Welcome, pixies to the Morton's Salt edition of the Whiner's Ball. This is dedicated to all of you who just can't seem to get out from under this week. And, of which I am one.
Let's just say that things started off annoying, and got downright brutal from there. Those three of you who read my blog know that I went off to the mountains of North Carolina this weekend for my cousin's wedding. (This is where the annoying part starts, sliding into the brutal.)
There are definite reasons that I live far, far away from most of my family. We arrived in the mountains, my mother, my daughter and I, at 12:30pm on Friday, and were immediately put to work. Now, don't get me wrong -- I don't mind helping out -- not at all -- but imagine my surprise when I, an actual *invited* guest to this shindig, was expected to make the coffee and act as a waitress for those people attending the rehearsal dinner. I did as I was asked, knowing that tempers were short, and that they are my family. I wasn't real pleased, mind you, but I wanted her day to be special.
I lost my cool on Saturday, though, after being bitched at for doing a task that I was asked to do. I threw a little hissy of my own, and proceeded to announce that I was an invited guest, not a hired hand. I was sick, still hacking with that cough that earned my coveted "Elevated Risk of Lung Butter" award last week, and every! single! fricking! person! smoked like there was no tomorrow and cigarettes were their only sustenance. Well, I exaggerate slightly. I didn't smoke, and neither did Offspring. We were downright lonely.
The luster of the weekend was also tainted by the fact that Monday was my birthday, and I gave up my entire weekend to assist people who treated me like domestic help, and on top of it, I missed celebrating with my husband and daughter to travel five hours (through three states) and get bitched at.
On the drive to the mountains, I learned that my maternal uncle would not be making the wedding because he'd suffered a heart attack on Thursday. The good news was that it was a mild heart attack, but the bad was that it occurred in a bad location. We drove through CityOfMyBirth on the way back home on Sunday, and stopped in at the hospital. He seemed in good spirits, but is still in the Cardiac unit, due to episodes of defibrillation.
Monday dawns, along with my birthday. I am feeling every single one of my 37 years, and took to telling people that I was three days older than the sand in Jesus' shoes. "37" may just be a number, but it is seriously messing with my head.
This morning, I'm jolted awake by my husband who says that his mother checked into the local ER overnight for a massive gall bladder attack. Being a fairly sound sleeper who occasionally dreams that her family members are blue triangles (Damn Ray Bradbury and "I Sing the Body Electric"!), I called him later at work to make sure that was not a hallucination. It was not. M-I-L is set to have the stone removed tomorrow, and the gall bladder removed this coming Thursday.
Can someone please stop this week? I want to get off!
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41 comments:
KLee,
This is not my weekly whine (I'll be back with it later), but I have to share a story with you that might prove to you that your family is not the only one like this.
Some 14 years ago, my cousin and her man were planning their wedding. My aunt and the fiance's mother had never gotten along, but it only escalated when the wedding plans began. They couldn't even plan a joint shower - both wanted it at their own houses.
MIL-to-be's shower was first, and though we all expected the standard animosity between the women, it did seem over the top when MIL-to-be asked my aunt to act as a valet and park all the cars so that her friends wouldn't have to park and walk. Right. Because that is exactly what tradition dictates the mother of the bride should be doing during her daughter's bridal shower.
Family. Can't live with them. Can't escape them.
can we have a special category this week, something about relatives going insane around weddings? because i'm nominating klee and amy, even though amy is having a flashback to a wedding some time back.
Klee wins the whole enchilada this week as far as I'm concerned.
Anti-whine: Big can o' whup ass!
Whine: 2 exams today, 1 tomorrow, 1 Monday, 1 paper due next week, 2 the week after. Aaaaannnnndddd...three weeks until we find out how all the smilingsmilingsmiling paid off.
Anti-whine: tons of support here in blogland and out in the real world for what we're doing.
also, happy birthday, klee! and i hope your uncle is doing better. xoxo
on to my whine: my sweet friskie-toes went gently this morning. and it was a good thing, because he had a very bad, no good, horrible visit to the vet this weekend, which freaked him beyond belief. [my husband meant well; circumstances already gave him the cluestick.] i'm comforted that friskie died in his special spot, and in no pain. not real thrilled at having made that decision.
Oops! I meant to wish KLee a happy birthday too!
Happy Birthday, KLee!
As for my whine - life is Teh Suck. I need an attorney. I have too many classes. Etc.
Antiwhine: I didn't cry in class yesterday. Not even though life is Teh Suck and my professor ripped my exam to shreds and this was supposed to be the one class I was doing well in. I breathed through it. Yay, Lamaze, you finally came in handy.
Aw KLee, I'm so sorry. That definitely wins you the overall award. Freakin' relatives.
Whine: Pain, fireplacing pain. And a complete inability to function on one of the meds prescribed to (apparently) help said pain. I've had to cut the dose back by half just so I don't sleep through the morning at my desk. So the result is that I either hurt or fall asleep in the middle of a sentence.
Nice.
Oh, and happy birthday KLee!!!
Happy Birthday, KLee, and much sympathy on the weekend of family joy, in the middle of the week of family medical chaos.
Good luck to Liz on your exams! And more!
Hugs to Kathy A.
Miranda, congratulations on not crying. I'd have been a blubbering puddle. Now if the breathing could just get you through all the rest of it.
Also, some magic pixie dust for Sue, which should take care of the pain without leaving you narcoleptic.
My old skool whine is that I have a giant quantity of not-that-good bean soup in the freezer. That'll teach me to download random recipes from teh Intertubes. Also I have a large quantity of yummy red chard to cook, and the other chard eater is going out of town. So I probably need to turn it into some other kind of freezable item. Preferably tastier than that soup.
Hi guys -
I have been lurking, but decided to step into the comment box this week.
Things here at FootballU are okay - I am working in a new area with a new advisor. She is, ya know, *nice to me* which is still a shock to the system, but I am struggling to figure out how (if) I fit in this new discipline and what I could possibly do with this degree.
Lots of life angst (whine), but my dog is a sweetheart (anti-whine), I live in a fabulous place (anti-whine), and I have good friends (anti-whine). Of course my family is still 3500 miles away (whine), my grandmother's health slipping (whine), and my sometimes-sort-of-almost-boyfriend both four hours away and far too married to his job to consider committing to me (whine).
Does it say anything that my *mother* keeps suggesting I drop out of school and backpack through New Zealand for a year, since “[I am] so unhappy?”
Anyways, this is why I don’t usually whine here – it sets off a cascade. To keep it from drowning us all, I will end and say: happy birthday, KLee; may dear Friskie-toes rest in peace; and I am thinking of the rest of you.
- redzils /at/ gmail /dot/ com OR http://redzils.livejournal.com
IT'S UP ON YOU TUBE!!!
Search on my last name (M.i.l.l.e.r) + DB8 (spelled out). The question was about traffic on a nearby road.
big hugs to miranda, sue, and redzils.
My whine is that I have an article and a chapter to write in the next few weeks and I'm panicking about the time that I have do these, but I'm also procrastinating like crazy.
And that makes me both stressed out and self-loathing.
I was a dork, growing up. Yes, I'm still a dork, but y'know, I've embraced it. I've found other dorks to bond with, and hey, its all good!
But when a dork meets a dork, and they love each other very much... they have dorky babies, who grow into dorky children, who come home one day and tell you, "Mom, Pete told me that on his friends list, I'm in the hundreds now, and even Marvin is above me on his list. And he told me I smell. I can't smell anything, can you?"
And your heart breaks into long, sharp, sparkling shards that spin around and stab you in the guts, and you flash back on your own dorky childhood and remember asking your own mother something similar nearly 30 years ago.
And you know that you're going to have to relive all the bad parts of dorkdom, hoping your child can take the same path to finding friends and happiness you did. And you don't know how to help them get there.
My other whine: I miss Phantom.
I just realized how that sounded. I don't mean I miss Phantom from Wednesday Whining - all of you who host are doing a wonderful job!!! I mean that I miss going over to her blog to hear about LG and BB's latest antics and to read her great posts.
I just miss her.
Sue, I knew what you meant, and think the other moderators will too. A moment of keyboard stillness while we all miss Phantom a little.
(PS, if you are reading, no guilt! We are not trying to make you feel guilty! Just whining, you know? We do that. Whine. A lot.)
Sara,
That is so hard. Similar issues here. How do we get through this again? Tell them to just wait it out, there are lots of cool people to meet in college?
And my kid is smart enough to realize that when other kids say the only part she can have in their game is "dog" or "servant" they are trying to drive her away just as surely as when they say "this game can only have two people."
Any teacher/parent opinions on how old is too old to let the teacher know these playground games are going on? Kindergartens often have a rule of "you can't say 'you can't play'" but at Grade 2 I wonder if I am being overprotective?
Oh, hugs to everyone dealing with the pain of kids' social lives. I blogged about this last week, too.
And to kathy a for having to say good bye to friskie toes.
madeleine -- letting a teacher know something is going on and that you have concerns is not overprotective -- certainly not in elementary school. it is passing along information, and inviting productive communication about a problem affecting your child.
sara, i'm so sorry. i wish we all had magic wands for the painful social things our kids go through.
high school was rough for my daughter; her old friends mostly turned into alien, terminally cool people. so now she is at college, a new start, and things seemed to be going ok until she called saturday, crying because everyone else has best friends already and she isn't in a clique. "don't send any more care packages of stuff to share, mom," she said, "i don't have any friends." [stab to gut.] and then that night, she returned a call to her dad. was having a great time! went to a haunted corn maze with a bunch of people from her dorm hall.
one of the great revelations of college, for me, was that nearly everyone had felt like an outsider, even the ones who outwardly appeared popular, cool, very successful. crossing fingers for all of our kids negotiating social hell.
my whine: I'm bad at watering houseplants. I used to be really really bad. Then I got better for a couple of years. So then, in all my wisdom, decided to get MORE houseplants when we moved. As well as moving all our houseplants, including a rubber plant (a whole other story which includes renting an SUV *cringe* so we could move them all). I bought a bunch for the guest bathroom to disguise, distract! from the fact that kitten's litter box is in there. But now I can't keep up with all the watering & fertilizing. Sigh. And you know, I used to work with plants for a living, have a freakin' PhD in it (well, it was more complicated than that, but you know). I think there is an optimal number of houseplants I can have. If I get more, they die until I get back to the optimal number. But plants dying! Ack. I'm a plant killer.
Anti-whine: at least some of them stay alive. I'm a plant live-er?
Whine: 23 weeks... and now I feel sick. Which may actually be a cold, or some strange, 2nd trimester morning (all day) sickness. With the extra bonus that I don't think my asthma medication is working well enough. And that means I might have to go on a steroid asthma med - and risk preterm labor. It makes me crabby.
And sadly, I'm so swamped at work I can't read the other whines. Sorry.
I'm posting anonymously because that seems to be the only way it doesn't come back to haunt me. Although things being the way they are, anonymity not be all it's supposed to be.
My S.O. has decided we're "drifting apart." Well, yeah, we are and we have been for quite some time. It has something to do with questionable computer usage, in both amounts of time and sites visited, on my S.O.'s part. After 3 or more years of this, I learned to entertain myself of an evening. But now I'm supposed to entertain my S.O. instead, so that we're "together" again.
Kathya - so sorry for the loss of friskie toes. It's just so hard to lose a pet.
(((Sara))))
Yes, I bring the nipples again. Cracked, sore, tired of being awoken in the middle of the night to hang out with the plastic cups of the breastpump.
But at least I'm getting kudos from the baby's nurses--"wow, you're good at this."
Yes, thank you body, for being good at one reproductive-related thing.
Baby is doing extremely well, thanks for all the good thoughts, prayers and crossed appendages.
Klee, you might just win the insane relatives award. Wow! I thought MY family was nuts.
Kathya, sorry to hear about friskytoes. Losing a pet sucks.
Whine: The Red Sox. I mean, REALLY. The Red Sox. Eric Gagne. What were they THINKING?
Whine: Son's therapist decided everything is daughter's fault and I should get her involved with the court system. Um, No way, Jose.
Whine: I no longer sleep at night at all. I sleep from around 11 am till 3 pm, and then nap around 9 pm till 11 pm. I'm groggy and completely out of whack and can't get myself back on track.
Whine: Went to the funeral of a wonderful woman from shul today. It was tragically sad.
Whine: my house reeks of old fish because someone (son) cooked fish and then left it sitting on the counter overnight. No amount of Method cleaning products will take that smell out. It is VILE.
Whine: this weekend is my nephew's wedding that we weren't invited to. We wouldn't have gone anyhow, but an invitation might have been nice.
Whine: I have had a migraine for almost 2 weeks on and off. It will not go away permanently and I can't take medication. And I'm STILL phlemish.
AntiWhine: Global warming... 70 degrees in Boston in mid-October. I'm loving it.
Antiwhine: Daughter's midterms are excellent. Son's were OK, not fabulous.
Antiwhine: Have finally discovered trick to keeping cat unblocked. Cranberry pills. Work great, but he has ruined the floor in the dining room in the meantime. Which is a whine.
Whine: At sixteen and a half weeks, I'm getting symptoms that mothers of singletons generally don't get until six and a half months, including Braxton Hicks contractions.
Whine: PSD. Pubic Symphisis Dysfunction. Everything throughout my pelvic girdle hurts. Walking is stiff and painful (and funny-looking!), but it's got nothin' on getting in and out of the car. Ouch.
Antiwhine: Neither of these things is bad for the babies, and in fact todays ultrasound showed them doing quite well and being all flippy.
Antiwhine: Doctor says he's pretty sure - pretty sure - that we're having one boy and one girl.
Whine: Inability to spell "symphysis".
Heh! I got that process on my A&P Bone practical today.
I'm sorry you're in pain and getting B&H, but YAY on the healthy wee ones!
Kathy a., I'm so sorry about Frisky Toes.
Margalit and all others with family issues, I'm sorry about that too.
And Sara, that's something I'm dreading for my son. But he comes from a long line of dorks, so I'm assuming he'll be one too.
The gentlest of hugs for uccellina!!!! Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. That's all I can say.
i'm double-dipping this week. you all can completely disregard any parenting advice or anecdotes i ever give, because for the 20th consecutive year [with two kids and considering the parental angst magnifying factor, that is 400 parenting years], i have completely knocked myself out of the running for any parenting award of a positive nature.
daughter is in a Blue Funk, crying and angry. she was ok when i told her yesterday that our old, very sick cat died. she is NOT ok learning today that we decided to put friskie down, to end his suffering. the hell of it is, i can't really blame her.
Baby's still not here. WAH!
Yeah, I see the irony.
Happy Birthday KLee. And many many hugs. It is enough to make you not want to go home again.
And so sorry to Kathy A. Losing a pet is just hard, all the way around.
Sympathy for everyone dealing with child social woes. Why do our children have to relive our own anxieties? And the school counselor's suggestion on how I can make my daughter happier about going to school (fine once inside, just shy about going) is for me to set up playdates. Um, < whine > if I had good social skills to teach her, she wouldn't be in this boat...
And sympathy for JenR and Uccellina for the pregnancy woes. All the best.
The best I have going for me this week as an antiwhine is going on progestin to restart my period (it has been 3 months since the D&C). Saying what the hell, let's try this again. And going against my judgment that this may be too soon, we're trying Clomid too. I don't think the odds are nearly enough in my favor to be this optimistic, but it feels nice.
here's my bit: am not pregnant. would like to be pregnant, but am not.
but i realize that my life is incomprehensibly blessed (i'm not counting the cramps), so i'll count today as cycle day 1 and we'll give it yet another go.
my thoughts to those feelin' knocked down and dragged out, those with heartache for/about their loved ones (especially anonymous), and everybody else. here's to a better week, starting today!
A vote for Amy, because no matter how your head tells you "we can try again this month," it still just sucks.
Thanks to all for the belated birthday wishes and the commiseration my my not-to-be-believed family. And you guys thought I was exaggerating. (Anyone who has actually read the post on my place dealing with my brother's college graduation knows exactly the depths to which my family will sink. Yeah, we're a classy bunch.)
Amy, I'm so sorry about the not being pregnant. I know you want it badly, but (and even though I know this doesn't really comfort you) you already have one gorgeous, adorable child. Why mess with perfection? :)
Best of luck to liz, and her unbloggable. I'm wishing that I was a resident of your community so I could help make your unbloggable a reality. All I can do is send good vibes your way.
I have lots more comments, but I'm saving them for the awards edition. If I write them all now, I'll have no material come Thursday! Be prepared to have the awards posted a little late on Thursday as well. I will try to compose tonight, and post before work in the morning, but judging by the state of lethargy with which I started today, I'm maintaining VERY LOW standards.
Whine: I just now realized that it's Wednesday. Yeah, that gives you a sense of my state of mind these days.
Happy birthday, KLee!
Kathy A - I am so sorry to hear about your kitty. It must be doubly hard since your daughter was upset about it. (hugs)
I'm thinking we need a Fertility prize around here. Or maybe a map for babies who need to get in the belly and babies get out of the belly.
Let me think on it or, probably, one of you will think of something first. :)
I like Miranda's idea about a baby map because, you know, they're babies. Cluesticks would be a bit harsh.
KLee, it's true. My tot is spectacular, amazing, and funney, and I'm not forgetting how lucky I am to have her. Right now I'm in the "if it happens, it happens" place, but that's after a week of "this had better fireplacing be happening, dammit!" Oi.
Hope your week turns around today.
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