Today Is My Birthday (In My Singsong Voice)

I’m 30 WooHoo…I am excited to embark on a new time in my life. I had an amazing weekend with my cousin and my good girl friend…30 is going to be a great year for me…I can feel it in my bones 🙂

Are You Really Listening To A 5 Year Old

As I sit and think about what is currently happening in my life and what has happened in the past I realize that I go through phases not knowing … doubting myself without even knowing it.  Most recently I realized that I have not done what I thought I would have done with my life … to date.

When I was a child around 5 years old my parents would ask me…”What do you want to be when you grow up?” My silly answer was “A doctor and a lawyer.”

Unfortunately I did not take the medical school or law school route but the most unfortunate part of this is that it was what my parents really expected.

A child has concept on what they should be as an adult…the many twists and turns life takes you through. I went through all of my school years getting very good grades, and when high school came around I had a social life and got good grades…great right?  Not so much, those words stated as a 5 year old were still haunting me through high school, so what did I do my first year of college when my counselor asked me to declare a major…Pre-Med please…Ha!!  I hated it so much I didn’t go to class, didn’t want to read 300 pages a week for one class when I had 5 classes…needless to say I changed my major my Sophmore year. Too bad the damage was already done…Senior year I ended up taking and doing very well on the LSAT exam but realized I didn’t want to go to law school, not right away anyway.  So after having jobs in different functionalities I returned back to school to become a nurse…or to try to become a nurse.  So instead of being 8 years into my career I am waiting to start my career.  Somedays I wonder if I should just take the test to become a teacher down here…so many ups and downs in my head but I know what I want to do I just hate that I have to wait to do it…

Instead of wanting to please everyone around me instead of myself I should have taken time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life…then maybe…just maybe I wouldn’t be such a mess today.

Are You There God? It’s Me Toni…

Okay I am going to be randomly rambling here so bare with me…

Some days life seems so great…other days not so much.  I remember reading this book as a little girl, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret and as an adult I still go to that place.  Sometimes it is so much harder to believe in a higher power when so much chaos is going on around you.  Let’s see what is it that I need…more money, more time, more free time, more patience…MORE, I just need MORE.  I look around and I know deep down inside that I am way better off than a lot of people in the world, but its hard not to feel like I need more and I need it now.  We learn all about patience when we are young, when we want something right away and mom/dad says you have to wait…we learn to wait, so why is that in adulthood we forget how to wait.  I need to go back and figure out how to wait…I have to wait for all my blessings: financial, personal, physical, etc.

Today… I wake up at 5am (which should be totally unlawful on a Saturday) because my 2 year old decided she wanted to get up and not lay back down.  So I get out of bed, make some coffee, and sit down on the couch and try to catch up on my DVR’d shows while she watches Yo-Gabba-Gabba in my bedroom.  Everything is going fine until my soon to be 7 year old wakes up and decides she wants to argue with the 2 year old.  Why are they arguing you ask? I have no damn clue…I just know that its 8am and my voice is already raised.  Way too early for me to be saying STOP, NO, DON’T DO THAT, SIT DOWN, etc.  Why don’t they understand that I need quiet until at least 10:30am.  My brain is on Saturday mode and does not want to function at all until I have at least consumed 2 giant cups of coffee…and at 8am I was just pouring cup number 2.  So now at 10am I am allowed to sit and relax and enjoy my 2nd cup of coffee that I now had to re-heat in the microwave…the life of a single mom.

I know at the end of all of this it will only make me a stronger woman…which is great. I just need a break at some point before I have a mental break.  I am going to keep smiling though through all of this because I know plenty of people have it way worse than I do.

Everyone have a happy and safe holiday weekend… 🙂

 

Friendly Exes

One of the topics this morning on the radio (while driving in to the office) was…

“Do you remain friends with your exes?”

I do…in most cases.  I am a relationship whore…I have been in relationships constantly since HS.  I have hardly had breakups that was so terrible I felt we couldn’t be friendly.  One ex in particular has been my best guyfriend since we broke up…we don’t call and text each other all the time, because lets face the facts his ex and my ext did not care for that.  So it was more like when we need each other we know we are there.  Now that we are not attached anymore, we talk more frequently, check up with each other via text, FB, etc.  Its funny because all of his exes hated my guts, mind you none of them ever met me…yes I know ladies hard to hold a candle next to the one who stole his purity 🙂  but give me a break…that was eons ago.  His last girlfriend was the only one that did not have a problem with him being friends with me.  Other than him I am not quite sure I am friends with anyone else…not because of anything in particular, just because we lost touch. 

My most current ex…we have to be friends, we have two girls together…even though at times I wish I did not have to speak to him at all.  He would be the one that I would never speak to again.  We did not break up on bad terms…I was pretty okay with him leaving to move back home (NY)…just after he left he decided to show his true self.  If he would just be good to my girls I would not be so angry with him. We were together for so long, I know him better than he knows himself sometimes and that is so unfortunate.  I just wish he would get it together so we can be friendly…there is nothing worse than parents that can’t stand each other, and I don’t want to be that…I grew up with that and it was not fun.

What do you think, is it possible to be friends with exes?

 

 

The Close Talker

Why do some people find it necessary to get really close to you when they are talking?  I have contact with a person that doesn’t say anything from a distance.  Most people I encounter on a daily basis say hello/good morning from a distance, or in passing down the hall.  Not this person…he has the need to get very close to say anything.  It drives me CRAZY…mind you I am already crazy in my own head…why would someone want to add to that?  The other day I was saying hello and he stopped…mid-stride…to walk very close to me almost touching my being to say hello…Needless to say I am a female, so you know what he was almost touching…

Have you never heard of personal space?

Does anyone else have a close talker?

Parenthood…

Not the Steve Martin classic (which BTW is one of my all time favorite movies) or the Robert Townsend TV show (where I got one of my girls names from)…the Real life…real deal. We watch all these superparents on TV and in movies and wonder how the hell do they do that…how do they deal with that.  And then snap…movie is over and back to reality.  When raising children, especially on your own, sometimes you just have those “rip out your hair” moments.  I had two of these moments in a 3 day time frame.

Let’s start with Saturday…

Since it was to hot to function outside we (the girls and myself) got up pretty early and headed out, ran a few errands and came home.  After lunch I started to clean the house so Sunday could be relaxing, no cleaning to do…so while the girls are eating their lunch, I start cleaning the kitchen and putting things away.  The girls are done inhaling their lunch…(both girls names start with Z…for purposes of my blog the oldest will be Z and the younger will be z) and go into the playroom to watch some tv. Fine with me since I get way more done while they are busy.  So an hour into my cleaning, with the music blasting in the living room, I am done with the kitchen and both bathrooms.  I go to the playroom and tell Z to start cleaning up their playroom and z to help…”okay mommy” is the response I get from both of them.  After a while I go check on them to see what progress they have made and nothing…they are sitting in front of the TV…I tell Z to turn the TV off because she needs to clean, not watch tv…when you are done you can turn the TV back on.  Z starts jumping up and down, having a terrible two’s tantrum(TTT)…mind you she is about to be 7 in 2 weeks. So I told her to go into her bedroom (where there is strategically no TV) and sit there until she was ready to clean up…the screaming continued…she sounded like she just got hurt. Luckily my neighbors are not nosy because if they were I am pretty sure the cops would have been at my damn door.  So needless to say she stayed in that room, screaming for hours, until dinner and then she went to bed…all because she did not want to clean up her playroom.

On to Monday…

I tell Z to get her work done…not really homework, she goes to an enrichment program and has work to do for that, nothing excessive just 3 worksheets a day.  Again with the TTT…ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS RIGHT NOW.  After she sat in her room again screaming for about an hour she comes out and says … “Can I just do my work now?”  What the hell was the screaming for? 

I SWEAR kids need to come with instruction manuals…the hospitals want to give you baby bags, coupons and stuff… what they really need is a damn How To Manual….how to not throw your own TTT, how to not get the belt out, how to not drink a whole bottle or two of wine in one hour, how to not sit and cry because you think you have done something wrong, how to not let these damn kids get so far under your skin you have a meltdown…how to breathe…how to not call their father and curse him out for getting on with his life and not helping…

The list can go on and on and on and on…you get the gist.

What are some of the things you do to not rip your hair out?