March « 2011 « American Family

Circular-Logical post

Not enough for any one post, so here are some tidbits:

-I would like to punch the person who previously owned our house. He apparently let his cat climb up the 80 year old trim of my downstairs bathroom for at least a decade. There are claw marks from floor to ceiling, not to mention the huge gauged-out spot where the cat apparently sharpened it’s claws. Mother Effit! I would clock that guy if he wasn’t already dead.

-If that wasn’t enough of a clue, Yes, I am back to my Annoying House Project. Good news, though! Next week someone is going to come and pump all the gook out of the Cistern! Then they will block it off and never will we have to think about it again except whenwe are stuffing dead bodies in there !

-I have the misfortune of marrying a man who has chosen a career that would be much more successful and easily accomplished if we lived in a Big City. He has the misfortune of marrying someone who is much more of a Mid-Sized City kind of gal. Oh, Country Mouse and City Mouse, how ever do they get along?

-In totally unrelated news, despite all my previous griping about wanting to live in China, at this point in time I would decline even if obscene amounts of money were being waved in my face (which, for the record, they are not). Not the least of my reasons for said rejection would be the fact that China is now scrambling VPNs and internet is unreliable there. (And it is dirty.) China has also been throwing lots of lawyers in jail lately and I happen to be married to a lawyer. Probably, no one pays you while you are in prison, right?? Where would I get my obscene amounts of money then? (And did I mention it is really really dirty in China?)

-Hong Kong, on the other hand, has good internet and is quite clean and frequently desanitized. It is unclear if they toss around obscene amounts of money there, though. And rent is a bajillion dollars. And we probably couldn’t get a Chinese speaking Ayi. The girls might like to learn Tagalog though.

-Probably the only place we will ever move will be right next door to this very annoying old cat-scratched house. Maybe I should try to get a Chinese speaking Ayi here? If only someone would move a major investment bank to town or something like that, we would be all set.

-Early today, L was walking around the house saying (quite loudly) “Mom! Where’d you get that cock? Whose cock IS that? Is that your COCK?” except it turns out she was saying CAULK because I left a tube of it lying on the kitchen table.

-Speaking of the table, we have been eating off a plastic folding table for the past 10 months. This is because my parents borrowed my dining room furniture to stage their lake house. Not the lake house they actually LIVE in, mind you. The SECOND lake house they bought on the very same lake. (Why? Liberal girls with parents who are rabid Republicans do not ask questions like that. Girls like me have parent-child relationships balancing so precariously that any talk of real estate could quickly topple into WHY THE GOVERNMENT CHARGES TOO MUCH FOR TAXES and then it could go to WHY TEACHERS ARE OVERPAID AND ARE BILKING HONEST CITIZENS WITH THEIR EXTRAVAGANT PENSIONS AT AGE 50 and god knows we don’t want to go THERE.)

The good news is it seems they are possibly going to sell the extra lake house by the end of April and I can finally eat on laminate wood table and put my other actual furniture in my actual house. And soon, I will paint over the wood fillered cat scratches and dry out the cistern so if we have to sell the house, it wouldn’t be a disaster.

Let’s all cross our fingers, shall we?

Bummed

I kind of blew my load on those last posts. Also,it is hard to come back with some random every day post after you bare a sliver of your soul on the internet. But here we are, nevertheless.

We are in a period of adjustment. Mr. A is settling into his new job. The girls have settled back into school. And I have….well, I have been moping around.

I am not exactly sure what my problem is. It is probably one part crappy weather and several parts lack of a Big Thing to look forward to, plan and obsess about. No more house to buy, no Big Trip to plan, no searching mystery to solve.

I have been trying to shoehorn the next house (the one we will build next door) into Big Thing status, but it is really several years and lots of money away from my current reality. Grasping at straws for a Big Thing never ends well.

I also think I am missing my little family. On the trip, it was just the four of us as a all-in-one unit. For better of for worse, we were intertwined in a way we aren’t here.

Here, the world is competing for our time and attention. We are ships passing in the day (at night we are not passing as the girls are asleep and Mr. A is at work), coming and going, rarely are we together in the same way. For as much as I was tired of the trip by the end, I kinda miss it now.

Yeah, so that is all that is going on here. Mopey. Let’s all cross our fingers that I will feel better when it warms up a little.

Name and Faces (pt. 3)

Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

I brought Mr. A in to look at the pictures.

“Do you think it is really them?” I asked.

“Uh, I don’t know? Maybe?” he said.

I kept looking at the pictures. Maybe I could see a little bit of L here or there. Maybe not.

As that day went by, strange things started to happen when I looked at L. It was like little features of her face would almost pop out at me. Parts of her where she resembled the man in the pictures. Parts of her that looked like the little girl. She would make a certain expression and I would see her brother or her sister echoed in her face. She would turn her head and I would see them.

It was the strangest sensation.

Here is a little girl I know intimately. I know every curve and every freckle. I know her face better than I know my own, but it was like I was seeing her for the first time. It was a powerful, powerful feeling.

And the more I looked at the pictures of L’s family, the more I could see her in there. I put pictures of L as a toddler next to her brother and I was shocked to see how similar they looked in some ways. They both had exactly the same S-shaped curve around their chubby cheeks. They had the same distinctive, full, cupid’s bow lips. Their little button noses were just the same.

Soon, I couldn’t look at L without seeing her family written all over her face.

Emotionally, I was whipped back the other direction from the feelings I had when I originally opened the pictures:

How could I have hard feelings towards this man who is so much a part of the little girl I love? How could I fault them for loving their son who is so very similar to the little girl I love myself? How could they not love the perfect daughter they kept? Of course they do.

It was a lot to process.

But at the end of the day, there was no way to deny it. This was L’s family.

L’s story was being rewritten and I was no longer the storyteller. She doesn’t have a fairytale family and an everyday family. She has two families, both real and human. Her mother and her father are not saint or villains. They are just people. Even though I always knew that, it was like my heart didn’t really believe it was true.

Names and faces. They change everything.

Circular-Logical post

Bummed

Name and Faces (pt. 3)

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