They All Fall Down

After being told by the velvet wearing acupuncturist that it was my anger, I decided to go with the flow this weekend and just “live and let live”.   That lasted about an hour; mainly because the Squeeze wasn’t home for that long.  When he returned, we went to a shopping centre to get a charm fixed on my charm bracelet, find a birthday present for the girl for next week and have a spot of lunch in a great little French place we frequent for coffee.

That’s when “live and let live” went out the window.

A woman in a large coat, scarf and bag had walked by several times; noticed because in Melbourne today, it’s in the 20’s and the sun is shining – a beautiful day!  The girl mentions that the woman appears ‘sad’.  I told muttered ‘stop looking; she could have an uzi in that bag…’

Her comeback was “seriously? Does she look like the kid?”  (Good point)  Mostly I wonder what he is going to do next and I haven’t completely discounted stabbing me.  I mean it has to top snot on the wall, doesn’t it.

So as discussion on ‘a little bit creepy…’ ensued and with parent goggles, the Squeeze mentioned that he has friends now (sure he does…)  and then goes on to ruin my day with “he even mentioned that he’d like them all to be here on the holidays to film a movie for a school project.

Aside from the fact that our agreement (in writing these days) means he spends school holiday’s with his mother and it will be a cold day in Hell before I change that agreement, I could only shake my head at the thought of four teenagers running around my beautiful things, making a movie while we are at work.  Ummmm no.  No way.  No way in Hell.

This song floated in my head; because the moment I go to work and leave an unhygienic peniwhacker and his nerd friends alone in my house, will be a cold day in hell – and 2 minutes after that, I’d be forced to make sure they all fall down…

Petrified Muscles

This week I have had a three day headache.  It’s unbearable really; but having just had five weeks off sick, I’ve soldiered on and gone to work, cooked… cleaned up.  I decided to give myself one more day to see if the headache was muscle related; or brain related.   Seriously, I couldn’t handle another trip to hospital to get my head shaved.

So I hunted down a new acupuncturist closer to home and went off after work, dragging my somewhat petrified muscles behind me.  And they are like stone.  No kidding.  I lie in bed and tell them ‘let go. Just let go and relax,’ but of course they can’t.  They are like that for keeps now; in a permanent spasm.  The last few nights I have knocked myself sideways with migraine tablets which have a muscle relaxant in them.  Oh I slept, but it was restless and I woke repeatedly with dark dreams.  The muscles didn’t let go; they just tighten a little more until it feels like a bunch of blood men inside my body climb up my spine with ropes and pitch a lasso over my brain and start to drag it down.  My brain is like Gulliver on a beach.

So this new age, Indian guy starts talking to me about alternate medicine and I’m not totally opposed to the idea.  I just think it has to be mixed with a dash of common sense.  I mean if slapping the kid over the head with a dead fish for a year didn’t clear up his nearly gangrenous toe, then maybe it was time to consider antibiotics.   And personally, anyone who doesn’t have their kid immunised should be flogged.  At the very least, don’t send your freaking kid to school with mine!  You want to avoid antibiotics then sure, but you take the stress and germs.  You can’t have such a holier than thou religion and then send the kid to infect me and mine…   But I regress.

I sit down with the new age Indian and he asks some questions and then looks at my tongue, eyes and takes my pulse before leaning back and telling me he suspects my migraines and muscle spasm are because I have a lot of anger in my life right now and that sometimes, it was better not to supress how you feel.  And he suspects I do supress it because I’m pale.  If I was an angry person, I’d have more red.

That made me laugh and I mentioned that I didn’t actually have any problem in articulating anger, but that yes… my home life has taken a dive and I’m struggling to deal with raising someone else’s germ ridden, thankless, manipulative kid and that moving has become laden with work and difficulty and the loss of my Starbucks mugs and God knows what else.  My home used to be my sanctuary.  Now I can feel my shoulders cringing up as I drive up the street because I know that kid is going to be skulking around the corner….

Poo Hands

What happens when you love someone, but can’t stand their family..?  

Yes, usually, you can avoid them and be busy at Christmas or Easter.  But what if the person you can’t stand, is some ignoramus kid that thinks he is better and smarter than you?  Is manipulative in the extreme?  And what if he is living in your house..?

That means it is time to move and shut down the relationship… Surely. 

There are so many people out there that can’t see how utterly disgusting their kids are.  Not fit for society really.  And seriously, this kid is not fit for human consumption.  He came home today and went straight to the downstairs loo for long enough for me to iron two shirts.  When he came out, he had flushed (thank God) but didn’t pause to wash his germ ridden hands before coming out to rummage around in my fridge and pantry and shove his hands over two bowls of cereal.  

Of course I can no longer touch the cereal or milk.  That happens a lot.  My daughter and I have to hide food so that his penis ridden hands do not touch "our" stuff.    I walk around with the pinoclean; wiping walls and handles just in case he touched them.  I don’t even want to be in the same time zone as this poo tarnished, potentially hepatitis ridden horror.

When I suggested the Squeeze should drag him out of his room when he went to get BBQ gas, the Squeeze paused to mention that the kid had been out of his room; he had in fact, sat downstairs with me and had a conversation when he got home.  The truth was the weirdo sat behind me as I watched House (season 6) and ironed - without actually saying one single word.  Several times I turned to look at him (in case he was creeping up to me with a knife)...

Before moving to the big house that takes me forever to clean up after a bunch of slack pigs; my home was my sanctuary.  It was quiet.  It was clean.  It was mine.  Now I feel anxious on week nights.  I suspect this kid has mental issues and it bothers me whenever he is going home from school early when I am not here as God knows what he would be up to. But it's almost worse if I rush home; because them I'm stuck alone with him.  WTF does that say..?

con•nip•tion [kuh-nip-shuhn]

I love the word ‘conniption’; but in case you are wondering exactly what it means: conniption is a fit of violent emotion, such as anger or panic…   Very unsqueeze like to have any emotion really.  He is almost serial killer in his lack of it!  Romance too. 

Anyhow, last night the Squeeze comes about as close to having a conniption as he comes to it (if you don’t count him going ballistic while driving).  His “conniption barometer” and mine are vastly different.   I blow my top over what I think are important things (which is every damned thing). 

Mostly, my conniptions are in regards to the slovenly kid or the Harridan - sending one of her belittling or holier than thou text messages that are still quite plentiful.  On the weekend it was "I could almost hear your whining voice in that message."  But even worse than her "Everything I DO is for the Kid!" messages that come while I am raising HER kid more than she does; I hate her “orders” texts.   It's as though she had changed her name to “she who must be obeyed”.  Several times she has started a tirade with “do I have to remind you…” and I’ve wanted to send a quick reply from his phone to say “do I need to remind you that I divorced your ass so that I didn’t have to hear you reminding me…” but if I did that, he’d have a conniption  ;)

So last night, I was somewhat surprised when he had a tiny conniption which was associated with his inability to find a handful of phone chargers cords that I had spoted earlier sitting in my copper champagne bucket, turning a piece of art into a sack of crap!  "Why do I have to move stuff?" he asked and I seriously tried to bite my tongue and not shout "why do you have to keep leaving stuff every where!!!" 

Of course I had moved them.  Why wouldn’t I pick up the tangle of spider legs protruding from my gorgeous copper ice bucket and put them in the large drawer of the coffee table; dedicated to Squeeze paraphernalia such his creepy collection of wrestling porn – old, fat, greasy guys in big speedo’s with mullet haircuts – locking one another in greasy clinches and breaking this up with the odd fake leap from the ring rope.

Arrrgggghhhhh.

Hmmm what a pity he couldn’t have been as upset over the fact that 8-10 of Starbucks mugs are missing – but the theft of my mugs by some unseen entity get's no more than a shrug of the shoulders.  The Squeeze went through every cupboard in the house; then the garage; pausing to ask stuipd questions such as "did you pack them up and put them outside..?"  Or my personal favourite, "did you give them away..?" 

WTF?  Who the hell gives their mugs away?  Even worse, is dolling them out like I'm living on the ark, because they are going in 2's!  A couple of weeks ago I was down to 12.  This week I"m down to 10!  If the Bermuda Triangle Cupboard keeps this up, I'll be down to 8 next week.

But of course the only logical answer is that the kid is messing with my mind; idiot.  And if he doesn't stop, I'll be messing with his bloody face! 

Cat. Mouse. Slipper.

It’s no secret that I’m not overly fond of the kid living in my house.  Let’s face it, the snot on the bedroom wall shot off my scale of cope-ability and into my “dead to me” zone.

But let’s face it; it was forced down my throat, so I was dragged here against my will.  I didn’t want to go back to having a school kid.  I thought we had covered this off early on in our relationship; and we did.  But the Harridan, that thing still firmly clamped to his back, has spoken and so we turned our worlds upside down and moved house and I was the not-so-proud step mother of a hideous 16 yo boy. 

Part of the biggest issue is that I have the kid more than his mother but it would appear that my opinions do not count – at all.  In fact, I’m not even allowed to have them.  Frankly, if I weigh up my success rate against theirs, then I think they should give my ideas a shot.

I’m 51 years old and am smart enough to have had children when I was young and to raise them as I was raised, with tough love and the odd slap to the backside.  In return for that, I got 3 perfectly lovely young adults that all work, all care about others and the world, love me and would do anything and fly in from anywhere to help me.

Don’t get me wrong, two of my children were freaking vile as teenagers and handed me more grief than most people ever know.  I still have nightmares going to court with one and seeing some kid awaiting his turn wearing a black t-shirt that said “dead girls don’t say no” – it was horrific.  But they were well grounded and came out the other side as great people.

This kid has never known the sting of a slap.  He is told repeatedly by his half-witted, velvet wearing mother that he is gorgeous, smart, clever, witty, perfect!  Can do anything he wants!  I wouldn’t approve of that style of child rearing even if it were true; when the kid is none of those things, I find it bordering on cruel because life will prove different.  Not everyone can win.  Sometimes you are a loser – take it and get the hell over it.

Lately, my groovy white Starbucks mugs started to disappear from the cupboard, so I asked the Squeeze where 8+ of my mugs can have vanished to.  Of course he had no idea.  Today, I’m down another 4.  Yes you guessed it – they just disappeared!  Without a trace!  The new house has a Bermuda Triangle cupboard!  Call the newspapers!

Now I know that I’d be looking into where the kid was and suspect I’d find him on the grassy knoll when JFK was shot; but seriously – how does anyone expect me to believe a thief is crawling in and out of my house, purely to steal mugs?  But what am I supposed to do about it; when I know they are missing and short of a stranger stealing them, it can only have been the kid taking them home to put them in mummy’s slipper!

And now it’s Friday and I’m off to relax.  No kid until Monday night and my beautiful niece is up tonight and I’m cooking pork belly and keeping the champagne cold!

Who is that creeping around up there...

Hopefully, I’m on my last week of sick leave.  During the day when I’m here on my own, it’s almost like being on holidays.  I’m recuperating yes but this week sees me at the best I’ve been for over a month so I can do those things that have been neglected.  Hell, I was just now sitting in bed thinking “I should get up and go for a walk to the market” – but then put it off to blog.  But after this…

Still, there is a dark cloud that hovers over our house.  Being home is less pleasant in the pre and post school hours when the house is silent other than the skulking of the kid upstairs. 

He is, in a word, disconcerting.  I was obviously trying to be kind in my word choice but in reality, his behaviour is sometimes just plain creepy.

Somehow, I’ve landed this strange man/boy in my home.  He exhibits extremely odd behaviour that mummy and daddy refuse to acknowledge or correct and in fact will flat out argue at me that it is ‘normal’ behaviour.   And I get to feel uncomfortable in my own home; especially when it’s just me and this kid there - even if he doesn't speak to me and just clings to his room.

Yesterday, I was watching a movie (which was kind of crappy; Cat 8 – obviously the final resting place for Matthew Modine) but I hear his key poking around in the front door before it swings open.  I know it's him, mainly because I've started the dread countdown.  Then I hear it quietly close before those archless feet slap up the stairs - seriously, it is like there are a couple of porterhouse’s hanging on the ends of his legs; and then the bedroom door silently snicks closed.

Who the Hell enters someone’s house and doesn’t even stick their damned head into the house to say ‘I’m home’?  I mean if I wasn't counting the minutes, he could scare me into a heart attack! (let's face it, that's probably the plot!)   Then he sits up there barking with a chest rattling cough and infecting the rest of the house (who cares about anyone else, as long as his good bacteria is okay?)

And what the hell is he doing up there…?

The Toad King

I’ve now been living in this house with the Toad King upstairs for 158 days.

Feels like a lifetime really.

I’ve gone from not wanting this pimple faced kid with zero hygiene skills and manky hair living in my world to gut swirling ‘why is it illegal to stab someone’; I want to punch you in the face; and the feeling is more than mutual.

Problem is that the Squeeze comes from Velvet Land parenting skills.  You must not smack.  They have to feel good about themselves – no matter if they’re a lazy selfish sod.  No one is a loser.  You are perfect and clever and talented and you can do anything you want to!!!!!  Yeah, well he is five seconds away from the real world and in the real world, he is a greasy headed, pimple faced kid who – due to the “velvet land of rearing” believes he is better than the rest of humanity.  Let’s see how that plays out!

I have realised over these 158 days that the lack of friends is more about the fact that he feels he is superior to them as opposed to my first belief that no one would want to muck around with this kid who smells and doesn't see the point of flushing the loo; and as a parent - I just know that if my kid bought this thing home, I'd say later "don't bring him here again...'

I mean, if the kid is supposed to be perfect and smart and all the rest of it, how can the Squeeze admit to himself that there is a problem?  Of course he can’t.  All the problems are about me.  I just don’t like him.  Yeah, well I have an aversion to snot wiping graffitists; call me fussy!

Picking his nose and wiping it on the bedroom wall was akin to child porn in my eyes – he should die along with every creepo out there.  But not so according to the Squeeze.  To him, it’s not about me or our home – it’s just boys being boys!  Even though the kid actually said he wouldn’t do it at his mother's house which is a filthy hovel so wouldn't even be spotted!  Still, he was in fact admitting it was about me and our home.  But the Squeeze sits there, tight lipped and refusing to see the forest for the trees.   His kid is a toad.

There wasn't anyone I discussed it with that didn’t gag as a first reaction and then demand he cop a wooden spoon to his arse or a slap to his face – I’d have been up for either…  Oh I long for it!  Dream about it!  I can almost hear the sharp crack as my hand connects with those pimples (note to self, wear gloves…)

Then this week, we had another big row at the dinner table when the Toad King informed the Squeeze that he had to give him $150 to go sailing.  Ummm yeah.   Whatever.  Your mother took the $800 parenting allowance and it sure as hell didn’t come off the school fees – get her to pay for it or better yet, get a bloody job!  Surprisingly, the Squeeze also mentioned the “you want; get a job” line to which the toad replied:

“I don’t want to work and I shouldn’t have to…”  WTF??? 

Yes.  Seriously.  He really is that lazy and selfish!  And I couldn’t hold back and informed him that he was in fact, lazy and selfish and if he wanted to do stuff, he had to get a job –after all, no one else at that table would be going to work every day if we didn’t have to!  But short of lotto, that’s our only option!

And then it was on. 

He, in his delusional world where he is far more superior than I, just puts out ridiculous random arguments that are pointless and utterly juvenile – that make me question his mentality.  He isn’t lazy but while he is at school, he shouldn’t have to work blah blah.  Didn’t kill any of my kids to have part time jobs; nor my nieces and nephews.  My friends kids all had part time jobs.  His brothers had them!

So the Squeeze, needing to step in to rescue the toad, turns the argument around to be about me calling him stupid.  In fact, I caused him lazy – because he is.  I didn’t call him stupid as his manipulation skills, although basic; work a treat on the idiot that I live with. But to twist the argument to me - in front of the toad only made me say outright that he was a fool and the kid was a manipulative little swine.  At this point, he turned to me and smirked behind his father's back.

And then I decided I don't want this kid in my universe.  There is no diving in and taking a bullet for him.  I’m more likely to push the little F-er into it and then high five the shooter afterwards!  Any of the other kids, I’d seriously go Wendi Deng for.

Still, rather than have a war, I left the room.  Let that toad and the idiot I love, revel in how mean I am.  How dare I call the little flower lazy!

I talked to my daughter about moving.  After all, she has a stake here also.  She loves the Squeeze, but the Kid…  Her feelings are much of a muchness to mine.  She watches this kid's every movement near the fridge – because we hide anything of ours that has to be touched by hands.  The idea of him peeling slices of cheese from our pack after holding his penis in the toilet is seriously nauseating…

And she agreed.  The kid is a manipulator who knows no matter what, daddy will back him up and throw me to the lions.

So it was decided.  At the end of the lease, we are out of here – along with 99.9% of the house that is mine.  And the little toad and his idiot father can rent a rat hole somewhere and share peniwhacker cheese until the cows come home!

I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair...

No. I haven't spent an afternoon watching South Pacific; although I did finish Glee!

The Kid came back from another music camp today and I had already set the stage to have 'the discussion'. 

I figured having the mild sting of Ajax under his nails may serve as a warming up process. 

As you can see (pick below), greeting him at the door was a bucket of pineoclean water. Cloth. More cloth. Spray cleaner. Box of tissues and garbage bag. 

In fact the discussion went pretty good I thought. I gave it a sit down family feel and in truth, I thought he responded pretty well - even when I asked him straight out if this was a deliberate slight to me and my evil bitch hygienic ways! 

Of course there is the truth that he couldn't tell me why he wouldn't do that at his mother's....

Who Needs Tissues?

I’ve had a rough time of late.  I have shunts in my head and when one goes – they go.  So I’ve been in and out of hospital and home to recuperate – which means I actually can’t do a lot of cleaning up because I just don’t have it in me.

Yesterday, finally, I started to feel better.  My sister came up for the night and my Aunty came for dinner so we cooked and drank champagne before slinking off to bed at a reasonable hour. 

This morning, when my sister left, I went up to the spare room to change the bedding.

Imagine my surprise when while putting doona’s and pillows away, I see snot wiped on the wall and on the window sill above the bed.  WTF?  I’ve just been around and counted.  There are 4 boxes of tissues strategically positioned around this house.  That isn’t even counting the 3 loos all with a large basket of paper – one basically 2 minutes from his room…

But no.  Let’s just pick our fricking nose and wipe it on the wall.

Who the hell lives like this? Really?

Oh:  here is a pic of my new haircut.