Size 4 Jeans

Are teenagers worse today than they were 20 years ago? What I really want to know is what we’ve done wrong, that we have a teenager who thinks the world owes her everything, just because she breathes. She’s always just one step away from being hateful because she can’t have something she wants.

Example 1: She’s been begging (okay, most of the time it’s more like demanding) for us to take her skiing for ages. My husband finally caves in, and makes arrangements for a ski week, including lessons for everyone (except me; I don’t ski and don’t want lessons either). She said she wanted to learn to snowboard, and my husband needs more skiing lessons and my youngest hasn’t ever skied at all. After the plans are firmly in place, the announcement is made, but the teenager isn’t happy because the trip is not taking her to Switzerland! So fine, she won’t go. She can stay home with me and eat frozen food. Whatever.

Example 2: She dropped her digital camera, which she’s never kept in a case despite the fact that we made sure that she got to pick out the “perfect” case for it when it was new. After dropping it (and probably due in part to all the prior abuse), it didn’t work anymore, and she expected us to just lay down the credit card to buy her a new one, post haste. “But what am I supposed to do without a camera?” she says. WTF?

This kid has a serious problem understanding the difference between rights and privileges. “Rights” in this family are: a place to live, food to eat, clothing to wear. This does not mean that I have to buy special food, like applesauce in single serving tubs (because she’s too lazy to open a jar and put the applesauce into a dish) or special protein water, or buy her fancy designer clothing that she likes and just “has to have.” The food and clothing just have to fuel and cover her body, respectively. If we’re nice enough (or can afford) to buy her special food and clothing, that’s a privilege.

Going skiing anywhere is a privilege, which is clearly not understood either. I soooo appreciate the school she went to in 8th grade that decided skiing was “team building” and made it a required part of the curriculum to send my child on the class trip to Switzerland that year. Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve finally given up and hired someone to clean the house. I’ve always said that we’re not dirty, just cluttered, but lately it’s edging closer to dirty, especially in the bathrooms and kitchen. Problem is, I HATE to clean. Yeah, cleaning is one of those other words that gets a HATE in capitals tacked on in front, so you just have to DWI (Deal With It).

I can always think of something else to do besides clean house, and it really takes no effort whatsoever to get on with something else entirely when faced with cleaning the bathroom. Add to that the fact that it takes about 30 seconds for the rest of the people in this house to dirty it up again, and there’s just no hope of ever turning me into my grandmother. My wonderful grandmother, may she rest in peace, LOVED to clean. Okay, maybe she didn’t love it (though she sure did it a lot), but maybe that was just because it gave her something else to be a martyr about. However it truly was with her, her house was always clean, and she was well and truly over set when she got to the point where she keep the house to her satisfaction any longer, because she was just too old.

Well, I’m not THAT old, not even close, but there are some cleaning tasks that my hands, arms and back just don’t handle well anymore. My hands and forearms are weak due to chronic tenosynovitis, and any really strenuous or repetitive action (think scrubbing sinks and bathtubs to remove lime deposits or stovetops to remove whatever’s been baked on) and then my hands hurt and I can’t do the things I LIKE to do. Ha, sorry, not going to go there. As for the back, well, vacuuming is okay, but bending over scrubbing bathtubs and/or floors doesn’t make it either.

There you have it, in a nutshell: why I don’t go out of my way to clean. But then there’s the guilt. Read the rest of this entry »

“Did you miss us?” This from my husband when he comes home after an absence of three whole days. He took my oldest daughter on a weekend holiday and I stayed home with the youngest. Frankly, no, I didn’t miss them, and I said exactly that just as he said “lie.” In other words, he knows perfectly well that I didn’t miss them, but expects me to lie about it, like it’s some sort of abnormality that I didn’t miss anybody. After I said “no,” his voice dropped and octave and his face fell. What the heck?

You know, this has nothing do do with whether I love them or not, because everyone can use a break now and then without feeling guilty about not missing someone because they’re not around. I thoroughly enjoyed their weekend absence for various reasons. Let’s see, the kids weren’t arguing because only one of them was here, I didn’t have to fix big meals because he wasn’t here, I had the bed to myself sans the oh-so-soothing symphony of his snoring, and I had a break from teenager attitude and demands. What’s not to enjoy?

We go through this every time one of us is out of the house overnight which is just ludicrous. It’s not that I don’t like being around my husband and family, but I certainly don’t pine away for them when they’re not around, even if it’s for a couple of weeks. Maybe if I could ship the kids off to grandma for the entire summer, or if my husband would take a job in Singapore for a year I might get to the missing point, but probably not too quickly. I mean, you miss people when they’re gone, like moved away or dead or something like that, not when they go on a jaunt for a weekend.

Sometimes I feel like he must have married the wrong girl, because I am sooo not dependent enough to suit him. I like being alone, thinking my own thoughts, and I don’t get much of that alone thing these days. My creativity levels were soaring this weekend, and still are for that matter, though I wonder how long it’ll last now that life is “back to normal.” And of course, if he decides that I’m irritated because he’s acted like a sap because I said that I didn’t miss them, then he’ll just say he knows how I am, and it doesn’t bug him, it’s no big deal and all that. But we both know which is the real lie here, don’t we?

**P.S. I had planned a different post for today, but then this irritation came up and the whole post was running screaming through my head, so I finally let it find its way to the screen. I’ll get to that whole “Size 4″ thing later…