Suburban Goddess

Okay, I’m ready to write about why I’m moody now. I tried earlier, but it was just pouring out in a rambling sea of griping.

My daughter bonked her head on the door this weekend, (3rd time this month) and has yet another huge purple egg on her forehead. I think her balance might have been affected by her tube surgery, or maybe it’s just the “learning to walk” thing. Either way, it makes me profoundly sad to see that little “I’m hurt” pout. And when you take your wounded child out in public, people start giving you what I like to call “the CPS stare.” Terrible how people automatically assume the worst.

And then there’s the perpetually sullen stepchild. We went out of our way to make his evening enjoyable last night; eat at Sonic (with a Sonic Blast), go to the drive-in, watched a kid’s movie well past bedtime…. yet he still complained. The only way to a tween’s heart is through gluttonny, I’m afraid, and it’s just not something I’m prepared to allow. How do you ever learn to appreciate anything if you get every single thing you ask for? So now I understand why my father would get so annoyed with me when I complained as a kid. Maybe it’s a kid thing.

So I go to work to escape some of this sadness, and my little minions complain incessantly. They have no idea how good they have it, yet all they do is bitch about how miserable their jobs are. Honestly, I am at the point where I want to point at the door and say “GET OUT.” Work used to be a happy place. One of the minions says, “That’s what happens when you cross over to The Dark Side.” Perhaps.

My husband surrounds himself with positive, fun people (which makes me wonder, how did he end up with me?) I just can’t seem to find any. I’m sure my own negative aura doesn’t help draw any in. But I’ve truly made an effort lately to less negative.

Maybe I need to work on patience next…

In honor of my current state & mood; a new look for the blog. Just for a little while. ADD strikes without rhyme or reason; I need a change.

My truck is in the shop for repairs this week, so I’m stuck with a rental. My husband was in charge of that endeavor, so with great glee he brought home a minivan as punishment for scratching the truck in the first place. I took my punishment with dignity; I whined for a couple days about the embarassment of having to drive a minivan, but eventually gave up the fight and endured the pain. After all, I deserved it.

Apparently, Minivan heard my complaints and took offense to it, because it suddenly began to make subtle attacks upon my health and the health of my children. While loading my child into her carseat, the door mysteriously moved, sending me hurtling forward to bump Alex’s head on the doorjamb. A day later, a similar event occured, and I bumped Alex’s head on the door and ended up with a bruise on my arm.

But the definitive moment that I knew Minivan had it out for me was Friday evening. I was picking up Alex from daycare. P-Bug was doing his best to irritate me with a high-pitched rendition of his latest original, “The Banana Song,” while Alex howled in the back seat of starvation. I realized I’d forgotten to drop off the weekly daycare payment, so I had to fight flailing baby hands and reach across my hysterical child (more bruises) to grab my purse, banging my head on the roof while trying to retreat. By now, I was pretty ticked off, so in a classic woman move, I took a big suffering sigh and went to slam the car door for emphasis.

Minivan pounced.

Unaccustomed to Minivan Dimensions, I didn’t realize that the top of the door protruded more than the bottom, and was greeted with a powerful left-Minivan-hook to the lip. I stood stunned for a moment, then realized blood was pouring from my face. P-Bug fell silent. Even Alex shut up. Both of them looked at me with that wide-eyed childhood innocence and the “I-didn’t-do-it!” plea. I carefully felt my front teeth, silently thanking God that they were still there, and looked at Minivan with great hatred, but a newly-formed respect.

All week my co-workers have been eyeing my busted lip, but said nothing until today. A particularly nosy busy-body pulled me aside in the company kitchen with a great deal of drama.

“Honey, did your husband hit you?”

“No,” I answered, swirling the cream in my coffee lazily. “We went out Saturday to some little redneck bar, and this redneck Amazon woman decided to sucker-punch me, so I took her out with a roundhouse to the left knee. I’m pretty sure it’s broken.” And with that I walked away, leaving the busybody with a stunned look on her face.

Come on! Like I’m going to admit I slammed my face in a minivan??? I’m sure it’s sitting in the parking lot with a smirk upon its grill. Touché Minivan. You win this battle. I hope the next unsuspecting renter has a child with a weak stomach.

“I’m the least-liked kid at camp,” Stepboy greets me yesterday as I pick him up.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because I don’t believe in God.”

I was thrown for a loop on this one. He’s twelve. I know that my husband & I are not religious people, but we don’t advocate atheism in our house. It’s never really been discussed, so I assume he picked up these beliefs elsewhere. But the die-hard Catholic upbringing in me was shocked. How can you not believe in God when you’re twelve? When you’re at the height of imagination, and life is easy? Who would snatch the comfort of a supreme-being away from a child and replace it with a cold, faithless world? Whether you believe or not is your choice, but is it really all that horrible if you do?

I wasn’t given a choice. I was raised Catholic because that’s the way you did it in my family. I learned the Bible and for a while, almost knew it word for word. But I didn’t understand what I was being taught until I reached my mid-twenties. Then the reality of what was coming out of my mouth was starting to not make sense. So it was then that I decided that Catholicism was not for me. But I respect the tradition and underlying message of the religion. Buried beneath the layers of man-made bullshit (my opinion), I believe there is something out there. I don’t know if his/her name is God, Allah, Budda, Jesus, or whatever… what matters is that I believe in a BEING, and that brings me comfort, and I can live happily within that realm. But to not have a belief at 12, for some reason, just makes me profoundly sad. If anything, a belief in God brings comfort in times of need. Who does this kid have to fall back on when something bad happens? How do you teach a child faith when he’s been taught to not have any?

I’m in the habit of building & re-building ads; it’s a hazard of the job. But when the instructions are wishy-washy at best, and I use creative license, I don’t feel that someone has the right to criticize. If you knew what you had in mind to begin with, you should have SAID SO, instead of expecting me to put on my mind-reading beanie. Because, you know I have one. All graphic artists do. We’re just too lazy to pull ourselves away from the Internet to go put it on….

I found this post pretty interesting, because my running buddy & I were discussing the very same thing the other day.

“http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/08/berg.interview/index.html”

Where does the circle of violence end? It takes someone like this man, a man who watched someone brutally murder his child and say “I forgive you” to break that circle.

I just couldn’t do that. If anyone, God forbid, ever hurts my daughter, I can see how easy it would be to snap. And so the circle of violence continues. Maybe it’s just human nature. Maybe we’re not capable of peace.

As I approach yet another deadline, I am aggrivated by others’ lack of urgency. As I pass desks, I see various people surfing the Internet as the stacks of paper get larger.

This just pisses me off.

Not so much because they surf; I surf, too. But I pull my weight. And at the end of the day, I consistently double the quota. And still find time to surf. What bothers me is that, in the end, I will have to work overtime because somebody else wants to be a lazy slug. I have the inside line; I know the numbers & who & who doesn’t meet the quota. So as I look into the picture frame of my baby girl, it infuriates me that because of someone else’s laziness, it will cut into my time with her & my family.

Enter the bitch. Time to exercise a little authority. But God, I hate to yell at people, even when they deserve it.

So I’m an artist by trade, right? I should be able to put together a baby book pretty easily. Alex is now almost 15 months old, and I still haven’t put a damn thing in her baby book. It’s not like I have second-kid-syndrome, she’s my first. Time is moving at such an alarming rate that I’m afraid is I don’t put something down soon, I’ll forget all the important little things, the little things that make me want to sit and watch her for hours. Soon, all those things will be gone & she’ll move on to new things, and years later when she’s thirtysomething with kids of her own, she’ll look at me and ask,

“What did you love about me, Mom?”

And I’ll reply:

“Uhhhhhhhh…….”

Jef got me thinking about how fast kids are growing up today and reminded me of last night’s disturbing incident.

Stepboy is in for the summer, freshly graduated from the fifth grade. Last night he handed me his yearbook, and I was instantly transported back to my own childhood. In fifth grade we had just moved from Mississippi to Louisiana, a mere 8-mile move, but a whole new world. We were “city-folk” now. I struggled my fifth-grade year to make friends and deal with being a small fish in a big pond. (I was voted class favorite the prior year in my tiny Mississippi school, now I was completely unknown). By “city” standards, we were poor. I didn’t even know what a “designer” label was, so needless to say, I didn’t fit in very well. Eventually I met a group of other misfits who became my friends. Our recesses were spent discussing boys, makeup, and who was the cutest guy on Saved By The Bell. You didn’t talk back to your parents or teachers, you did as you were told, and you didn’t get to eat cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets everyday. If you were given the rare opportunity to make a decision, it was usually overturned by an adult.

But as I looked at this yearbook, I didn’t see fifth grade as I remembered it. The girls looking back at me had knowing eyes, expertly applied make-up and professionally coiffed hair. Some had French manicures. In the candid shots, many struck Pussycat Dolls poses, sexiness exuding from the pages. The boys stood with arms crossed, leaning back AKA “gangsta” style. Some flashed symbols with their fingers. I actually found two photos where the boys were flipping off the camera (guess the yearbook editor missed that). As I turned page after page, I was amazed at how OLD these children appeared to be. But the true shocker was the signatures at the end of the book. Under three or four of the names, there was an anagram. I was familiar with a few of these when I was younger; I myself often signed letters to friends LYLAS. But in case there was any confusion, one of the girls has written it out: H.A.K.A.S - Have A Kick Ass Summer.

I don’t know why it shocked me so much. I guess because if I had brought that home, my parents would have called that child’s parents and let them have it for putting filthy words in my fifth-grade yearbook. Not that “ass” is such a horrible word, but it really has no place in a 12-year-old’s vocabulary, much less in their yearbook. It’s not like I don’t know Stepboy uses it; I’ve caught him throwing around grown-up words before. But how do I impart that there is a time & place for such things? And it’s not his fault; he didn’t write it. It just made me utterly sad, because it shows me the complete and total lack of respect today’s children possess. Kids aren’t kids anymore.

Our neighbor was discussing this with us the other day too, and she dropped another bombshell on us. “Ask K. to update you on the bases,” she laughed. K is her high-school daughter, who quickly rattled off the bases with a nervous giggle & a blush. I almost hit the tile. It wasn’t at ALL how I remembered it. Since when did ORAL become part of rounding the bases??? And this girl was only mildly nervous about telling us. In ninth grade, that was still the most disgusting thing I could ever imagine. I could only imagine if my mother had put me on the spot like that with one of our neighbors; I would have died of embarrassment before the first word ever escaped my lips.

“Kristie, tell Ms. H what “fingers” means!” WTF???

Suddenly I understood how my grandmother felt the first time I tried to get her to listen to Will Smith’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” Mild by comparision, I know, but it had to be pretty radical for her. I can only imagine what lies in store for me when my daughter hits her teenage years….

As my business endeavors grow, expand, and ultimately morph, I’m faced with a new problem; my website is outdated. I thought I was a genius at the time I built it; Flashy Flash and dynamic fields that are easily updated. HA! Now I look at it (or don’t) and HATE it. So I have no choice but to start over and make the information flow easier. Currently, I host 2 bulletin boards, 2 galleries, 1 blog, a shopping cart and one extremely disjointed website with such a range of products that it’s a mish-mash of mushy mess. Too many links, user-unfriendly, and in the end, nobody’s using any of the features available anyway. Time to streamline. But in doing so, I’ve delved into the evil world of CODE, that mysterious language(s) that give me a Ben Affleck migraine when I sit down to try to decipher them. You almost have to be a mathmatical genius to figure this crap out. Arrays, variables, divisions, yap yap blah blah….

Is it wrong to take the easy way out and hire another designer to do it for me?