So I always hear how my daughters organization wants volunteers, but yet everytime I ask if I can help with something I am told that they don’t need my help. Ok, fine. If you don’t need my help that’s ok with me, believe me I have many other things I have to do. However, I get really sick of hearing how “nobody wants to help” or “the same people do everything”.  Truth is they want the credit. They only want your help with things that they don’t WANT to do. And that’s ok too, but don’t whine constantly when you are offered help with something that the other person could actually do and you decline.

Everyone has things they are good at, or things they are comfortable doing. I have many ways I can help. I am good with accounting, research, sewing, computer and internet, organizing, but I am not comfortable working in close quarters in a concession stand at a very busy soccer stadium or being responsible for thousands of dollars of equipment. So I have offered my services and you have declined, so get off your high horse and understand, that you have been offered assistance with all that you do, but you have declined because you want to seem like super parent…Quit whining already! You’re getting on my nerves!

Trust is a funny thing. It is something that must be present in any relationships we have, whether they be of the romantic variety or not. And trust must go both ways for it to work.

For example there is the parent child relationship. Everyone thinks of it from the parents perspective. Can I trust that you will be where you say you are going to be? Can I trust you to go to the movies with your boyfriend? In other words parents want to know that their children are not lying to them. Most of the time when parents question that trust it is not because they think their kids can’t be trusted it’s that they worry about their kids being hurt or worse. On the flip side children also have to be able to trust their parents. Are you really going to be there to pick me up on time? Will you be there to support me no matter what? Can I talk to you about anything without being made fun of or being judged?

The same is true with friendships. In order to have strong friendships you have to be able to trust the other person wholely. If I can’t trust that you won’t blab to everyone you know what I tell you, or that you won’t judge me for what I share with you, then we will never be more than acquaintences.

Then there is romantic realtionships trust. Whether you are married, in a long term relationship, or just dating, if you don’t have mutual trust you don’t have anything. Trust in a romantic relationship is so much more than worrying about if the other person is going to cheat on you. It’s about respect, it’s about being able to be at your most vulnerable with another person and trust that they aren’t going to use that power against you. When you tear down all those walls and let another person see your bare naked soul with all it’s imperfections, when you share your most intimate thoughts and feelings with them, you have to have the ultimate trust that they will not betray and hurt you.

That’s where I’m at. I don’t trust easily. I have been let down by just about everyone in my life at one time or another. So once you break that trust it takes a long time to regain it. And even then it will never be what it once was, there will always be the slightest doubt lingering in my mind.

You know I did some things when I was a teen that 30 years later I haven’t forgotten about. I remember my mom taking my boyfriend home and I sat in the backseat with him, and he felt me up with my mom right there in the front seat. My mom was also a little too trusting in my opinion. She let my boyfriend back to my room and let me go to his house when I was 13! Needless to say with that kind of privacy we were not angels. BUT I was a totally different girl than my daughter.  I have never really had much of a sex drive so even though I had all of this freedom and very little supervision I never went all the way until I was 19!

So today I walk into my family room after being outside for 10 - 20 minutes and find my daughter and her boyfriend struggling to put themselves together. I really hope they weren’t actually “doing the deed” cause that would’ve taken some balls given that the entrance to my house literally is 3 feet from where they were. At any rate I’m pretty sure his pants were pulled down because he was really struggling to cover himself, and he was white as a ghost when I snuck a peek at him. I have never been so uncomfortable in my life! I am really disappointed in her, I really thought we had moved passed this, but I guess we haven’t. I know she is going to do things, but dammit don’t be so stupid about it! I don’t want to know about it and I certainly don’t want to see it!

Teens will be teens I guess…I love my girl but the next 3 years can’t go fast enough

I’m not as upset as I was yesterday however I just think I’d be better off if I just expected nothing special for Mother’s day - at least then I wouldn’t be disappointed. After 15 years you would think that the man would realize that he has a child, and that child has a mother, and that his child can’t drive yet and doesn’t have any money. Maybe he could take a few minutes away from trying to impress everyone else and think about his family, and offer to take his daughter out to pick out something for her mother for Mother’s Day, so she wouldn’t feel bad.

You’d think that maybe he would realize that he didn’t just drop from the sky one day, that he too also has a mother, and maybe he should pick out something for her. But I guess that is expecting too much especially when you have someone who you expect to do it for you.

So instead of taking an hour or two of his precious time to take his daughter out and let her find even a card, and to select a card and a gift for his own mother he does nothing. Leaving his daughter feeling bad, and his wife to pick out HIS card and gift for HIS mother. Just to show his appreciation, he also makes his wife cut her visit with her own mother short so they can visit with his mother. However I use the term visit loosely, his idea of visiting with his mother was to let his wife carry a conversation with her while he watched TV and then to sleep while his mother was trying to talk to him.

It’s pretty bad when a teenager is more sensitive to someones feelings than a grown man. God love her, she always knows how to make my day, and always manages to give me something need. And yesterday it was a coupon book she made and a night at the movies together.

So yeah….I think I will just skip mother’s day as long as I am married to his self centered ass.

So here it is another Mother’s Day. I take care of you 363 days a year. I am supposed to get 2 days off - my birthday and Mother’s Day. Those are supposed to be MY days. Days were I get to feel special…

You really don’t have a fucking clue do you? Are you really that self centered or are you just a clueless fucking moron?  Has it ever occurred to you that we have a daughter who can not drive, who isn’t old enough to have a job, who doesn’t have anyone but YOU to take her somewhere (other than me, her mom) to get her mom, at the very least, a freakin’ card and maybe a little something for Mother’s Day? I mean really, it breaks my heart. Not because I didn’t even warrant as much as a card from you, but that you never stopped to think how it made HER feel.  I know she would have loved it if she would have had someone offer to take her out to get something. I didn’t expect anything from her. Spending time with her was worth more to me that anything she could have gotten - but that’s not the point. She WANTED to be able to give me something from the heart, something she picked out, something she didn’t have to make, because trying to be creative really stresses her out.

Yeah I know, you took 10 minutes out of your day and did the dishes for me. Sure I appreciate that. But then again maybe it is something you should be helping with ALL the time. I’m tired of all this bullshit, I tired of feeling like your slave instead of your wife! What’s that? you say I don’t act like your wife? Hmmm…..could that be because you don’t treat me like your wife?  So today was Mother’s Day, and what did I get to do? I guess I did get to go see my own Mom for about 2 hours, until I was told that we needed to go see your Mom. Then I got to go to your parents, where you wouldn’t even get up off your ass to give your mom the card that I bought, you made our daughter do it. Then you left me to talk to her while you watched TV and went outside to smoke a cigarette. When I finally come outside you go in to “see what your mom is doing”.  I come back in a little later and you are taking a nap!!!!! NEVER will I do this again. She is your mom not mine. She is difficult to have a conversation with, and I will not take away time from my own mother, and from celebrating my own mother’s day so that you can “make an appearance” while leaving me to deal with her. NO THANK YOU.

The best part of my day was when I took our daughter to lessons. I was able to finish reading my book and then, at her suggestion, we went to the movies. I really enjoyed that. Until I got home. You were waiting up - and I just felt my body tense up because I knew you were waiting up because you can’t seem to figure out how to go to bed without being tucked in like a 2 year old!

I see women talking all the time about their husbands cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning, taking care of the kids. I observe the way husbands of happy couples treat their wives and I think I have finally figured out what is wrong here. I am not a PRIORITY to you. I NEVER come first, there is always something more important. When or if I voice this to you, you always have some excuse. Well I’m old, and I’m tired, and I just don’t care anymore. Our marriage is not some conquest, you can’t just say “I’m in it for the long haul” but do nothing to change the way things are. I want to be happy, I want to feel important, I want to feel like priority, and I want to feel like I’m in a partnership.

What can I say? I will just duck and cover and see which one of us can hold out the longest without exploding…

Kids….what can I say? They make you laugh, they make you cry, they can cause you so much worry, and make you the proudest person on the earth. There is no harder job on the face of the earth than raising a child.

I sit here thinking about my daughter today and what a great person she is turning out to be. Throughout the years it has not always been easy, there was colic, teething, sleepless nights, anxiety, depression, and many things in between. So much of who I perceived myself to be was directly linked to my daughters failures and successes, the kind of person that she was. I experienced every emotion, happy or sad, that she was going through as if it were my own.

I have been hard on her, I have had high expectations. We have had times, not so  long ago, where she barely spoke to me. Now I see her coming full circle, learning things not from me, but from living life. It’s hard to step back a little and watch her trying to negotiate life on her own, making decisions that I wonder if she will regret. She is only 15 but there are some things that it seems that she understands better than many adults I meet. She is a kind and loving soul who doesn’t hold grudges. She’s has the most genuine personality and doesn’t try to pretend she is something she is not - even if it means that she won’t have a ton of friends.

I used to worry about her - who am I kidding I will ALWAYS worry about her, but in a different kind of way. Lately when I read things she has written, or hear things that she says, tears of pride fill my eyes, I can’t help but feel pride when I think of who she is, who she will become. I admire her courage to be her own person even if it comes at a personal sacrifice.

I now have confidence that she will be okay. That while she may stumble, while she may make some bad decisions in the future, she will be able to pick up the pieces and carry on, to make something out of her life. I’ve seen her do it.

I hope she knows how proud I am of her and how much I love her.  Without her my life would be nothing.

I sit here some 19 years after agreeing to marry the man of my dreams and wonder how my knight in shining armor turned into someone I can’t stand 80% of the time. Where did the last 19 years go? Am I really 42 years old with no life at all?

We met in 1993 though a personal ad in the paper (he placed the ad and I responded, it was 1993 there was no internet then) I had just had my 23rd birthday and he was just shy of 21. We seem to hit it off pretty well and spent lots of time talking on the phone and together. Three weeks into the relationship he asked me to marry him and I accepted. Looking back this was pretty stupid on both our parts, you can’t possibly know someone well enough to marry them in 3 weeks! We were married 10 months to the day of us meeting. During those 10 months things slowly started to deteriorate. At first things were great, I was smitten with him. I made him home cooked dinners on the weekends, and left him a plate of food in the microwave before I went to work so he would have a good meal when he got home. He was a hard worker and for the most part picked up after himself.

We both had our own house and at first we would spend some time at both. Eventually it became a hassle and I moved in with him and rented my house to my cousin. So we were living together, like a married couple, within just a few months of meeting. After the newness wore off, we continued to go to work, pay the bills, and do the ordinary everyday things you need to do in life. I started to see his temper flare on occasion. I didn’t like what I saw, but I tried to calm him down, after all he was a sweet guy most of the time. We never went out, not to dinner, a movie, nothing. All he ever wanted to do was work and play around with his car. I wasn’t used to this. I was used to being around people, going out to the bars on friday and saturday, going shopping, maybe take a day on the weekend to just relax. He was a morning person, I was a night owl. I started getting tired of his temper outbursts, and never doing anything. He started getting irritated by my lack in interest for sex. We started fighting a lot but always made up. We wrote a lot of notes to each other and apologized for the things we had said or done.

It kept getting worse. More than one time I left before we ever got married. But I had already sent out the invitations and it would be humiliating not to go through with it now. So we got married.

For our honeymoon we had booked a room in Niagara Falls, Canada. I was excited, I had only been out of the state once when I was little, and this was another country! It was a disaster. All he wanted to do was stay in the room (granted it was a nice room) and have sex and I wanted to go out and see the sights have a nice dinner spend a nice day and evening together and THEN enjoy the room. We had a HUGE fight and he told me when we got back he was going to get our marriage annulled. I spent the majority of the first day crying and feeling pretty devalued. This was supposed to be my special time too. A time when I felt beautiful and loved and worthy of his company and companionship. but I got none of that. I guess it’s safe to say that the honeymoon was over before it began…  

Throughout my adult life I have quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) observed people. There is nothing more entertaining sometimes than watching a group full of parents who have been thrown together because their kids go to the same school, play for the same team, or are part of the same band.

Most times they all want what is best for “the kids” but they usually always disagree on how to get there. I have found that all parents fall in to a few select categories:

The Invisible Parent - these are the ones you don’t even know exist because you NEVER see them - not dropping their kid off, not attending a game, PTA meeting, or a performance. Sometimes you wonder if these kids are secretly staying at home alone because everyone has died in their house and they didn’t tell anyone.

The Make an Appearance Parent - These are the ones that don’t want to get “involved” , or possibly can’t because of personal circumstances, but they show up occasionally at games, performances, parent-teacher conferences, etc.

The “Involved” Parent - These are the ones who go to most of the meetings, games, etc. but are fairly quiet, don’t really voice an opinion, and are generally happy to just go with the flow and have someone dictate to them what they need to do.

Then we have my favorite category….

THE SUPER PARENT

If you have kids you know exactly who I am talking about. These are the people that are at EVERYTHING. The ONLY time you do not see them around is when they are literally not allowed to be there. They are at every school function, every event, they serve on every board.  They know everyone and brag about their kids like they are the first ones to ever have accomplished anything. Band, PTA, Softball, or whatever their kid is involved in is their LIFE. They volunteer for everything, and have to be in charge - or at least have their two cents heard about anything that goes on - even if someone else is already doing it and has it under control. If someone volunteers to take something off their hands, they say no that’s ok, or if someone brings up an idea they say oh I can check into that, or I can do that.

Throughout my daughters school career I have encountered every category of parent above. The invisible parents I just don’t understand, but I try not to judge because you never really know what someones circumstances are. The ones that drive me the craziest are the Super Parents. I find that I am currently involved in a group that is mostly composed of Super Parents. It has proved to be a very hard group to break into. I just want to scream. Every time I go to a meeting all I hear is whining and complaining how no one else does anything - how they do EVERYTHING, and it’s not fair. I hate to be the one to tell them this but I have tried to help out with things I know I can commit to, but every time I am told “oh no, that’s ok, I can do it.”  I just want to scream “QUIT COMPLAINING THEN!”.  I personally usually fall into the “involved parent” and occasionally into the “super parent” categories.  But with this group I am ready to call it quits. Every time I talk to one of them they tell me everything they are doing but they never ask for or even let anyone know they need help. I have learned that they do not want help because then they would have nothing to bitch about.

So I just don’t understand some people….if all you’re going to do is bitch about volunteering then don’t do it. Step aside and let someone else take over. Quit acting like a martyr and like no one else does anything. Regardless of what anyone wants to think - somebody will step up if you don’t do it. But most people think you have it covered so why would they volunteer?

For now I think I am going to step back a few notches and become the occasional parent…the one who goes to all the events but just doesn’t volunteer for anything. Just too much drama for me!

Which parent category do you fall in?