woe is Auntie Wissa...

It has become a traditon for the past... I don't know how many years now... for me to bake and decorate birthday cakes for pretty much everyone in the family. For the adults, it's pretty much "what flavor do you want?" But for the kids, I get specifics and I get creative. Or, I try anyway. For Madison's second birthday last year, I was adamant about making her cake into the shape of a '2'. And I did. And for an amateur, I think I did a pretty darn good job!



I've collected some Wilton cake tools to help me better my "skills" along the way. To minimize my frustrations and to amp up my pride a bit. It does boost the ego to see the kids' faces light up.

When my niece Dede saw what I did with Madison's 2nd birthday cake, she immediately began thinking about what she wanted for her 12th birthday cake in June. Which, at the time, wasn't for another seven months. It wasn't long after that she told me that she wanted a rainbow cake. My wheels have been spinning ever since.

So it burst my bubble when I found out that they are going to visit BIL's parents from the 7th through the 21st. Dede's birthday is the 19th. I know that doesn't mean I can't bake her a cake but I can't help but feel a little deflated. BIL's parents are well off with an extravagant house and the like. They'll most likely treat her to whatever gift(s) she wants. She'll probably have the 12th birthday party of a lifetime. A silly rainbow birthday cake will probably be 'whoopity doo' in comparison. Maybe I should talk to my sister about doing something the weekend beforehand. The tiny voice inside my head screams that my BIL picked these dates out of spite. I can count on one hand how many of my nieces' and nephews' birthdays I've missed collectively. And those were due to a significant geographical difference or, you know, something like this.

I know, I know. Pity party for Liss. But they are the closest things I have to children of my own. Of course I'm going to be a little greedy/possessive/selfish over them. [sigh] I guess I should go back to Kindergarten and relearn how to share.

In the meantime, I am imagining something like this. I even considered buying a star-shaped cake pan. Because stars = YAY.

adjustments

The adjustment period of moving into my mom's has been relatively easy. in fact, I don't really feel like there's been much of an adjustment at all. After the initial shock of having to move and all the change, I think maybe the fit is just right. I miss the kids but at the same time I don't miss being around 24/7. One of the luxaries of being an aunt is being able to enjoy your nieces and nephews without feeling too much like a parent. The past two years have not been like that. The Monkey and I have been more like second parents than an aunt and uncle. We shared in the responsibility of doling out discipline, helping with school work, and plenty of other parenting duties. It's not that either of us minded, but it really affected the dynamics of our relationship with the kids. I want that to change. I don't want them to look at us so much as second parents anymore. I want to be Auntie Lissa and Uncle Monkey again. And while I don't want them to lose respect for us or think that we won't discipline them if we need to, I want them to think of us more as the ones they come see when they want to be... you know, spoiled.

You'd think with my BIL having gotten his way his attitude would have changed a bit. Yeah, not a chance. This weekend we rented a U-Haul to move our stuff into a different storage unit and get the majority of our things out of Michele's. The Monkey's brother came over and helped and we knocked it out in like three hours. While we were at Michele's, The Monkey and and his brother pretty much had to tackle all the big stuff by themselves. So rather than sit out in the heat, I retreated into the house to talk to my sister and meet my nephew's new (tattooed and pierced!) GF. It was crazy hot on Saturday. Even though we got started early, it was already well into the upper 80s by the time we got to my sister's. So when I went into the house I went into the kitchen cabinet and got a cup and helped myself to some icewater from the fridge. Whoever had ice before me had put it on crushed. I don't care for crushed ice so I switched it to cubes. Still, when I pushed the lever, the fridge spewed out some crushed ice first. Some missed my cup and a few bits landed on the floor. Oops. I picked up the bigger pieces but I wasn't overly concerned about hunting down ice on the linoleum kitchen floor. I mean, really. If I'd spilled Kool-Aid or iced tea or soda or even a large amount of water I would have mopped it up diligently, but a few pieces of crushed ice? Give me a break. I went to the living room and sat down to talk to my sister and my nephew. While my sister was engaged in a conversation with Becca, my nephew's girlfriend, I hear my BIL in the other room make some off-hand remark about "damn ice on the floor" in the kitchen. Oh. My. Freaking. God. Are you serious? Like this doesn't happen a zillion times a day with the kids! Mostly I thought it was funny because I knew he was trying to get to me. But here's the thing. He can pick at me all he wants. He can try to make me grovel at his feet for "all he did for me" until the day he dies. Until he acknowledges that HE benefited from The Monkey and me living there as much as we benefited from living there I have no reason to thank him. I have given thanks where thanks is due and that is to my sister. He is not going to stop me from coming around to see her or the kids. I don't give a damn what he does. I still have a key to the house because my sister told me to keep it. I will not relinquish it until she asks me to and he will not make me feel bad about using it whenever I damn well feel like it. I have a good mind to remind him off all the hell he put her and his children through over the past two years. I can't imagine what it would have been like for them had The Monkey and I not been there. All those nights my sister sat up and cried. The nights the kids came running to the garage during their screaming fights. So, whatever. I told my sister that she and those kids are HALF MINE too and he's just going to have to get used to it. And that's that.

In spite of everything, I really like being here at my mom's. It feels so much more permanent. So much more like home. I spent all day Friday hanging and rearranging and organizing all of my mom's clothes. This may sound like an easy task but the woman has more clothes than you can imagine. Enough that she fills FOUR closets. And this is after downsizing. Um, that's not including dressers. Or other folded clothes. Like t-shirts, tank tops, sweaters, and jeans. What can I say, the woman likes her variety. Aside from the throbbing pain I had in my neck afterwards, I mostly enjoyed myself. When my mom got home from work, she literally started crying. She's so adorable. I really don't think she ever thought it would get finishd. I kept telling her it would! I try to keep myself busy because the house is so quiet and empty during the day and that gets pretty lonely. Well, it's empty except for the five cats and the dog. That's pretty exciting. Which is kind of silly because we had five cats and a dog at Michele's. But our cats were trapped inside a box. Now all of our animals are together. We have four girls and two boys. The Chihuahua, Frankie, is my little side kick. He pretty much follows me around all day long. We're working on getting him fully house trained which is a bit of a pain. Little dog, little brain and all that. Most days he does pretty well; especially when I take him out regularly. I bought him a leash and harness to take him on walks but the little spaz reacted badly to being on a leash. (He basically freaked out and cowered and refused to move.) So there goes that idea. The cats are pretty hilarious. My boy (whose official name is William but answers to Fat Cat, Fat Boy, and Little Kitty) thinks he's a pimp. He's taken to chasing all four girls around the house at random which really pisses them off. Especially my mom's two, Muffin and Cupcake. Olivia is really happy. I honestly think she was starting to get cabin fever. She was starting to act really strange at Michele's. Jasmine has taken up residence in my mom's room. Which has also pissed my mom's cats off because that was their spot. There's something really endearing about waking up at 2:30 in the morning (which I've been sadly doing quite a lot) and finding a different sleeping cat on each of the sofas.

I have three active pills left in my pack of birth control. I'm considering going out on payday to buy a new basal body thermometer and starting up charting again. I need to start my essay for the IVF sponsorship or at least start jotting down my ideas. I'm going to need to schedule bloodwork and my yearly with my RE soon. I'm pretty sure I need a new prescription for my Synthroid. And I suppose we can talk about getting back on the TTC rollercoaster. I'm looking at starting off very slow. I think I just want to chart for now. Maybe see if my cycles are even remotely regular and if I'm ovulating on my own at all. That's probably the logical first step anyhow even though this raging case of baby fever I have wants me to being doing an IUI cycle yesterday. Must focus on more important things. Must focus on The Monkey's health. Must focus on losing some more weight (198 as of today, by the way). Must do what is necessary to better our financial situation (which is looking more and more like my filing bankruptcy). But, in the meantime, it will at least be nice to get out of this incredibly long holding pattern.

So it goes, so it goes.

ch-ch-changes

One can only assume it was a matter of time before we wore out our welcome here, right? I mean we've been staying at my sister's for going on two years and that's a long time to live with someone. It's definitely more than I can expect. More than anyone can expect, I guess.

Things have been going downhill for a while. I'm not sure exactly why. My sister has always been clear that she is fine with us being here. She enjoys our company (and I think a part of her enjoys having a 'buffer' between her and her husband). But her husband feels otherwise and I guess that's fine. The whole mess started out over money. I'm a little irritated that he's taking things out on us that aren't our fault. (Like the fact that the boat he and my dad went in on together is now in default because my dad is in jail. Or that he didn't account for things coming out of his retirement like, oh say health and dental insurance. Or that he didn't listen to me when I tried to tell him how SSD really worked. And now he's getting no where even close to the income he thought he was going to be getting now that he's out of the military. So all of a sudden The Monkey and I should start paying half of the $400 electric bill? And help with other utilities? And prepare meals several times a week? And I should talk about filing bankruptcy since I clearly can barely afford to keep up with my credit card payments.) But all of this would be water under the bridge if it weren't for the conniving way he went about "asking" us to leave. Because he didn't. He picked an argument with my sister and gave her an ultimatum -- tell them to leave or I'm leaving. What kind of husband does that??

So, we've been tossing around the idea with moving in with my mom. We can't afford a place of our own until my disability kicks in and that could be several months from now still. (Have I mentioned lately how incredibly tiring this process is??) We hadn't gone forward with it because we were mostly worried about my sister's feelings. She'd already mentioned that she didn't want us to move out. And it went from that from that to this overnight.

So I guess we'll be spending the next week or two getting things organized and moved into storage. We won't need a lot of the things we have here. Our TV and dressers can go into storage as can most of our furniture. We mostly just need our clothes and essentials. There's a big part of me that's utterly relieved. No more worrying about creepy crawlies and sweating to death in the summer time. The Monkey and I can finally look at getting back on track with eating properly. My cats will finally have room to run around. Olivia has really been acting strange lately. Almost like she has cabin fever (if it's possible for an animal to get such). It's certainly going to be an interesting adjustment, though. Our three cats, my mom's two cats, and her chihuahua. Wow. We're definitely going to need a couple more litter boxes.

With this has come all sorts of new questions. My mom keeps telling me that I should stop my BCPs and we should start TTC again. (FYI - this living situation could be semi-permanent. Once my dad gets sentenced, he's likely to get prison time from anywhere from 10 - 15 years; if not longer. My mom has the room and she's not bad company or hard to get along with.) I've already told her that we are not going to be ready for that right away. (I will admit that it's totally tempting; but we're not in financial shape right now to TTC much less support a child. But it is nice knowing that maybe we can start some sort of "countdown" to trying again. Perhaps a 2011 or 2012 baby is on the horizon?)

In the meantime, I have surrendered my credit cards to The Monkey. I am going to start with my lowest balance card and start hacking away at balances the best I can. It's not going to be easy and it's definitely not going to be quick but it has to be done. With any luck we'll have a couple paid off by the end of the year and we can use our tax return to pay off one or two more.

Change. fdsjkf;sjdk

how do I know?

The truth is, I do not know. There is no way of knowing and knowing what I know now and putting it together with what happened then. And knowing how I felt and then how I forgave and then forgot and then trusted... and now look what's happened. Your trust gets dragged through the nastiest muck you can ever imagine.

All of this makes me wonder if I want to have children. Do I want to bring them into a world where these types of things can happen to them? My sister is a good parent. She is attentive and loving. But she was also trusting and, because of that, her son was hurt. And I'm still having a hard time thinking of him as a MONSTER because, deep down, I know that he's not a bad person. Not all the way through. But things will never be the same. Adn I wonder if I'll be able to protect my children adequately from these horrible psyche-destroying travesties that seem to be all too common in my family.

I cry for the person I love. The person I lost. Maybe he was never that person to begin with. I miss the perons that taught me how to drive and helped me take care of my car. I miss the person that took us, the family, out on big summer camping trips fully equipped with big tents and fire pits. And we'd spend our days swimming in Inks Lake and hiking up cactus laden trails to my favorite part of the entire lake -- Devil's Waterhole.

My therapist insists that it's okay for me to feel this week. She tells me that she can only imagine how hard this must be for me; for our family. Knowing that all of these years we essentially lived with two people. And it's hard to distinguish those two people now because the bad has overshadowed so much of the good.

I still have a lot to process. And maybe this isn't square one all over again; but it is certainly a large step backwards that I never dreamed I would be taking.

One day at a time.

another week (and another MONTH even)

Things kind of feel like they are in slow motion. Or something to that effect. It's hard to believe it's only been a week. Everything has changed; life is completely different from last week. I'm trying not to dwell on it because it makes me nauseated when I do.

My emotions are all over the place. But my mood, surprisingly enough, is mostly stable. I'm back in therapy for the umpteenth time in my life to try to sort through this new madness and truly process my past. Maybe then I'll be able to focus more on the future. I don't know.

In light of all this madness I've been considering going out to California to visit my BFF for a few weeks. But I haven't decided for sure yet. I just bought a new laptop (after much persuasion from The Monkey). Then I had to buy a new wireless router because our current one wasn't able to handle the new work load (three laptops, X-Box Live, and two desktops all working off of the same connection). My last splurge was really unintentional but it was just an opportunity that was too good to pass up. With all that has happened we are moving my mom over to our wireless plan. There's no sense in her paying $80.00 a month for a cell phone she hardly uses. (In retrospect, there's no real reason for her to be without one, either.) The ideal solution was to add her onto our account since it would only be, at most, $10 more a month on our bill. But then VZW said we couldn't add a new line without changing (read: upgrading) our current plan since it was outdated. And since we were going to be forced to do it anyway I went ahead and upgraded our phones as well. We'll both have Motorola DROIDs tomorrow. Yes, I am excited. (They were buy one get one free. And as a VZW employee, The Monkey only has to agree to a one year contract versus two. BUT we get the two year contract price on phones. And we get that privelege every ten months. Sweet.)

And now it's time for me to lie down. I am taking Mom to the social security office tomorrow morning. And then I have another therapy session at noon. I'm really enjoying all of the extra time I've been spending with my mom. I can't remember ever getting to sit around and just talk to her. Especially while she's sober. :P She's a good person, with a good heart that has been dealt a crappy hand. But she is just the type of woman that will pick up and go on and amaze the hell out of all those around her.

My BFF is trying to help me, too. She told me to start writing stuff down. I haven't written (in a paper journal) in years. I'm also going to start working more on some holistic treatments for bipolar. (This involves learning triggers and how to avoid them and what to do if I can't avoid them... etc etc.)

In spite of everything, I am still pretty confident that 2010 is going to be a good year.

sudden unmending

I've spent years in therapy trying to reconcile and make peace with my past. But then one event rips everything to shreds and I'm back trying to pick up and put the pieces back together.

But all the ends are too frayed and it seems unlikely that I will ever be the same again.

I want it all to be a very bad dream, please.

new year, yada yada

The holidays commenced with mostly a minimal amount of madness this year. Christmas was a bit of a let down. Even though I thought that I'd mentally prepared myself to spend the holiday just The Monkey and me, it turned out to be very difficult. I spent a good deal of Christmas Eve night and Christmas day crying. Er...sobbing. Boo hoo. I don't think it would've been quite so depressing if The Monkey hadn't had a sudden recurrance of his sciatica. It was so bad that he was incapacitated. Eventually I convinced him (and myself) that he needed medical attention. We drove out to the medical center (which is about 45 minutes away) to the ER. We chose to do this instead of going to our local hospital because we know the type of ER care our hospital gives and it's NOT what we were looking for. As it turned out, however, we wasted the extra money in gas because the medical center was just as bad! If not worse. The on call doctor refused to call the on call MRI staff (seeing as how it was Christmas and all) and sent The Monkey home with NO medication. He got three shots in the butt before he left: a steroid, a pain killer, and a muscle relaxer. But that wasn't after the on call ER doc practically drilled him about his prescription drug use. (She was very accusatory with her line of questioning asking him how often our GP prescribes him Lortab for pain; how often he takes it... blah blah blah.) The Monkey was being very polite until I jumped in and told her very sternly that the prescription he was currently taking for pain was nearly a year old and that he almost NEVER takes pain killers if he can help it. It would be one thing if he even looked a little like he was faking it. But, I'm sorry, you can NOT "fake" a significant rise in BP (like 20+ points) or a crazy fast heart rate. He was in a LOT of pain! At any rate, the medication they gave him either did him some good or the rest and massages and stretching we did at home did him some good. Either way, on the 26th he was completely mobile again. He isn't in pain anymore, so to speak. His back no longer hurts and neither does his butt or his leg; but his calf and parts of his right foot are tingly/numb. We know it's a low back nerve issue. We are working on getting him setup for an MRI.

So, yeah, Christmas pretty much sucked. But it's just another day on the calendar, right? I certainly can't let one day (regardless of it's cultural or religious significance) ruin an entire year. 2009 certainly wasn't, by any means, a horrible year. It was full of some ups and downs (what year isn't??) but over all, I think it was pretty darn good.

2009 certainly ended well. The Monkey, as I said before, went from being incapacitated by pain on Christmas to being almost completely normal for New Year's Eve. My sister and family came home from their vacation early so they were all here for New Year's Eve as well. I have to say I was quite happy that they cut their vacation short. As selfish as that may sound! At any rate, we hung out over at my mom and dad's for th evening. We'd brought our X-Box and stuff over their house for Christmas Eve but didn't get to play it because we wound up staying at home. But we did play it on New Year's Eve and it was a lot of fun. I had a few Mike's Spiced Apple (YUM!!) and a couple of weak rum and Cokes. I can't really drink much alcohol these days. Not only do I not drink often so I've become quite the lightweight. Not to mention several of my daily medications interact with alcohol (read: I get drunker WAY faster) so just a few drinks does me in pretty quick. Which is actually kind of nice. I'm definitely a cheap bar date! Anyhow, we rang in the New Year playing pool and having a good time. We left shortly after midnight and came home to sleep.

Speaking of SLEEP... the most exciting part of 2009 happened on New Year's Eve. The Monkey and I actually slept together in the same bed all night!! We haven't slept in the same bed for three years because his snoring was just that bad. I finally bit the bullet and jumped through a dozen hoops to get him set up with a CPAP machine. The first night was horrific because his pressure setting was WAY too low and he felt like he was suffocating. But now that we have that fixed I don't even have to fight with him to put the darn thing on! We woke up early this weekend for our usual routine of cuddling and early morning nookie. Afterwards I fell back asleep. And he did as well. Imagine my surprise when I woke up and saw that he'd put his mask back on to do so! He can certainly tell the difference in how he feels. And WOW... so can I! He already has much more energy. He's been sitting down to play video games (both WoW and X-Box) without falling asleep during. I took more naps this weekend than he did! It has been absolutely incredible and I only wish we'd known years ago how good one of these machines would be for him! I have a feeling that he'll start losing weight easier now that his body is getting recouperative rest. We are both looking forward to being healthier and happier in 2010; even moreso than we were in 2009. (In fact, I've set my sights on a NEW weight loss goal. I lost a total of 33 pounds in 2009 -- about seven pounds short of my goal. My new goal for 2010 is to lose at least another 30. Definitely more if I can manage!)

So alls well that ends well. Now I'm going to go crawl into bed with my husband and go to sleep.