529s, 401Ks, Marriage, Delousing & What Someone Should Have Told Us

I’ve been silent about CT, because this is such a gut-wrenching one…
My family’s lost a mother/daughter/sister/wife to a gunshot.

English: Author: myroslava (Myroslava Luzina, Kyiv, Ukraine). Source: own camera. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am terrified of guns. I think hunting is– well the nicest men I know are hunters, but I just don’t understand. If I couldn’t live on berries and wheatgrass, I’d just starve, before I’d kill anything with fur, and fish grosses me out. But— I don’t like anyone telling me what I can and can’t do, especially not the group of yahoos up there that get, taxes, fees and fines combined, half of every dollar we struggle to make, save or spend. I’ve sure been glad that Skip owns several guns, especially back when a few freakazoids were leaving gross messages on file://localhost/Users/Frances/Pictures/iPhoto%20Library/Modified/2012/Mar%2021,%202012/IMG_4490.JPG

my work voicemail.

One woman recently kept texting me, threatening my kids, and she was texting from phones with area codes from places that were closer & closer to Raleigh. I guess, at that point, not knowing how sane this woman could be, I might not have been opposed to owning a gun that shot a lot of bullets in rapid succession. She really was crazy if she was really thinking what she was apparently thinking (that I was the long-distance lover of her husband who lived about eight states away– and as the commercials put it so eloquently, if I WAS in fact “healthy enough for sexual activity, which I wasn’t; I couldn’t even WALK at that point without looking like John Wayne after getting along with a whole lot of doggies for several weeks). If she did mean harm to my kids as she implied, and if she was coming our way, as she seemed to be, even after the police told her to stop calling and texting us at 3am, if she did show up at our door, I’d be probably scared enough to want to see the door-frame region peppered with as many holes as we could put in it. I don’t write about this stuff though, because it’s too freaking real to me. I can’t even go there. These are real people, with real loss, and I cannot even imagine. I just can’t imagine. And my goodness, if I ever had a child as emotionally affected or mentally ill as I know so many become, even before their families realize it’s bad enough to warrant an “intervention,” I just can’t imagine that either. Prayers. That’s all I can say. I just pray for this world, and know that in the end, God wins. That’s all we need to know. I’m sure it’s not a bit of consolation but those families will see their babies and sisters and friends in Heaven. I know that I know that I know that I know it.

So… lightening the topic a tad bit: Skip has NRA stickers all over our house and cars. It makes me laugh. I joined PETA to harass him, and because I love bunnies and deer and all things furry.

So I’m not even touching the gun thing, because well, who cares what I think, and I really struggle with what I think anyway, because thank God, I’ve never been on either side of a gun. Obviously there are too many guns out there already to start passing laws, saying we can’t have them. If you haven’t noticed, bad guys don’t obey the signs that say “NO firearms allowed on this property.” This kind of thing rarely happens at the firing range or the police training facility or in any airport in Israel. It happens in places where guns are illegal. I wonder how much people have spent for their schools, TV stations and public buildings on metal signs that say, “Firearms are not allowed on this property.” Those will stop a sick person with bad intentions as effectively as Mrs. Dora Edwards could. She’s the little old lady who worked in the lobby of Park Road Elementary School in Charlotte 35 years ago.

Still I am terrified of guns. I hate that we have them. I trash all water-guns that people buy us, even those noodle-water-guns. Even when I find a microscopic Lego gun on the floor that goes with my kids’ Legos Star Wars Mini Figures, it’s tossed. I don’t even let them do that finger thing where they pretend to have a gun and shoot each other. Don’t go there, guys. It’s not anything to make a game of. And yes, I’m far too sensitive about this. I am the namesake of someone who died from a gunshot wound. It’s not a game. Really nothing is to me.

My thing is… well I guess it gets back to me, worrying that there could be a whole generation… maybe even two or three generations in fact of young people who don’t think they need to sacrifice anything for their kids. I’ve never been in a bad marriage, so I don’t get to point fingers or pass judgment, but I sure hope that people aren’t giving up on relationships (after they have kids) just because it gets bad. Yes, marriage after kids can get awful. I say that from experience. I am a quality girl and Skip is more man than I deserve, and we really had an awful marriage for at least two years. We’ll both admit it. He says though, it’s like Cortez: burn the ship and you might handle things differently. That might be the only thing that saved us. Know that, at least I think, EVERY marriage gets awful at some point. I mean totally, horribly awful, for years even, and that’s even for ones with no cheating, stealing, lying, drug-abuse, alcoholism, mental illness or dandruff. Joyce Meyer says nobody’s compatible. I couldn’t agree more. I pray that I would see Skip like God sees him, instead of how I see him, and that’s helped me a lot. He’s also stopped pestering me about being a night owl. That made me hate him a lot less.

I was almost going to say it in yesterday’s blog post… A lot of us are believing a cruel joke, and it might be our kids or someone else’s kids who are getting hurt because of it.

Yes, I’m so thankful for women’s rights. Maybe I take it for granted that God really did make us all his children. As a woman, I’m glad we can leave the jerk if he beats us or cheats or beats our kids or gambles or abandons us or gets drunk or verbally abuses anyone!!! I’m also very thankful to have had a college education and, while it lasted at least, a decent career. But I wish that part of the “Fairy Tale ending” which hits us from a lot of different angles included a warning, especially for women but also for men to realize too. I wish someone had told me that, once I had babies, I’d rather die rather than leave them every single weekday of our lives for the WHOLE day. BUT I would have benefitted equally from the warning that the decision to go from Working-Career-Girl to stay-at-home mom would take a fun, exciting, shopping-at-lunch-break and beach-trips on weekends kind of life and turn it into the most mind-numbingly-boring, oh-my-goodness-I-have-never-been-so-bored-yet-exhausted-and-adrenally-fatigued-in-my-life-and-I-want-to-spit-and-cry-and-beat-a-wall-and-apologize-to-the-wall-and-cry-some-more-because-we-are-so-broke -and-trapped-but-isn’t-so-wonderful-and-isn’t-this-the-sole-cry-of-my-heart-cry-that-I-could-not-ignore kind of life. You thought dating in high school was mind-blowing. Wait ’til “married and working or home all the time and broke with kids” shows up! My girlfriend says, “They didn’t TELL US about this! Nobody told us that right as our career might be cresting, we’d have oh, some HUMAN LIVES on our hands and unless we are going to totally lie to ourselves and say the old ‘kids are resilient’ thing, it’s going to kill us to go back off to our stellar careers and leave little Benji home with the three dogs the two story house and the garage (for those of you that have them).  Young women, you’re hearing it from me.  Please just hear me now: assume right now, as a single woman who’s picking her career for LIFE, that you’re going to get married and have babies and will need a career that’s morph-able or one that you can scale down so that you don’t have to hire Briggita from Norway for two years at a time to raise your babies. If you’re tough and, honestly, have a heart or something else that’s made of steel, feel free to disregard this warning, because it doesn’t apply to you.  You’re going to be very successful at work and will work out every day and look hot at the beach at least until you’re 56, and your kids will probably go to Harvard just on the strength of their genes. Congratulations. It’s easier to be a mom when you’re tough and don’t have this big-old, floppy wet heart and mind to drag all over this stupid planet.

If you’re like me though, here goes:

LADIES, WE CAN’T HAVE IT ALL.

IT’S NOT POSSIBLE.

EITHER YOU SUFFER AND MAKE SACRIFICES OF ALMOST ALL OF THE THINGS YOU LOVE, SO YOUR FAMILY WON’T HAVE TO—

OR YOU ARE ESSENTIALLY ASKING THEM TO SACRIFICE FOR YOUR WANTS AND NEEDS MANY OF THE THINGS THAT THEY MAY NOT EVEN REALIZE YET THAT THEY REALLY, REALLY, REALLY WANT AND NEED— WHICH IS MOST LIKEY— YOU.

ONE-HUNDRED-PERCENT– ALL OF YOU:

YOUR HEART, YOUR THOUGHTS, YOUR MIND, YOUR EVERY WAKING MOMENT, YOUR ENERGY, YOUR IMMUNITY, YOUR ENTIRE ENDOCRINE SYSTEM,  YOUR SNOT, YOUR SWEAT, YOUR BLOOD, YOUR MANICURES, YOUR REPUTATION AS A WOMAN WHO REALLY HAS HER STUFF TOGETHER, YOUR SEMI-CLEAN CAR, YOUR CAREER, YOUR HOBBIES, YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH EVERYONE ELSE IN YOUR LIFE, INCLUDING THEIR FATHER AND YOUR CUTE LITTLE BIKINI-WORTHY BODY.

GONE.

KISS IT “BYE-BYE.”

JUST ACCEPT IT NOW.

DON’T WRESTLE WITH IT.

DON’T TRY TO FIND A WAY.

WE TRIED, AND WE ARE DAMN SMART, AND WE COULDN’T DO IT.

WE’VE KILLED OURSELVES, TRYING TO JUGGLE AND MAKE IT WORK, AND WE CAN TELL YOU NOW, IT’S ALL A FREAKING HOAX. IT CAN’T BE DONE.

YOU CAN ONLY GIVE YOUR SOUL TO ONE THING, AND MY SUGGESTION IS THAT YOU GIVE IT TO GOD, BECAUSE HE’S THE ONLY ONE WHO’S GOING TO BE ABLE TO HELP YOU THOROUGH THIS THING YOU’RE GOING TO CALL MOTHERHOOD, AND YOU WILL BE DOWN ON YOUR KNEES SOMEDAY, BEGGING HIM TO HELP YOU, AND YOU’LL REMEMBER THIS POST, AND YOU’LL FINALLY SURRENDER ALL, AND STOP STRUGGLING AGAINST THE KNOT IN THE CHAIN THAT ONLY MAKES IT CLENCH MORE TIGHTLY, AND DOING SO WILL PROBABLY SAVE THE MARRIAGE YOU’VE BOTH PROBABLY ALMOST DESTROYED WHILE TRYING TO PULL OFF THIS BALANCING ACT FOR HOW MANY YEARS NOW?

BREATHE.

YOU’RE FREE TO ROAM ABOUT THE CABIN NOW.

Suddenly I feel as if I just wrote the prelude to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy (?)

OH YEA, AND YOU’LL SACRIFICE YOUR FAVORITE TV SHOWS AND BOOKS AND MUSIC TOO— TOO TRASHY TO LET THE KIDS SEE YOU READING, LISTENING TO, WATCHING, AND THEY NEVER SLEEP ANYWAY, SO IT’S EASIER NOT TO HAVE A FAVORITE SHOW THAN IT IS TO HAVE ONE, BUT KNOW YOU’LL NEVER, EVER, EVER HOPE TO WATCH IT AGAIN.

But I mean all this is the best way possible.  Having a kid, raising a kid, loving someone until you’ll sacrifice yourself for him or her is the only venture worth chasing in this life, be it a child you’ll die to self for or another human being who is no relation to you at all, but who simply needs someone. Why live if you don’t do it correctly.  I’m 42, crippled, unemployed and my house is filthy. I can no longer run, but I get it now. I can finally die, because I’ve figured it out. But I hope I get to the warm beach a few more times before I die. Either way— who cares?  Not me. I’m over it. Done, trying to make it all work. I’m free…

Or maybe you’ll be lucky like me and find out you’ve had all your life some bizarre degenerative hip problem caused by a rare genetically malformed structure that you’ve only heard of Labrador Retrievers having, that will cripple you and render you unable to do much other than prattle on and on, at a web blogging site, right about the time your kids need your love, support and HARD WORKING BODY the most.
OK. so back to Square One: So let’s just say Skip and I both went to college, got degrees, & were working on our careers, ’cause, I mean, what else do we have going on? We meet, party, take some trips with friends, it’s all feelin’ great, so we get married and set upon baby-making. We are still both working. Great. All life needs is a little baby, right? Twins would be double the blessing, right? And what’s one more?  Just throw another diaper into the bag! No biggie!

Skip and I are both are the type who figured we’d work until our fingerprints rubbed off and we died. We don’t believe in retirement. I’m not even sure that Skip believes in vacation. I, however, think life, lived to the fullest, includes four week-long vacations at the least. However we’ve just never been at that station in life. We’re more like “one vacation every four years” kind of people. It’s one vacation every ten years, if you have big medical problems.

But as I hear happens and as I’ve seen with this hip-replacements thing, something happens maybe you can’t work, physically, or the economy collapses and you are laid off. As a 42 year old, I now understand that I am well past the age at which anyone would hire me again.  But like Meredith Viera— let’s say I get lucky and get to work (once the kids are out of the house, which makes me, oh, 54 when I start back to full-time work, YEA RIGHT, LIKE ANYONE WILL HIRE ME TO DO WHAT I DO AT 54!  There’s always hope, right?  Martha Stewart, Paula Dean, Betty White, Frannie Scott. It could happen. I’ll bet Erma Bombeck’s old publisher is just looking for me right now… ready to hand me a chunk of cash to take the family to Fiji, and on a beach there, I will crank out my genius revelations, as I lay on the beach, typing, and letting the sun turn my skin browner and browner until it’s eventually a soft leather that looks, thanks to the scars from the midlife acne and staph infections, kind of more like ostrich leather than genuine Corinthian leather—)

So Meredith is (a few years back) on the Today Show and is using her gifts, but her husband gets sick. What choice to you have, but to take care of him? And that means you cannot work. I’m there now personally, except it’s my own body that needs care and a beach and a pool and a warm climate and frozen, low-cal drinks like Crystal Light virgin daiquiris.  But if Skip gets sick too or laid off, we have to have money right?  We have to be READY to support ourselves as if we were in retirement even if we have no plans ever to be in retirement in the traditional sense.  Some hot now boss may stroll on in and PUT your behind into retirement, comprendez-vous?  I don’t know about you, but not many in my circles are ready for that kind of tsunami and aren’t really positioned to get themselves to that level of security before the Big One (SOMETHING YOU DON’T EXPECT) hits and sucks you out to sea.

Still not one of us wants to look at our 24 and 22 year old children, 18 years from now when we’re broke and hobbling through life, hoping not to get tossed out, and hope that our kids will let us move into the basements of the houses I’m pretty sure they won’t even own yet.

It happened to my mom and step-dad. He got Alzheimer’s after retirement. She might have started a job, but he literally needed the level of care that would have cost between $10K and $90K a year, just for the worker, not to mention the supplies and non-human care elements he needed.  Once their  retirement stores were depleted, I guess she could have gone back to work but for those ten years, she would have spent more than she earned to pay someone else to care for the man she loved. So for a decade, she did a job that would have paid at least $30-60K annually. Both her knees finally failed and my step-dad got to the point where he couldn’t move himself. She certainly couldn’t move him. He forgot how to walk. It was big stuff, and he needed expensive, EXPENSIVE CARE. I won’t have that kind of money to pay for that, if Skip gets Alzheimer’s, the way things are going now.

So I see that scene happening all around me, and I want to “prepare for it.” Yet I look at my two 9 year olds and my 7 year old, and I think, “Do I sacrifice their only mother now… so that someday, IF something bad happens and neither Skip nor I can work or can find work… then we won’t have to put any extra stress on the kids?” I don’t know.

Plus college. Our three kids are two years apart. One grade level apart. When the twins were 18 months, I opened up a 529 for each of them. For an in-state university, if I only budgeted for four years per child, the ‘program’ said I needed to start AT BIRTH putting away $150 per child per month. I did it for about three more months until, OH, I got pregnant (Docs had said I was infertile. We’d had IVF to get the twins. It was quite a shock to get pregnant sans help— from anyone other than Skip).

I’d read that many of a person’s life-long habits are formed by the sixth year of  life. My twins were already two. We adored my sitter, and I was a part-timer (it’s unreal now, to think that anyone ever let me work part-time. as the market’s become more filled with hungry, unemployed, talented workers, the workplace can say “no” to more of these “creative options” we parents might have gotten away with asking for in the past). But in the end, I wanted OUR kids to be raised MY way with ALL of OUR values. Actually I didn’t care what Skip wanted; I knew my way was best. Awful to admit, isn’t it? Now I care and respect what he wants for our kids and am even willing to seek it, but back then— not so much.

So I quit my job at 6 months pregnant with our third. SCREEEEEACH. We were off to life on one person’s salary. That meant long days for the worker-bee (Skip) and NO EXCESS money for crazy things like soft drinks or hair color for me. It wasn’t pretty. It also meant there was no money for a sitter. UUUUGGGH! Leave a Type-A woman who’s just quit a fairly rewarding job, working with with people she loved, home alone for the first time in her life with children for about 10-12 hours a day, times five days per week, and see what kind of marriage that gets you?

So I went to work part-time, just to pay for 1) the sitter 2) 4-percent of my part-time income to put away in a 401K, which was just what the company matched and 3) so I could put $50 per child per month in the 529 plans. That lasted about two years, so we saved a TINY bit more for their college and about $10,000 in the 401K. Skip’s always good about contributing the max to his Roth. I never seem to have four or eight THOUSAND dollars just lying around at the beginning of the year. I don’t know what Skip has in total for retirement, but I know that when he worked for four years for a small business, there was no 401K plan, so I know we weren’t contributing then.

That was the period I took a side-job in advertising… cars… and trucks. I used THAT money to put an extra $900 PER MONTH down toward our mortgage amount. Ewww, I was being SO SMART. I planned to pay off our loan so much sooner than the 30 years, saving us tens of thousands in interest.

This was circa 2005/’06. For a year I did that. And then the car market hit the tank. My super-wonderful employer said, “I can’t say you’re doing a bad job, but the business is so bad, I can’t pay ya’” and I said, “I understand, but I can’t work.”

And we didn’t really know it yet, but the house we’d just bought in ’06… that got the extra $900/month paid toward the primary loan amount for a full 12 months?  Well it was eeking air from inside the inflated-price balloon every month.

We should have taken twelve nice vacations or six REALLY NICE vacations that year instead of pouring that money into our house. But I’d heard it would be good to pay off our house early. I was being SMART. Oh, and my 401K, to which I’d contributed during the pre-kid years… (1998-2003), well it was up to $100K in ’06, but you know what happened in ’06, right? Yea… It, um, lost about $20K in ’06. But I knew not to do anything with it while it was down, right? Yea, um… it lost another $20-40K by the end of ’08. After that, I just stopped looking at the statements, figuring there’ll be another huge release of air before I am old enough to take any of the money out anyway. It’ll all be gone. But thank goodness I worked that part-time job and contributed $5k per year to my other 401K for two years. Woop de wee. This ain’t my pappy’s stock market ride, now is it? I really SHOULD HAVE bought that time-share in Cabo San Lucas.

And you KNOW we didn’t contribute to the kids’ 529 plans from ’09-’12, when I was having surgeries a COUPLE of times per year to try to get out of hip pain, plus I was having physical therapy three times a week and covering co-pay costs for several prescriptions each month— for THREE YEARS, while we also lived in a condo we’d bought from someone who was in foreclosure, so we could still ALSO afford our MORTGAGE PAYMENT for the house we’d left back in Virginia, when we moved away for a job that had a retirement plan. The Virginia house didn’t sell. Finally we found WONDERFUL renters, and came up short only about $200 a month. We were taking a bath, but at least it wasn’t a blood bath— yet.
So at this point I’m so physically useless. We needed Skip, literally, at home to care for us. Our kids were 6, 6, and 4. It was 2009. I couldn’t walk or stand without burning pain 24/7 that always progressed to muscle spasms down my entire legs that lasted for weeks. Skip did EVERYTHING and could not have left us alone to go and take a full-time job. No way. We four would have died. Literally. I have no idea how we made it as it was. He. just. did. everything. everything.

We saved— ourselves from filing bankruptcy only by the grace of God, I’m sure. I knew we were relatively frugal. I mean life was good, but every cent we had was spent on 1) the kids church-school tuition. It was not as bad as private school, but we didn’t want to commit to a neighborhood school, because we didn’t know if our Virginia house would ever sell and didn’t want to be jerking the kids in and our of schools all around the Triangle, as we weathered the economic storm and tried to settle-again in Raleigh. We thought, “We’ll live in a tiny space (1100 sf, family of five, with furniture handed down to us, that once filled a 3800 sf home = a lot of squooshed living!), but we’ll pay for the kids school, so we can at least let them have one constant in their lives.” That’s what we thought, at least.

So I guess instead of a mortgage for a house big enough for all of us here in NC, we paid school tuition. I don’t regret it. Loved the school. Wish we could have stayed. But my hips were calling; singing their evil siren’s song.

I had one surgery that cost, I think about $45,000.00, just for one hip and seven hours of surgery. It didn’t clear up my pain, nor did all the PT I had for about five more months before and after the surgery.

Next, when the total hip replacement surgery  (had both replaced on one day) didn’t immediately solve my giant pain issue, we braced for more waves. The bilateral total hip replacement surgery, I think was about $90,000.00— I think that’s what it was– maybe just for the doctor? or for the doctor and surgery? or for the doctor and hospital, but not for the anesthesia and follow-up care in another hospital for about a week. Anyway we had insurance, yes. But for “out of pocket expenses,” we were nearing the ten-thousand dollar mark— or $20,000.00, and that was “after-tax” money.

You really do intentionally stop counting the dollars you’re spending, when you have a medical problem that lasts for years. It’s like winning the UN-Lottery. It’s like Monopoly, except instead of WINNING that huge pile of cash in the middle of the board when you hit Free Parking, you have to COME UP WITH a pile of cash that’s ten times bigger than that. Everybody who’s paid for cancer treatment or the care of a Parkinson’s patient, can I get a witness?  Say a-men!

So I’m hobbling around here last spring, working full time in Durham, lying on the floor every other waking moment and putting away only the 4% that the company matched. The other nest-egg has never recovered from the $50K loss that started in ’06. My ’09-’12 contribution hasn’t done much either. Nothing was contributed to the kids’ 529 funds. I think our retirement now is about— 14 bucks. If we can live on $14 bucks while we’re both unemployed invalids, until death, we’ll make it. Whew.  Reassuring. Like my girlfriend says, “You gotta laugh. Why even try?”  Eat the Cookie, Buy the Shoes. That’s the title of a really good Joyce Meyer book, by the way. Spend the $16 you have in your kids’ college funds and buy it.  Nobody’s going to college anyway. And we’re all gonna die….

So right now we’re looking at sending three kids to college in about nine years… and we have about oh, $6,000.00. “Waaaaitress??? Another round please, and put it all on my tab!”  At the time I really thought all this through, when I’d realized I was not going to be able to keep working at my job because of my hips that weren’t healing quickly enough, Skip was frantically trying to find a job, after working part time for a church or two, while he did all of the home and child responsibilities, and counseled his sobbing wife every night and on both days of every weekend. He’d made no friends, no contacts, and probably hadn’t come up for air for long enough to think of trying to dig for leads for jobs. We had NEEDED HIM not to be at work because, for me to continue MY work, I had to give all my useful hours to my employer and was literally useless when I was home.

Sprinkle in a lot of lunch-hour runs to see doctors 50 minutes from my office or physical therapist visits to maintain what little mobility I had— three times a week. It was a party. I ate Snickers and drank Diet Mountain Dews for lunch every day for about three years.  $2 a day. And I didn’t even lose weight.

The medicines I was on made me nauseated all the time. My kids got used to seeing me running to the rest-room to get sick to my stomach. Poor things. The condo was tiny. You could literally be at the potty, and have a nice, low-volume conversation with the person who was doing dishes (that’d be— Skip) about ten feet away.  After the first year we all stopped closing the door. It was more fun to have someone to talk to.  Truly. We were close.  I loved that part of living in a single-wide.  But I couldn’t hide from the kids the fact that the medicines were making me sick every single day during those six months, as I waited for that first hip surgery. I would say to myself… “Sooooo which will it be today; severe nausea and vomiting from the medicines that ease the pain— or decide that walking really is not more important than not vomiting?” “Vomit and not hurt as much, or hurt like hell, but not have to puke every two hours?” Such fun decisions to make each day, off a month, on a month, for about three years.  I remember leaning over the potty thinking, “Oh sadness. Is this what it feels like to be on chemo?  Do I want to live, but be hurling my guts up every other hour— or do I just throw in the towel now and die?”

It’s incredibly sad to think that’s how so many people spend their last dozen or so years of life.

I sort of hoped, but didn’t really ever have peace until about two months ago, that my story would end in anything other than death or a very early move to a wheelchair and one-story living. I am pulling out of it though. I have VERY little need now even for ibuprofen, other than when I get jiggy with the leaf-blower. I can’t stand more than 4-6 hours a day, but that’s just fine.  I tried an act of kindness seven weeks ago and blew my neighbor’s leaves. STU-PID. I was in bad pain again for the next three weeks.

Then we got the three-week stomach and lower-tummy flu, all five of us, in rotating shifts. Now, bending to do laundry or to unload the dishwasher or to stand and do dishes, given NORMAL circumstances: I really can’t do any of these three tasks well to begin with. Add to it a stomach-flu bug, and the laundry got way, WAY beyond what I was going to be able to manage. So after the hip-inflammation died down, I looked around at my DESTROYED house. I mean we’d scrubbed poo off the carpets, and pulled poo-covered sheets, blankets and bedspreads off all five beds in the house. (Let me clarify that it was only the kids who didn’t make it to the potty in time for the lower-tummy bug to do its damage, but we have a lot of kids, who tend to come into our bed when they feel sick.)

Anyway I decided to spend about $100 and just take it all to the dry-cleaners to be “Wash-dry-folded.” It was totally worth it to spend the money, and wait the two weeks for it to come back.

It’s really worth spending that money, except when you consider that, when I went to get it two days ago, the cleaners hadn’t washed the two poo-covered bedspreads and had lost exactly half of the eight giant duffle bags of our clothes that I’d dropped off. Then the woman refused to let me take home the four duffle bags of clean clothes that she DID have ready for us. As a BONUS, she tells me that they didn’t even touch our comforters, so they’d been sitting for two weeks, balled up with poo on their insides, just sitting there, smashed in a duffle bag. Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME? YOU DIDN’T EVEN CALL TO SAY, “HEY. WE CAN’T WASH THESE. COME GET THEM”? YOU JUST LET THEM SIT THERE AND MOLD or whatever it is that poo-covered comforters do when their not cleaned promptly? I don’t know. I’ve never not cleaned a poo-covered comforter for two weeks.

So we have NO clothes. In desperation my nine-year-old  twin daughter gave up waiting for laundry to be done, and she did her own! I was so proud. I had taught her long ago how to run the washing machine and dryer. She was so happy when she came and told me she’d put in the washer every single last piece of clothing she had. She also mentioned that the soap smelled “VERY STRONG.”

Bleach.

She’d put a half-gallon of bleach in the laundry-soap dispenser. Her clothes had already been running in the cycle for about 15 minutes. Too late. These were all of the clothes she had left. Most of them were navy. Now they’re navy, with giant swaths of brown and taupe and a kind of lavender-looking color that’s, well, about the color of what’s on our comforters.

How did I get from— wait. Where was I? I think I was starting to think about, thanks to that awful thing in CT that I can’t even bear to mention, the rough, rough conversation in my head about guns and kids and keeping guns and kids apart, versus a need I personally have had quite truly many times in the past few years to protect myself from evil vermin that could be prowling in my neck of the woods, looking for me in particular.

I’m so torn on the whole dreaded thing. You want to have someone or something to blame. You think all sorts of declarative statements, but not one of them totally sums it up, which means— it’s not answerable. She shouldn’t have had those guns. They should have been locked up. How could there not be a degree of mental illness involved in every single one of these mass-killing situations? And what sets off someone to do something like this? Too much TV? Seeing violence. Wanting to feel powerful? Feeling neglected?  Feeling invisible? What can we do to stop it?  What I was beginning to think– OK, to worry about, via blog– is that it seems like, I hate to say it, because I know I’m going to be skewered, I just think a lot of kids don’t get enough parent time. There I said it. I’m not blaming what happened last week on that though, because I do not know. We just don’t know why any of this stuff happens other than Evil. Evil is real. No doubt. Yes, sickness. But yes too… Evil.

I just hope that, if there is anything to find in this horror that has a lot of us depressed, right here before Christmas, we’ll all seriously think about putting our EVERYTHING into raising our kids, even if it means we make less money. A LOT less money.  This world really does often make us feel like it takes two incomes to support a family with kids, but how it feels isn’t always how it is.  I for one am running on faith. Our budget, Skip tells me is about $12-20K shy of what we need, and that’s without cable, vacations, new tires, saving for cars when ours die, 529s or 401Ks or surgeries.

A chunk of our ceiling fell in our living room the other day. It just fell. Plop. I’m choosing to run on faith, because neither of us sees a way out, of our own volition. God is bigger than this though. I have absolutely no plan, but I have absolutely no more worry about things like bills or the car or college or anything.  Skip has the best job he could find, and it took him six months to find it. I applied to do part-time, over-night stocking at The Container Store, but really? I can’t even stand long enough to do our own dinner dishes. Damn, I love The Container Store though. I would have been great there, but not during the day. I homeschool now. I feel so good about it. I had been terrified, but now I see how wonderful it is, and how it’s simplified our lives so much. I hurt to stand, but I have to stand a lot less, now that History is in our study (former dining room). Sure it scares me, but I love doing what scares me.

A few months ago, you could say we were bringing in one income and a part-time income, but because of my health, I’d say we really, between the two of us or between the five of us if you count the kids, had about 3/4ths of an income, once you subtract all the time and hours spent on medical bills, copays and travel and mental effort that could have been spent on getting better-prepared to go out and make more money.

So now we’re back to the “five people/one income” thing. We’re back to not saving for retirement, and we’re definitely back to not putting a dollar toward the kids’ college tuition payments. When I first realized I was not going to be able to work, and Skip still didn’t have a job and I wasn’t healthy enough to handle housework, I realized, “Hey, here we are— two sharp people with long work histories. He has his CPA license and I have a Master of Arts degree, and between the two of us, we’re not gainfully employed anymore.” The trades started looking a lot more sensible for our kids, if that’s what they want. Skip sure wishes he’d become an H/VAC expert years ago, and I’d probably be better off now, had I just gone off to art or interior design school. But we just have to keep getting leaner and leaner. There will be hockey still for the kids, if God provides a way.  We have pulled the kids from their school. There’s no money for tuition, if Mama doesn’t work. I had them in public school for the first quarter of this year, but honestly, physically, I couldn’t handle the movement demands of getting three kids dressed and ready for school. I really couldn’t do it.

Then Jake broke his arm on the monkey bars at school on Day Seven and needed emergency surgery with several nights spent at Duke. Skip’s parents came for that first night. My mom stayed for two more. Jake was in extreme pain for another four days, and then he was withdrawing from the narcotics the doctor had given us for him, so he was extremely weepy. Party on, Garth. Party on, Wayne.

You can imagine how the chore list was looking at this point. Then the email messages came. There was one each day for three days in a row; one from each child’s teacher:

“Your child’s already been late X times this year and absent X times this year. We must stress to you how important it is that your child be… “

BLAH BLAH BLAH. WE WOULDN’T BE LATE THIS MUCH OR HAVE MISSED SO MANY DAYS IF ***SOMEONE*** COULD HAVE HAD THE SENSE TO MAKE SURE MY TINY SIX-YEAR-OLD BABY BOY DIDN’T FALL OFF THE FRICKITTY MONKEY BARS AND SHATTER HIS ARM!

By the time the third email came, the last thing I needed was some freaking 22-year-old, condemning me, as I drowned in laundry I could not do, because squatting is about the hardest thing I’ve ever done at this point, and every day there are more and more dishes I cannot put away, because simply bending still hurts a lot. It’s now a full 15 months after getting my metal hip implants. I suggested to the kids that they stop eating, so we wouldn’t have any dishes, but they passed on that idea.

I avoid pain, but it’s not because I hate pain. I’m cool with pain. We tight, pain and me. We been hangin’ out for years now. I ain’t got no trouble with pain. We buds.

I avoid pain now, because I found out it makes me mean— to Skip and my children. Very mean. AWFUL-mean. They don’t deserve AWFUL-mean, not after everything else they’ve seen, related to my issues and me. So when it starts hurting, I stop doing it.

You know though, that I am not a “stop doing anything” kind of person, so when I have to stop, so that I don’t turn mean on my family, I get frustrated, and perhaps because we don’t have cable and I don’t want the kids to use TV as any sort of sedative, therefor I cannot use it either, I grab a box of anything and start eating. This could be why I’ve gained 30 pounds in the past three months. I’m so swollen that when I look down my nose, my cheeks are kind of— they’re actually in the way of what I’m trying to see, and my chin— it’s more like a hog jowl now.  I’m like a caricature of my former self.

What now? Sheesh. It’s not like I can go run six miles like I used to.

Next another letter comes home. I find it, right as I’m clearing out all the FOLDERS that bring me tons of notes and daily calls for fund-raising— like we have any money to give.

“Someone in your child’s class— has LICE.”

No, the letter went on to say, no,  we weren’t allowed to skip school to avoid the lice, but if we got the lice, we would be forced to stay home until we could prove that we’d been deloused. Deloused? I can’t even de-dirt or de-leaf! We are still at de-billing our lives right now. And so it is at this point when I don’t know what to do, that I just start painting— every room of the house.

When you don’t know what to do, just paint. You can do it, sitting down. It’s slow. It’s rhythmic. It’s methodical. It’s cheap. It’s quiet. It’s soothing. No lice. No lice. No lice. Paint the lower half of the kitchen. Paint the lower half of the den. Paint the lower half of the stairwell. Paint the lower half of the foyer. Please, Jesus. You know we can’t handle the lice. Paint the base boards.

I looked up “delousing” online. It seemed very labor-intensive. This revelation is hitting me, the woman who can barely just do NORMAL life’s laundry.

Ohhhhh, I cannot handle delousing. My daughter barely lets me brush her hair as it is. It’s 18″ long and wavy, so it tangles. All the kids were blessed with my giant head of millions of tiny hairs. Somebody pass me that box of Frosted Mini-Wheats. I do NOT want to get lice. We CANNOT get lice. Ohhhh. What if we get lice? I found the “Prepare yourself to get lice” letter at 8am, as I waddled around, hurting, but trying not to scream at the kids, while trying to get them all ready and to school before we are late again. Would hate to get another nasty-gram from the kiddo who’s teaching my nine-year old and who’s never had to clean up liquid-poo off four different rooms’ carpets in one night. Mentos anyone? Mike and Ike’s? I don’t even like them, but I’m shoveling them in.

That was Strike Three. Strike One was the baby, breaking his arm on the monkey bars. Strike One and a Half was the outbreak of a staph infection in the skin on my face, picked up most likely at the hospital while my son had surgery. I still have scars from it. It made me look like a wart-hog. And not the hot wart-hog that all the other wart-hogs wanted to mate with. I looked like the gross, witch wart-hog with the giant jowls that gets picked to play the Wicked Witch of the West Wart-Hog in the wart-hog school play.

Strike Two was the bevy of nasty-grams, from all the teachers who obviously didn’t understand the extra stress that had been put on me now, because of the Narcoholics-Anonymous six year old who now has the crippled paw and can’t be allowed to sleep alone, because he’s falling all the time. I guess the weight of the giant cast throws off his balance.  They didn’t understand that he can no longer dress, bathe, feed or groom himself anymore, and was going to be helped by a mother who could really hardly dress, bathe, feed or groom herself.  Where was the father at this point? He was getting up at five a.m. to drive an hour to the one job he’d found, working all day, and driving and hour back home. Gone at 6:00 a.m., home at about 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., and wanting to go to bed at 8:30 p.m. He’s lost 30 pounds and looks like Skeletor. I look more like Paula Dean every day, but with wart-hoggish undertones and Kid-Rock hair.

And the twins are saying all the time, as I waddle through Stuff-Mart for more milk, feeling like Old Mother Hubbard,  ”How come OUR family never takes bike rides together?”

Earlier that morning, they were saying in that tragic tone, “Why are WE the only family that’s never gone to Disney or gone snow-skiing or to Mexico?”

“Just let me dig through this pile and find you some socks, OK. We’ll solve the world’s problems once we find enough matching socks and everyone’s one pair of shoes.”

What’d I leave out. OH! The blindness! Yes, yes. How could I forget the blindness!

Freaked TOTALLY out at the thought that maybe we already had the lice, I start checking hair. Hell, I don’t know what a baby lice-monster looks like. I read about little white specks and little dark specks. Within about ten minutes, I feel things crawling all over me. Mind you, we’ve allowed our children to self-clean since my first hip surgery two years ago. WHO KNOWS. They probably have confetti-colored specks, stuck to their scalps for all we know.

I start looking. I check a kid. I think I see something. It’s either pepper or— the LICE. I tell the other two kids to come over, so they’ll learn what the LICE look like. The kid with the pepper-speck in his hair starts FREAKING out. Shrieking— totally wigging out at the idea that there are little LICE thingies, crawling around, sticking their eggs to his scalp and making sweet love on his head and running quickly through his thick head of hair, like all the websites say.

Leave it to Genius Mother to actually TELL THE CHILD that I think I see the LICE in his hair, knowing that this particular child is exactly like his genius mom; creeped out by anything that you can— well, really stop and DWELL UPON– if you let yourself, and we let ourselves, always.

So he’s “going there.” I’m “going there.”  We’re all itching and screaming and crying and chasing each other around the house, twitching and all, scratching and shivering like there are LICE BABIES hatching all over us. I am, however, so happy to read that the dog cannot get the LICE from us. We put her in the car. She thinks we are going off to kill her, based upon the look on her face. I’m still itching, just thinking of the LICE and all the delousing that the infestation I’m imagining we’re already into is going to make me have to do, on top of the de-germing, de-pooping, de-vommitting, de-dusting, de-broken-pieces-of-stuff-the-dog-has-chewed-uping I’m going to be doing anyway. Ugggh. I can’t do it all, plus delousing. Who the hell loused us anyway!  Make them come over and delouse us!

We are going to the pediatrician. We need to be checked by someone who knows what the LICE look like. It’s 9:30. I am NOT GOING BACK to the LICE SCHOOL.

We don’t have lice. The lady checked. We are all totally not in need of delousing. Sigh. She seems sympathetic. She seems eager to teach us about the LICE. I take the opportunity to ask what she thinks about home-schooled kids. She thinks they are the most wonderful kids she ever sees.

Done. We are now home-schoolers. Effective: this morning. The LICE. STRIKE THREE.

I’ll get to telling you about all my worries about everyone in my generation, working so much, and the toll it takes on the kids, and what I imagine that’s doing to everybody, and the pace at which we’re all going later. My kids are awake now, and they’re all coughing. They want to go for a bike ride. I think the testers missed a brain-development abnormality in all of my kids. They still make fun of me for walking “like C-3PO,” yet ask me daily to chase them, to play tackle football, to take long bike rides and to wash the frigging 100 pound dog, either in the shower, which remember, has leaked so much that our the ceiling is falling. They say they’ll be ok if we just wash her outside. It’s like, 12 degrees. My thyroid gland ate itself when the twins were 2 months old after I almost hemorrhaged to death after giving birth to them. 80 degrees feels like 20.  I’ve said this to them all of their lives, but they still ask me to wash the dog outside when it’s 12 degrees out?

“Hey!” ((pat pat)) “Hey Einstein! It’s cold out!  I can’t bend over.   My pants are falling off, because of this new style I have to wear so I don’t look like Pat the gender-non-specific person from Saturday Night Life or a wicked wart-hog-witch-lady who kind of resembles and ugly Paula Dean (who is pretty).  I don’t want to get wet, wrestling a wet dog in the driveway in my falling-down-low-rise jeans, in the middle of December!  I’m not even sure there are still tires on my bike, if it even survived the move over here last year. Get back in the house. We have some praying to do, if you guys want to play Spring hockey.

I love homeschool, by the way. Let me just reiterate.  It leaves time for teaching the forgotten domestic arts that I never had time to learn as a child— like how to make your mom’s espresso-mochaccino with just the right amount of foam.

Chop. Chop.

Mama’s starting to get her caffeine withdrawal headache, so we’ve let it go a bit too long now.

December 21, 2012 | Categories: "Thank You, Lord, for my Smokin' Hot Husband!", and it starts with constructing myself a pool... even if i have to dig it with my bare hands, And Suddenly It Hit Her, Maybe She's Due for a Lifestyle Change..., damn hips, Enjoy Your Life, Friends Are Kind of Great, HATE the Cold. ALLERGIC to Temps Below 60 Degrees, hip replacement(s): bilateral THRs on 9/16/11 after L scope to correct FAI on 12/16/10, i Came Up with the Baby Toupee in 2002, & the Edges-Only Brownie Pan in 1999, but Never Bothered to Patent Them, I Don't Mind that there's a Committee Meeting Going on in my Head. I Don't Even Have to be Chairman. I'd Just Like the Floor Occasionally, It's All Silliness--- Or Should Be, Life Really IS Too Short, Never Settle, No Regrets, prayers, Pretty Sure I'm Going to be Named "Mom of the Year" AGAIN This Year ((sigh...)), Skip: "I'm Glad You Like Me... Today...", Stress-Related Topics Now Have Their Own Category, The Part of George Michael's Star People in Which He Samples the Gap Band's Burn Rubber (Why You Wanna Hurt Me?) is Baaaaaad, Things I Think About While My Husband is Doing People's Taxes | Tags: anchor, blog, former, Frances, Frances Scott, hip, Hockey, husband, Individual Retirement Account, insomnia, kids, life, marriage, Men, messy, mommy, mommy blogs, moms, mother, NC, news, news anchor, Oh My Gosh I Totally Need a Glass of Wine, pain, Raleigh, replacements, Scott, sleep, tv, Twitter, wife, work | 5 Comments »