Every Woman is Entitled to a Meltdown Now and Then!

Today I am searching for things to be grateful for. I think 2 weeks at home has started to strip me of my sanity. Really. It's very rare, or practically never, that I feel ill equipped to handle things in my life. In fact that is what I base all of my successes on. The idea of the possibility of failure is somehow foreign to me. I don't know why but it never crosses my mind that I won't be able to do something. Until today....and yesterday....and the day before.

Where shall I start?

Well, I am 7 weeks pregnant right now. Currently I live in what I call "my husband's house". It's a 4 story house with 3 bedrooms and a tiny basement. I don't feel like I have any space that I can claim as my own. It doesn't bother me much though because I own 2 businesses and I feel like those are my personal spaces because I created them and I maintain them to my liking. However, now that I have a baby on the way I see 2 challenges. 1) There are not enough bedrooms in this house for 3 children and parents, and 2) I will be home a lot more with a newborn and I will need some space I can call my own. As a result, I decided to start house hunting. If you know me you know that indecisiveness is not in my character. I am not the type to shop around and look at 25 houses and stay awake all night trying to decide which one is best. Totally not me! So I looked at 3 houses and bang, I found the one. There is no need to look any further. This is it! I love it! I went house hunting by myself because, let's just say, houses are not really my husband's forte. He has been paying the Enbridge bill for 10 years but if you came to our house right now and asked him what his house is heated by he would say he doens't know and he is not lying, he truly doesn't know. I am grateful (there's the 1st thing I am grateful for today) that he completely trusts in me to sell his house and pick us a new one. He barely even questions anything I tell him. He tells me he will follow whatever I say. I did show him this new "dream house" and he agrees that it is nice and he likes it. My husband is not the most adaptable person in the world. Moving is therefore a really big deal to him. The great thing is that this new house is 3 minutes down the road from his current house and he lived directly across from this new house when he first moved to Canada so it's almost like he's been there before so hopefully it won't be to painful for him. It's actually so odd that we manage to get along because I am the complete polar opposite of that. I love change. I thrive on it. In fact if one day goes by without change I am sure to stir something up on purpose just to create some change. When I am home for more than 3 consecutive days like during summer holidays for example, I, at the very least, move some furniture around and re-do a room in the house just to have a change.

OK, so I found my "dream house". Immediately I listed my husbands house for sale. We have put an offer in on the new house conditional upon the sale of ours. We have apparently been given 1 week to sell ours. I obviously counter offered that one with 30 days!! What is this homeowner trying to prove??? One week? Give me a fucking break!

So now I am feeling a little overwhelmed. Buying a house and selling a house is not a big deal to me. I have moved 7 times in the past 5 years. No big deal. The thing that is overwhelming me is the condition of our current house. My husband has a side business in which he repairs XBOX's. And as a result we have at least 50 XBOX's in this house that we are keeping "for parts". The dining room is filled with XBOX's, the living room is filled with XBOX's and the basement storage is filled with XBOX's. All of this needs to be cleaned up by Monday (today is Friday) when the showings will begin. And there are just some things in life, very few I must say, that I will refuse to do, but cleaning up XBOX's is one of them! Perhaps I am being a bitch because it's because of those XBOX's that we are able to afford many of the luxuries in life including the purchase of this new house but I just can't fathom cleaning up those XBOX's. But I NEED this house spotless by Monday so we can sell it ASAP!

Yesterday I attempted to clean the top 2 floors of this 4 story house. I cleaned the bedrooms and bathrooms and almost completed the kitchen. I cleared all of the art work off of the fridge. I put all the bathroom items in baskets. I put all the kids toys, easle and craft supplies out of sight. I cleaned the grout in the tiles and I cleaned under everything that I could lift on my own....which is everything I guess. Now one day later, after 2 kids and a little cousin have spent 24 hours in the house my work is practically invisible. How can I keep up? And how on earth will I be able to keep my new, even larger, house clean and organized with what is soon to be 3 children? Try as I may, I am not one of those mom's who can ignore the mess and just enjoy my children. Cleanliness is a BIG deal to me. It always has been and it always will be. I think it's a good quality and I don't want to change it. I may drive myself in sane trying to maintain my standard of cleanliness but I will continue to do so despite the cost to my mental state. I guess I feel so much resentment when I stuggle so hard to keep things clean and no one even notices the diffence and no one makes an effort to help me maintain the state of cleanliness that I work so hard for. I don't know how many times I have freaked out on my family and told them to pick up after themselves. I don't want any help cleaning. I like doing it myself. All I ask is that they pick up after themselves. Like put thier dirty clothes in the laundry basket and thier dirty dishes in the dishwasher. I don't think it's a lot to ask. What would they do it I wasn't here? I suppose they would leave all of their dirty clothes on the floor and when they ran out of clean ones they would learn how to use the washing machine and when all of the plates, bowls, dessert plates, and paper plates (if we had any) were all used up perhaps they would load up the dishwasher and run it for a cycle. I am sure they would not empty the dishwasher and put the dishes away though. I can guarantee they would simply pull a clean dish as needed from the dishwasher until it was empty.

Oh ya, I was trying to find things to be grateful for right...

Well, yesterday I went to my tenants house to pick up rent money from her. She was not there so I called her on her cell and asked her if I could enter since I had my brother with me and we could install the cabinet she had asked me to do last week. I reminded her that it was very short notice and she had the right to deny me entry. She had no problem with my unexpected visit and much to my suprise the state of the house had improved substantially since my last visit. My last visit, by the way, was with the exterminator to rid the house of the cockroaches she had so kindly brought with her when she moved it. I will admit there were still several dirty dishes on the counter and old food open on display everywhere but besides that I could actually see the floor this week. The living room was in order and the basement family room was somewhat organized. I really like this tenant despite her major lack of cleanliness and sanitation issues and I hope to have a long standing tenant-landlord relationship with her. I was sceptical when I went with the exterminator but I am more confident now that this tenant will work out decently well in the long run. And for this I am grateful.

Now to get to the point or the issue that I fear I may not be capable of handling. I tend not to be the type to worry about things that are far off into the future but this time I am wrought with worry. Wrought with worry that I will not be able to co-parent a child. Everyday I hear women tell me how difficult it is to be a single parent. I totally can't relate to that. I was a single mother for about 3 years and I would argue any day that single parenting is easier. There is one fundamental reason for that. When you have a child with someone your expectations of them change and if they don't live up to those expectations the resentment grows so deep. When that happens the primary care provider, typically the mother, begins to have less patience for the child and indirectly takes this anger out on the child. Not to mention she is generally unhappy in her own situation overall. Well, from personal experience, that's what happens to me anyway. My husband claims that he is a 50% contributor to child raising. Frankly I resent this claim but it doens't seem to bother me that much because he is not the father of my child which leads me to have little expectations of him, or anyone, to help me. Today, for example, he slept in until 10:00 a.m. I got up with my daughter, his son and my neice who stayed the night. I made them all breakfast. My husband informed me that "we" needed to wash his son's sheets because his ex-wife believes you should start the New Year "fresh". So I washed his sheets and our sheets because he has slept in our bed the past few nights and heaven forbid the sheets not be "fresh" on whatever bed he ended up in. I did other laundry and cleaning as well. I bathed the 2 girls and washed thier hair and styled it with pretty pink accessories. I sent the kids out to play which resulted in failure after about 5 minutes so I made lunch for everyone. When lunch was finished I cleaned up. Later my daughter went to play at a friend's house and I sat with my step-son and watched him fail repeatedly at Super Mario Bros but encouraged him to keep trying. I took everything out of the fridge and cleaned all of the shelves and drawers. I put all the laundry away, cooked supper, cleaned up and gave my step-son a shower. I watched a movie with the children, made them popcorn, fruit before bed, brushed thier teeth, cuddled them each for 5 minutes, emptied the dishwasher and took out the garbage. I have no problem doing all of that except for the fact that I am 7 weeks pregnant and tired as hell. I feel like regurgitating every meal I eat and I am completely going mad with being cooped up in the house all day. Today is January 1st and everything is closed. These days tend to drive me crazy so I make it a point to get out if even just to fill my car up with gas. My body needs some sun and fresh air to stay sane. Did I mention I had a complete meltdown on the floor in the hallway between the 2 kids rooms? When I put them to bed my daughter said she was scared and did not want to sleep in her bed. I couldn't take it. I started balling me eyes out and I sat on the floor weeping. Yes, my children must think I am insane! All I wanted was for the children to go to sleep so that I could have 30 minutes by myself before my bed time. I think they got the idea. Both children attempted to cheer me up and they both clearly felt so bad for me even though I am sure they haven't the slightest clue why I am crying over time for myself. Anyway, my step-son summed it up nicely when he said, and I quote,"Auntie Natalie. You gotta toughen up! Sometimes you just cry and you don't even know it". I am positive this is a mis quote of something he recently heard in a movie but you know what I will heed his advice and toughen up!