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Single Parenthood

By on April 6, 2012 in family, mommyhood, writing

Before I was a year old, my parents were divorced and I didn’t even hear from or meet my biological dad until I was 9. It was just me and my mom for 6 or so years before my stepdad entered the picture.

During those years I watched my mom work her ass off so she could take care of us. I remember we had plenty of meals that consisted of pot pies since that was all she could afford.

We moved around quite a bit because once rent was due, she wouldn’t always have the money so it was on to the next place, some more scary interesting than the others.

She had several jobs but one thing I remember very clearly is that as much as she worked, I never felt like she wasn’t there for me. I also can’t remember a single time that I lacked for anything.

I have a very soft spot for single parents and would love to hear your story. You can write about anything you want when it comes to single parenthood and I’ll post them here. It doesn’t matter if you have a blog or not, write away.

Send the posts to elle dot mommyhood at gmail com. You can also add any pictures you want. If you’d like to remain anonymous, just let me know.

 

Comments { 6 }

Monster-in-laws are back.

By on March 9, 2012 in family, hold me, holy hell, in-laws, mother-in-law, really?!

*It’s that time of the month (no not that time) for crazy mother-in-law/in-law posts. Remember, if you’d like to vent about your in-laws and of course be anonymous, email me at elle dot mommyhood at gmail dot com. I’m making it a monthly thing so the next posting will be around April 5th.

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From “My mother-in-law makes me really stabby”

I’ve heard my gal friends say that they have the best MIL’s and oh-how-would-they-live-without. BLAH/GAG. I thought my MIL was great until I got pregnant and she bought me wine glasses. Because mine were “red wine glasses” and I needed “white wine glasses”. I would have been happy with a onesie or some brownies OR ANYTHING ELSE THAT DIDN’T INVOLVE DRINKING. I should’ve asked for a new bong too.

My DH thinks I blow her actions and comments out of proportion but you be the judge:

1. My MIL literally fought with me over when my anniversary was. It falls exactly 1 year after our son was born. To the date. Pretty sure when son turn 2 then it’s not our second anniversary. Because I sure would’ve loved to give birth AND get married in the same bed.

2. When son turned 3, we had a birthday party and MIL greeted MY friends at the door saying “hi, I’m T’s grandma.” Problem? The birthday party was for D, not my stepson T. That’s normal to forget whose birthday it was. Just like when DH bought flowers that day and MIL thought they were the 3 year old. AGAIN, it’s our fricking anniversary you dumbass.

3. MIL & FIL cannot visit together because we told them not to bring their gigantic dogs to our house(the hair, the constant attention to these animals). They apparently cannot find anyone to watch the dogs for a weekend and kenneling the dogs is “inhumane”.  Did you give BIRTH to the stupid dogs?

4. Pretty sure when I have grandkids and visit for 2 days, then I will be reading books to those kids and giving baths and bringing toys and generally being very happy to play with my latest bloodline. My MIL never offers any of that and when I ask her if she’d like to, her response is “well, I’ve got my wine glass so…” WHY ARE YOU HERE THEN?! Oh right for your son (see #5).

5. I only have boys so I get that moms and sons are close. But I would NEVER call my son, my “soul mate”.  SOUL MATE, didja hear that? MY MIL does on numerous occasions. She obviously doesn’t know the definition or is secretly in love with her son. Either way, it’s ridiculous.

6. She sleeps on the living room couch and bitches the kids wake her up at 7am. Sleep in the downstairs guest room then. Not MY fault you drank an entire bottle of wine and have to pee every 10 minutes.

I’m just going to end my little guest blog there-I suggest to anyone who thinks “no way is my MIL ever going to be that bad” then have a backup plan to move far away, marry an orphaned man, or buy untraceable poisons because guess what beotches, all MIL’s eventually kinda suck. Hehe. Married life is just fantastic with in-laws. I think that maybe why we all used to live until 50 so the in-laws were pretty much outta the picture before they could piss us off too much. Damn the new lifespan.

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From “Monet”

When my husband and I first got together, his mother was living with his sister and her family. Mind you, her family lives within spitting distance of my parents house. The house next door to my parents house came available to rent, and since my grandfather owns the house, I talked him into letting the in-laws rent the house from them. All worked out well until the in-laws decided not to pay rent for six months, and ended up getting kicked out of the house, so now my in-laws owe my grandfather $3,000 worth of back rent.

Now I can’t even invite both sides of the family to our son’s birthday parties because of how much tension there is. They see no need to pay it off because “technically” everyone’s family. Now every time I hear MIL commenting that she’s going to save up the money for whatever, all I can think is, “You can save up the money for something you don’t need, but you can’t save up the money to make the tension between the two families go away?” After they were evicted from my grandparents house, MIL had the nerve to list me as a reference for the house they are currently living in. I mean really now?

After I begged for my grandfather to let you live there, and you go and shit on both of us like that, I’m going to lie to a lady I’ve known all my life and tell her that you all are great renters. I think not. Not only do they owe my grandfather back rent for a house they haven’t lived in two years, they are also on the shit list with their children. My husband and I added his parents to our cell phone carrier when their phones got disconnected, with the expectation that they would pay half of our cell phone bill every month. They haven’t paid us a dime since August of 2009.

Their car insurance is under my husbands brother’s insurance policy, which is deducted straight from his paycheck where he works his first job. They were also supposed to be paying them, and since they haven’t, BIL had to go and get a second job to take care of his family. The SIL brings them groceries from time to time and any time they need anything done at the house they’re currently living in, they call her to attend to things. What I don’t understand is how in the hell if they both work two full time job, and one gets loads of overtime, how in the hell can they not afford to live on their own?

MIL on her own makes you feel like an idiot when you talk to her, making snide comments about anything and everyone she sees. What I love most about MIL is that she doesn’t listen to anything I tell her. MIL was looking for a vet to take her animals to, and I told her what vet my family had been using for years. Does she go to the one I recommend? Oh, no. She goes to the most expensive vet in the county, and then proceeds to complain about the bill.

MIL also needed to register her vehicle, and I had informed her that personalized plates would cost more on a yearly basis. She gets personalized plates and tells me that it’s not going to cost her more money, but down the road it sure does. Previously when she renewed her tags, she had to borrow money from BIL and once again put personalized tags on her vehicle.

Anytime I try to tell her something to save her some money, because Lord knows they never seem to have enough money, she doesn’t listen, she goes and does what she wants. Hello, I’ve lived in our county my whole life, and her only for 5 years or so. I think I know where the best place to go for the best rate is.

Sister in law is a nightmare. I cannot stand that hateful bitch. I swear if she had the money to go to the doctor, he would diagnose her with bipolar disorder! One minute, she’s your best friend, and the next, she’s wanting to rip your head off and bury you in her back yard. All I had ever known about her from even before my husband and I were together was that she was a bitch and she would back stab you the first chance she got. I’m pretty sure it was her who left my husband and I nice little messages the night before we got married, trying to tell me that I was all wrong for him, and I was going to ruin his life if we got married.

She told him that I was herpes infested (which I most definitely am not, I’ve got the blood test to prove it) and marrying me was going to be the biggest mistake of his life. Needless to say she was not invited to the wedding, although I was going to send her an invite to be nice, but she flat out made it known that if she got an invitation, she wouldn’t show because she didn’t agree with two people who hadn’t had any real dating time getting married. HELLO! YOUR BROTHER IS IN THE ARMY AND STATIONED 600 MILES FROM ME!

We saw each other at least twice a month and talked on the phone every day, until he got deployed to Iraq, in which I remained faithful and supported him the whole time. I managed his finances and took care of everything I needed to as if we were already married, but I guess that wasn’t good enough for her.

She has two children. The oldest was a surprise from a previous fling, the youngest from her husband. Oldest, God bless her heart, is the most shell of a person you have ever seen. Hubby and I have discussed ways to get custody of Oldest to save her from her life of hell but without any physical signs of beatings or things of that nature, no luck. They don’t beat her physically, but emotionally. That poor girl has no self esteem because her parents spend all day berating her for whatever reasons, and Youngest could commit a triple homicide and SIL would just look the other way.

Youngest has the sassiest mouth on the face of the Earth, telling his grandfather to shut up and that he doesn’t have to listen to him, and SIL just sits there and lets him get away with it. Long before I ever decided to have children with my husband, I made this nice long list of “Things My Children Will Never Do” and you can trust and believe that everything on that list came from things I’ve seen Youngest do. SIL also threatens divorce from her husband on a weekly basis, but the second anyone in the family tries to say anything remotely negative, she will defend him to the death.

BIL isn’t as terrible as the rest of them. Recently I learned that he had been lying about previously being enlisted in the Army. Hubby has been in the Army for 5 years, been deployed to Iraq twice, and is going to Afghanistan within the next two months. He’s risked his life twice already and BIL wants to claim he’s in the Army.

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I got along so well with my mother-in-law this past visit and we even got matching outfits and held hands while skipping down the sidewalk. *snort*

By on February 17, 2012 in anxiety, blah blah blah, depression, family, hold me, in-laws, marriage, mother-in-law, my brain is melting, the little hummingbird

*This is a really whiny & ranty post. If you’re lucky and have a nice mother-in-law I just have one question. Can we trade?

This last visit with the in-laws was one of the worst I’ve had with them. By Thursday night I just wanted to leave and go to the fancy schmancy hotel down the street and have a spa weekend. These are just a few of the highlights.

I usually wonder what I did to make my MIL act the way she does towards me but my therapist said that it wouldn’t have mattered who my hubby married, my mother-in-law would have probably been like this with anyone else. My mother-in-law absolutely undermines every little tiny thing I say and do when she’s visiting. That pisses me off since it’s my house but as soon as she visits, she takes it over and my hubby never wants to say anything.

I was talking to her about the hummingbird starting preschool really soon and the MIL asked me how she thinks the hummingbird will do. I told her I think she’ll be fine, it will be me who cries and takes a few hundred photos of her going to school. I’ve joked that I’m going to throw a party and it will be so nice to watch what I want and even bathe before bed once she starts preschool but I know I’m going to miss her like crazy.

It’s like when I’m dying for some free time so my hubby will take the hummingbird out but once she’s gone, I don’t have any idea what to do with myself.

When I told my MIL that it will probably take a bit of time to get used to my baby being in preschool and not cry, my mother-in-law said No, you won’t.

Sometimes I end up falling into her trap so I told her that it’s hard because even though I trust the school and it’s teachers, I won’t be there to protect the hummingbird. I was starting to see red so I don’t remember exactly what she said but she basically told me that I was an idiot and it’s not normal to be emotional when your kid starts school for the first time.

I told her that even if she thinks it’s not normal, I’m still going to worry because that’s just how I am and she said No, you won’t I should put that on a t-shirt. Really? That’s when the conversation went downhill fast.

After that I went upstairs to the bedroom and hid which is what I mostly did the rest of the week.

As far as my blog is concerned, my in-laws are just under the impression that I write occasionally for blogs but they don’t know I have my own. I had to think of something fast last year when I slipped and said I was writing for a blog. One of the last times they were visiting we were watching the movie Julie & Julia in which Julie cooks her way through Julia’s cookbook and blogs about it.

I don’t know everything there is to know about blogging but my father-in-law quickly became the expert on blogs and basically talked out of his ass for about 15 minutes. It took all I had to not say anything because he was saying things like you can make a lot of money really fast if you blog. Uhhmm, okay. I guess my money for blogging has gotten lost in the mail. Ha!

Even though I try not to say much when they’re here because my MIL always twists things, I could probably sneeze and she would tell me I didn’t do it right. It was so hard to tell the hummingbird to give her grandmother a hug and kiss when she would go to bed because my MIL would be treating me like shit.

Because they love to talk about things that make it impossible to add to the conversation, I would disappear for a while.

On Saturday night when I decided to brave the downstairs, I grudgingly went into the living room. In just a few minutes time they went into this deep discussion about the wind energy in the Netherlands. ?????? I don’t even know anything about the wind energy in the U.S. so I just sat there for about an hour while trying not to fall asleep and forcing myself to be quiet and not yell shut the f*ck up!

I made a huge mistake by making the suggestion of watching Crazy. Stupid. Love. Luckily I’ve seen this movie 100′s of times a few times but my in-laws sit there and always have something to say about the movie. They even get into long discussions so they miss most of the movies we watch.

My hubby and I had to explain things that would have been answered if they would just pay attention to the movie. I would end up not being able to see Ryan Gosling’s hotness, which should be a punishable offense, when I have to answer questions like “who is that guy”, “why did they do that”, or ”this isn’t realistic” (they’ve said that with almost every movie I’ve seen with them. They don’t seem to understand the concept of movies).

One of the most oddest moments was when all of us minus the hubby (who was in the garage but I think he could’ve been hiding from his parents) were sitting on the couch and watching one of the hummingbird’s favorite cartoons, Peppa Pig. The hummingbird and I were making snorting sounds when they did it on the show and my FIL actually joined in.

That’s when my MIL flipped out and told all of us to be quiet because snorting like a pig is disgusting. She has 2 grown kids and 3 granchildren so I don’t know how it’s possible that making an animal noise is disgusting. I’ve been thrown up on and have cupped my hands to catch the rest of the puke and I’ve gotten poop under my fingernails when I’ve cleaned up a really messy diaper. That’s gross.

Snorting like a pig is a walk in the park.

 The last night my in-laws where here we had dinner at the house and the subject of teenagers and rebellion came up. All I said was I think most teenagers go through some type of rebellion at one point. The MIL said No, they don’t I need to put that on a t-shirt and I should have just been quiet but told her that I said most not all teens and they rebel in different ways.

My mother-in-law told me that was probably just me and my friends. That’s when my FIL cut in and said the hubby was a wonderful young man at that age. I was thinking uh huh, that’s what you think. My husband wasn’t that wild when he was younger but there were still things he did that his parents won’t ever know about.

They ended up having an early flight on Monday thank gawd! so I only had to deal with them for 4 days instead of 5 like I thought but I’m still recovering from their visit.

The hummingbird’s 3rd birthday is in less that two months but they didn’t say anything about coming to visit again so soon. I’m hoping I’m in the clear and can enjoy her birthday.

**I’m going to be really busy this coming week and if you’d like to write a guest post, whether you have a blog or not, then drop me an email at elle dot mommyhood at gmail dot com. The post can be about anything you want but I currently don’t accept sponsored posts.

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Vodka and a dixie cup. What more do you need in life?

By on February 15, 2012 in a glimpse into my mind, family, i know i'm strange, life is funny, mom

A few weeks ago was the 17th anniversary of when my hubby and I started dating. It also reminded me of the night before my wedding from hell thanks to my MIL.

Not long before the wedding I was out with my mom and sister and we started talking about what we were going to do the night before. I was surprised when my mom said no alcohol. I figured it was the night before my afternoon wedding so I wanted to live it up but not too much.

My mom and I argued a little which was pretty rare at that point in my life and it seemed so unlike her to be against me drinking the night before my wedding. We compromised with one drink and then I figured I could sneak some from my maid of honor.

We were spending the night at my parents house the night before the wedding and my future hubby and his best man were staying at our apartment although most of his family, especially his grandmother, they didn’t know we were already living together.

The hubby and I got sick not long before the wedding so I couldn’t care less about drinking the night before. We all went out for the rehearsal dinner and all I wanted to do was take some Nyquil and go to bed once I went to my parents.

Since it was so long ago I don’t remember what led up to it but I do know that everybody except my mom and I were asleep so we went outside on the porch to talk.

After dealing with all of the wedding preparations with my mother-in-law and family that had come in for the wedding, it was so nice to have my mom to myself.  We were talking for some time and then my mom told me she was going back into the house for a minute to get something.

She came back onto the porch with a bottle of vodka and a dixie cup. I was like what in the hell, I had to fight you for one beer. So, there we were sitting on the porch in the middle of the night, tossing back dixie cup shots of vodka.

We were laughing hysterically about who knows what when we realized we needed a bathroom break. The only problem was we didn’t want to go back inside the house because we were so toasted and loud and didn’t want to wake everybody up including my maid of honor who was asleep in the living room near the front door.

What to do?

It seemed perfectly reasonable in our state to go back to nature so we walked onto the front lawn and had a little squat or at least tried to. We were both laughing so hard and it was really difficult to keep our balance but yes, we peed in the front yard then went back on the porch for a few more shots of vodka.

My mom and I had stayed up talking and laughing until around 4 am and it was one of best times I’ve had. What wasn’t so great was only getting a few hours of sleep before everyone was rounded up to get ready for my wedding. I found a way to pull through and a few hours later I was a Mrs.

We had a formal reception at the church but then went back to my parents house for a laid back reception with sandwiches and beer. I skipped the beer and told myself I’m never drinking again. At least not until later that night when my new hubby and I stayed in a honeymoon suite and drank champagne.

When it comes to my wedding, the night before with my mom just hanging out and talking was my favorite part of the whole thing.

I usually find that no matter how much you plan anything, some of the best memories are those that you don’t plan. Even if it involves peeing in the front yard like classy ladies do.

*Updated: I think this post should be a drinking game. Every time you read ”the night before my wedding” you take a shot of vodka in a dixie cup. :^)

**I definitely plan to write about my in-laws but I need some time to cool down or else you’ll be reading more gibberishy gibberish than normal.

***You should check out this new website, What The Flicka?, that was founded by Desperate Housewives actress Felicity Huffman. It will be going live soon but there’s already a twitter account and a FB page to get the latest information. I can tell that the site is going to be amazing!

Comments { 4 }