On most weekends the boys come home and now they bring their girls with them. I am bitching about my kids coming home. How horrid am I??? I LOVE having them here, but with BigD not working and his retirement checks are much smaller than his paychecks were, the cost of feeding seven people is huge. Not to mention the continuously empty hot water tank from endless showers, dish-washing, laundry (they do their own but with my machine), the uptick in electric use, needing the heat in the house turned up because someone is whining they are cold (while someone else is opening a window because they are hot)......and the list goes on and on. BigD won't eat anything that is considered take-out, even veggie pizza with minimal cheese so ordering in usually isn't an option so that means trying to make enough food that there is at least one thing that every person will eat. Difficult, time consuming and expensive. When I suggest that they all go out to eat nobody wants to go citing cost (really? hmmmmm) and they eat out during the week and want to eat mom's cooking. Veiled compliments. My cooking is not outstanding, it's more likely they are cheap.
So as I mentioned BigD has been home now for 149 days. He is looking for work but with his credentials there aren't too many places to go except for some gov't agency or security at a corporate level and guess what......hey aren't jumping on hiring a 57 year old. Imagine that. So, as of midnight last night we have NO health insurance. It's insane. We still have a 22 year old and 17 year old that are likely to need medical attention (the 17 year old has to go to the doc tomorrow because I looked at his sore throat today and it sure looks like strep to me). This same 17 year old plays sports and we have never gotten through a season of anything without an injury that needs at least one x-ray or round of physical therapy. Not to mention the fact that BigD had heart surgery 130 days ago. (He recovered faster than most cases of flu. No shit.) Technically he is very healthy and is doing great but it's still scary and nauseating to think that something like that could happen now with no coverage and it would be a financial nightmare to pay for.
The worst thing of all is him being home. every. single. day. We had a MAJOR blowout a couple of weeks ago. I came completely unglued after three ten hour days at work (I literally am on my feet the entire time except for lunch) and came home to him sitting on his ass (daily routine to that point) playing word games on his phone. The dishwasher was full of clean dishes, laundry was stacked up the entire height of the washer, dog hair everywhere that needed to be vacuumed...etc etc etc. I gently asked him if he felt depressed...giving him the benefit of the doubt since he is not working, had surgery etc it would be understandable. Unfortunately for him he said with a smile "No, not at all. I feel great". That was the final stab. I lost it.
I asked if he had any idea how hard it is for me to work long hours and come home and have to do 100% of everything on the home front while he sits on his fucking phone all day. He got defensive, I got louder. He had the nerve to tell me that HE has worked all these years. I had to remind him that I worked AND raised three boys, AND kept us all afloat on our incomes, AND taken care of everything on the homefront all at the same time. He said that my *job* was easy and he would have traded with me. That's when I said a huge FUCK YOU and the gloves came off. S3 heard lots of things he shouldn't have heard. Am I proud of it? No. Am I sorry? No. All of my points were entirely valid and I am not one to say something I don't mean in the heat of the moment. I mean every word. He is a very mean, belittling arguer bringing up digs and insults that have nothing to do with the situation. BigD later told S3 that he and I both said things we didn't mean. I later told S3 that I meant every word. He smiled. He sees what his dad is and isn't doing and is learning great lessons from it. All of the boys have witnessed the inequity in the responsibilities and are well aware they need to be better husbands. If I haven't done anything else in life that I am proud of, raising my boys to be good husbands is one thing I can put a check mark by.
So for the past two weeks since the fight I have come home to the dishwasher being unloaded and reloaded (the wrong way but I rearrange because that's not a battle I want to have--but seriously, why doesn't he realize they go back in he same places they came out of??), the bed has actually been stripped twice (no clean sheets on the bed because he didn't know where they were-----same closet for the last 20 years ) and there is other evidence that for at least an hour out of the ten I am gone he has done something other than play games. It's a start.
I just really really really want the house to myself for an entire day. I am a simple woman. Let me watch a movie or a show on my very full DVR without comments like "this is a stupid show" or "that would never happen" or "why do you watch this show?". Yeah. They must be worse than the one with turtle catching man, that he watches marathons of....sigh. We have more TV's in this house than we should, yet everyone congregates in my home office to watch. I told BigD last night that I was going to watch a show I had recorded and got all of the above comments before the first commercial. It really wrecks the flow of my focus on whatever I am watching when I hear snickers, mumbled comments, and I can actually feel eye rolls. Yes. Yes I can.
I made myself a deal. When BigD lands his next gig, and I have a for certain date that will be his first day gone, I am taking the day off to celebrate. Alone.
