Hammock Weather

Today feels like proper spring. It'll probably get too hot inside in the afternoon, and will probably not be this nice tomorrow, but right now, at noon, I want to string up a hammock and take a nap in the sun and feel the light, cool breeze over a fuzzy blanket.

Puzzle Pieces

Once again these "feel good" snippets aren't meant for the deeply depressed and truly broken. They're meant for normal people to pat themselves on the back about how well they handled that sharp curve, that bump in the road. Thing is, those people come equipped with good shocks and suspension systems so that they CAN handle the normal roughness of life's roads. Some of us have broken shocks and we don't know how to fix them.

The problem with simply "rebuilding myself" is that as I was being chipped away, the pieces were stolen from me, hidden, sometimes replaced with pieces that weren't mine, sometimes waved in front of me with the insistence that they were wrong or undesirable or sinful. I don't have all the pieces I need, and some of what I do have aren't even the same puzzle.

Oh, and I don't have any superglue either, so these pieces are just going to get scattered again when the next pothole reminds me of my broken shocks.

Look How That Turned Out

So why try again today?

Bad Wife

Today was the first day all week that I got my husband off to work with a packed lunch. I almost felt proud about that, but sure enough, the broken record piped up immediately with "Well you should have been doing that every day this week. You're a bad wife. You stay at home and do--what, exactly?--all day, and you can't even feed him?"

And now my toddler is crying for gods know what and I can't find my give-a-damn. She has her favorite snack, a sippy cup of juice, two loveys and a video playing, and she isn't happy.

A Good Thing

This one actually took 10 minutes and concentration for me to find the downside: My daughter cleans up after me.

Well, not really after me. She just put something where she thought it was supposed to go, and she was right. Once again, last night, her diaper leaked. We need to go up a size, but we still have the 3s to get through first. When she woke up, I took the full diaper off her, cleaned her up, and took her back to bed with me. I forgot about the diaper, left out on the floor.

Three hours later, I finally decide to put a new liner in the diaper pail (as it has sat empty for two days now; when I take it out, there's still room in the resealable bag, so I've just been taking diapers to the trash can and slipping them in the already-full diaper bag there). Opening up the front door of the pail, I find a small pile of dry diapers in it--on top of the fat wet one from this morning, folded over on itself. Diapers go in the diaper pail, duh.

So what's the downside? If she keeps this up, I'm afraid I'll fall into a habit of letting her clean up everything, and then I'll turn into a lazy slob. Yeah, I know it's reaching.

The More List-y List

Sidetracked when I tried to make a list. I'll either have to update this post, or post updates, because otherwise I'll just revise and rewrite and never post.

Driving. I prefer to drive, because I feel out of control when my husband drives, and sometimes unsafe because "I would have started braking earlier" or something else relatively minor. Just because it's not what I would do, it's wrong. That comes from my father insisting that every detail be done "right," which of course meant "his way". It took me years to realize the difference. I'm afraid I'll be that picky and demanding when my daughter gets older.

My hair. I mentioned this one earlier. Even though I really do have control over it, I insist that I don't. I'm not sure why, or why I would be scared of being in control. Maybe because the person with all the control also takes all the blame when it goes wrong.

Money. It has never been in my control. For a while, before the baby was born, I kept a ledger and paid all the bills, but that's the most control I could pretend I had.

The List

I cut my hair yesterday. Another tooth broke on my hair clip, and I discovered that was the last straw for me. I have hated dealing with the weight, the heat, and trying multiple times every day to get the stupid twist just right to get the stupid clip on.

It's one of the few things I feel I have control over, but even so, I don't really. I foist some of it onto my husband, because after all, he's the one who has to look at it every day, right? Even though he doesn't want "control" over my hairstyle, I still ask his opinion and then give it more weight than he thinks it should have.

I think I get scared when I actually have full control over something.