Holidays! Thank the Lord!

Reading that headline, it may sound as though I’m about to embark on a fabulous journey.  Maybe I’m off to Greece again like last year…  Sigh no; not that lucky.  The joy I am experiencing is due to school holidays and that means I am kid free for two whole weeks. 

In reality, holidays started last week so I’ve existed in a relatively stress free domain for a week.  Well, more like it was restricted to the normal stress of having the Squeeze walk around the house dropping things wherever he is standing when their usefulness is finished.  No amount of training seems to be able to rectify this.

It took a week and two bottles of Frabreeze to air the spare room out – seriously, that kid is stinkier than anyone I’ve ever known.  His doona and pillows were shoved in the wardrobe so I did no more than open the door and throw sprinkles of frangipani oil on them before slamming the door again.

So Saturday rolled around and the room smelled normal and the Squeeze was packing for a week down the coast.  Just the Squeeze and Kid in technology heaven – and it is heaven, at least for the girl and I.

In the typical organisational skill-less land that they live, the Squeeze had arrange for the kid to catch a train but when the train fell several stops short, the poor little poppet couldn’t get his arse off the train and catch a bus.  He had to call Daddy to go pick him up and bring him home which meant by the time he had chauffeured Little King home, there was no packing or preparation for the coast.

In my world, you pack during the week before.  You have a spread sheet and document everything you know you’re going to need and check it off as it goes in the case.  Case…  Ha!  Last week we went to Torquay for my sister’s birthday.  I came out with a glossy black overnight case – which I had put his toiletries in but left the packing of clothes to him.  As we were leaving, he strolls out the front door with his clothes packed – in two plastic Coles bags.  I just rolled my eyes.  We picked up my brother from the airport on the way and he just shook his head and laughed.  My sister and her husband looked down at his bags in mock horror when he walked in.  I’ve just learned to live with it really.  He is a strange beast is the Squeeze.

So I hand him my overnight bag so that he can pack which elicits a laugh and start the “Saturday morning clean”.   The Squeeze goes off to start gathering what he will need and Little King races for the television, laptop and phone in hand, attempting to download the new iPhone OS and God knows what else while he has internet.

Now that I’ve fumigated the spare room, I move up there to vacuum and make up the bed in anticipation of the boy on my side, flying in from Perth, which incidentally, also has my stress levels rising.  He is no picnic either I’m afraid, but at least he is transient and I can suck it up for a week!

The kid is hovering near the router, I’m not sure how he figures that’s going to make it go faster; the Squeeze is lugging armfuls of crap to the car and tossing it to the boot (nothing like packing!) and I open the blinds and windows in the spare room and drag my Meile into the centre of the room only lurch to a stop as I spy a big patch of red ink smudged into the brand new carpet of the brand new house we are in.  My stress went up a couple of levels – to muttering point.  Loudly.

I speak to the Squeeze about it but all he wants to do is shove his hands over his ears and sing so he doesn’t hear the words.  He doesn’t want to deal with it (he never does which is why I am in this mess)… ‘It’s not ALL over the carpet – there is just a large smudge’ but he neglects the part where it is basically as soon as you open the freaking door. 

It’s red ink on cream carpet!  So I shrug.  What the Hell do I care?  It isn’t my bond and I’m not cleaning it.  I’m not even going to try.  It can rot there.  Rot I say!

Having no joy with the Squeeze, I go downstairs and say to the Kid “there is red ink over the carpet upstairs…”  And he looks at me with his dead eye glare.  Either he is slightly autistic or just trying to be annoying, but all I get is a stare. 

“Do you get what I’m saying..?” I finally ask? 

I should think “Wow.  Sorry.  Didn’t realise.  Want me to try to get it off?  I’ll make sure I don’t leave pens on the floor next time…  I’m really sorry.”  Any or all of these would have been appropriate, but he just continues the dead eye stare.

I finally give up, creeped out by the dead eye stare and go back upstairs, this time to find more snot on the wall.

My stress went up a couple of levels – to screaming point.  I want to go down stairs and smash this kid in the face.  Instead, I go down and with a voice that is so frosty I’m surprised the furniture doesn’t crust up, I tell the Squeeze to get up there and clean the snot off the wall.  I’m not happy and he knows it.

The Kid comes out for something and I say “why is your father up there cleaning snot off the wall again..?” to which I get (you guessed it) dead eye stare.

Then mercifully, they leave.  I want to cry with happiness.  I love the Squeeze but his constant weakness regarding the Harridan is ugly.  His inability to ram the truth down her throat sticks in my craw.  Not seeing the requirement to bitch slap this horrible, snot wiping kid is sucking the life out of me and our relationship and it’s pointless to even discuss it with him anymore.  He just can’t deal with either of them – even to save our relationship; and there is a little piece of me that thinks that if it isn’t important enough to him to change things in his life, man up, then it isn’t important enough for me to stay and put myself through the Hell that this kid is.

So Grand Final day went by without my beloved Cats getting to play so I watched ‘Moses’ as I drank red wine, ate pizza and cleaned the house; then warmed myself by the glow of “clean” that night.  This morning when I left for work, it was still sparkling.