who dressed slutty and smoked cigarettes and drank long island iced teas.  The Trey who dragged me to strip clubs and to buy vibrators.  Who convinced me to drive to Vegas with only $40 (we drank free drinks, played nickel slots and slept in the car).  Who went to nude beaches.  Who posed topless in a magazine. Who dug vagina art.

I can’t believe my friend who didn’t wear a bra for the first five years I knew her, now won’t let her daughter wear belly shirts.  She’s a stay-at-home mom.  She goes to church for God’s sake!  This has been confusing for me.

We talked over each other, getting louder and louder, and I started crying.  During the fight, my husband walked into the room, saw me crying and yelling in the phone, and promptly turned and left.  Smart man.

We made up in the end.

After things had calmed down, I said, You just don’t know how oppressive they can be.

Who?

Mothers

She laughed.  Yeah, sometimes the other mothers get on my nerves too.  Some mothers are crazy. 

I bit my tongue.