Frustration

When I was at my parents’ a few weeks back, I told them about their birthday options re: PP. I said, you can come to the party if you’d like, but that will be full of kids. Or you can come to the dinner the Ex and I will be taking PP to on her actual birthday. My Dad was excited about both but leaning towards the dinner. Said my Mom, I don’t know, I might have clients those days.

I considered asking her what I should tell PP: that her grandmother is more interested in making a few extra bucks, or that her grandmother would rather hang out with strangers than celebrate her granddaughter’s birthday? I refrained.

One of these days that woman is going to be old and sick and alone and convinced she’s being unjustly persecuted when no one is interested in taking care of her.

Tomorrow, the SA and I and PP are going to the parade, and my Dad and my SIL and nephew are planning to be there as well. I asked my Dad if Mom was planning on coming; he said, I don’t know, I asked her and she shrugged.

This, by the way, is something she does often and I’ve seen it myself. If she were three you’d sternly tell her to use her words. She’s almost 60.

This does not sound like someone who is ‘over it,’ I think because the good grandparent facade is now cracking a bit and I’m in the position of watching her hurt my daughter. I want to force her not to, and I can’t. All I can do, if she persists in this, is limit her opportunities to do so.

She would say it’s about money, if I asked her. Despite having retired herself in circumstances almost identical to my Dad’s and five years younger and not having any plans to pursue standard employment again, she’s got it in her head that the fact that their retirement funds aren’t meeting their budget is because he’s not working full-time. So she’d say it’s his fault, she’s bringing in money to fix his problem. I’m not supposed to know this but, thanks to Dad, I’ve heard all about it second-hand; and I feel like taking her into the large bedroom they had converted into a closet, all the basement closets she’s taken over, the brand-new walk-in closet in their bedroom, all full of her expensive clothing, and saying, THIS, mother, is what happened to your retirement funds.

this is not very letting-go of me. I am trying to tell myself that I can no more prevent her from being a shitty grandmother, if that’s what she’s going to do now, than I could prevent her from being a shitty mother. But goddamn her. PP will not understand.

Updates

sorry it’s taken me so long to write anything. Busy busy busy, no time to sleep, let alone post to multiple blogs. But there is lots to say right now, so here I am.

1. Realized the other day that what I’d written about the Engineer sometime last year (that everything I wrote, I wrote for him) is no longer true. I write for myself and for other people now and hardly ever think of him at all. This is progress.

2. Visited my parents in October and it was, I don’t know, easy. I had (here comes the flakiness) a trance a short while ago where I saw them, or their ghosts (it wasn’t really clear), in the living room of the house we lived in when I was a teenager. Neither were speaking, not to me and not to each other, and the tension and unhappiness in the room was palpable (as it often was when I lived there). I stared at them and realized that I couldn’t keep living there. That being unhappy and following in their footsteps was not going to redeem them or their choices, and it wasn’t my job to rescue them from the unhappinesses they’d made for themselves. It’s hard to describe. I left the house and it fell down behind me. Since then, it’s been a lot easier to deal with both of them and not to let their behaviour bother me. Not always easy, but much easier; I can remind myself that I can’t let myself make their choices or repeat their mistakes, that I can’t rescue them. It helps.

On the other hand, my Dad found my other blog last week, and that’s making things all kinds of interesting. More hypothetically than actually at this point. I’ll see him w/ PP and possibly the SA as well as my sister-in-law and nephew next weekend, so we’ll see. It’s impossible to tell what he’s actually feeling and thinking from the email he sent me. No surprise there.

3. The SA has been trying really, really hard to make a plan and carry it through. So in the last few weeks he’s investigated student loans and school programs in the field he’s been trying to freelance in (for the last decade-plus) without a full degree or diploma (he was a fine arts major. Apparently it really makes you as unemployable as they say). He’s now secured a student loan and has talked to the school he likes and has plans to enrol for January. I’m very proud of him. It’s a big step and a lot of work. And I think it’s a good plan. He’ll have a student loan, but the diploma should at least double his current annual … I can’t call it a salary … pay? So he’ll be much better of financially, and it will help his freelance and artistic aspirations too, and he says he’ll enjoy it. So this is all good. I keep asking him if he promises he’s not doing it to stay in the relationship, because it has to be something he thinks is a good idea for him, not just because of what I need, and he keeps telling me that he knows he should have done this a long time ago and he thinks he will really enjoy it. So.

Before I completely relax I think I will wait to see how he does in school, and maybe how he does finding himself a job next summer. Meanwhile he’s been temping so he has money coming in which is less stressful for both of us. And bigger news….

He’s planning on filing for bankruptcy.

Backstory:

He and a friend went into business together in their twenties, and amassed quite a bit of debt, and the business foundered and died. His friend also had a terrible credit rating (with good reason) and declared bankruptcy several years ago, leaving the SA to pay off the entire debt. On no steady income. Currently, over half of his very minimal pay goes to servicing this debt.

Bankruptcy was made for these situations, as far as I’m concerned, and I think it’s a good idea. I mean, he doesn’t even have anything for his creditors to seize. Financially the only repurcussion for him would be losing all the debt and starting fresh, which is the only way I can see him moving forward with anything at all–trying to pay this thing off by himself over the past however-many years has had a real distorting effect on many areas of his life–so I think it’s a good idea. I’m a bit nervous in that I don’t know how it would affect things like applying for apartments and it would obviously put a mortgage off into the distant future, but he has to get rid of this thing. His trustee seems to think he should be able to continue getting student loans even after the bankruptcy goes through.

He’s got a trustee hired and the whole thing is in place; just needs to get a new bank account set up for his new financial life.

Apparently telling him that I needed to see that he was capable of making a plan and carrying it out worked. Who knew? And as of January we will probably both be students. His sister actually wrote me a thank-you note for lighting a fire under his butt and getting him motivated to do some life-planning.

Protected:

Protected: money money money

Apparently calories are toxic to plans

My boyfriend had a plan.

He wrote it out on paper and everything so he could show it to me. It had a few holes, needed a bit of research, but mostly it looked like a good plan. I was very happy. If I’d had time over the last few days, I probably would have posted about it.

Then he went out for lunch with his friends.

Do you see where this is going?

Now there’s no plan. There were contrary opinions, and the whole thing is going to be thrown out and redone.

Ten minutes to write an update: Go!

The SA and I had a talk about his plans. It’s hard to know what kinds of plans you can make when you’re unemployed (step 1: hunt for job until found; 2: work), so that was kind of hard to evaluate. I know he’s been looking hard; and he has a temp assignment right now, an interview today and another one next week, so things are looking positive right now (which is saying something given the economy) and I have my fingers crossed.

But it’s not that he’s unemployed right now that was the problem, or the perceived problem, it was that he waited until the money ran out to begin looking. Right now it’s not my problem b/c our finances are separate, but if they one day weren’t it would be my problem, and I don’t want to be in the spot of supporting him or telling him what to do. On the other hand, I don’t want to be my mother, who didn’t speak to my dad for months b/c she was so angry when he lost his job when I was a teenager. I want to be supportive. I also want to know that he’s not going to walk into this kind of a situation again, especially if we ever move in together.

So I wanted to know that a) he is making plans that don’t depend on other people telling him what to do, and b) he knows that this would not be acceptable if we were living together. To b) (which I pretty well said point-blank) he said he knows and he’s been angry at himself not only for getting into this situation but also because he knows it makes him look unreliable and he’s very worried about that. So I told him that in general if he wants to keep me from freaking out, he needs to tell me what his plans are in as much detail as possible so that I know he has plans.

We also talked about him going back to school, since it seems that a lot of the regular jobs he is most interested in he doesn’t have the required credentials for. Which he’s considering though, again, I was the one who brought it up and had to tell him how student loans work, which makes me nervous.

The hard thing for me is that it’s so hard to separate how much of my need to know that he can take care of himself is based on knowing that I don’t have the resources or desire to take care of him vs. just thinking that everyone should be completely self-reliant always as a result of my upbringing. How much independence is healthy? How much dependence do I want? How much taking-care-of-each-other is good or comfortable and how much isn’t? I don’t know. I do know that I still can’t picture anyone helping me in any way whatsoever, so there’s still a lot of unhealthy independence going on in terms of how I think of myself and other people (I mean I can’t even picture my parents showing up to look after PP for an afternoon, let alone a friend. I try to even just imagine asking someone for any kind of help and it runs into this wall: I should clean up my house and I should take care of my daughter and I should buy my groceries and make my meals and I should do all my own homework and study for tests myself (studying in groups is practically cheating, you know)–which doesn’t leave anyone any room for helping me, and to a certain extent that’s how I tend to assume other people should live their lives, too). So I don’t know what is really reasonable or healthy of me to expect in terms of independence/interdependence in general, let alone applied to a particular relationship. I am, after all, trying not to get into yet another relationship where no one ever asks for help or talks about what they want or need.

Do you know that in the 1o years I was with the Ex he never volunteered to do anything to help with my insomnia and I never asked, and at no point did it even occure to me that this was strange, let alone undesirable? It was my problem and I should take care of it myself. But if the SA knows I’m having a hard time sleeping he’ll try to help me get back to sleep–which is sweet, but my immediate response is that this is MY problem and I should fix it myself.

A lot of what I found/find offputting about his current plans is how much of them comes from other people, how much help and input he takes. Because I would never do this. I would diagnose a problem myself and brainstorm for solutions myself and research steps toward it myself and not ask for advice or input and organize a plan towards it myself and then just announce it to other people when I’m done. So it scares me that he is comfortable accepting help when he needs it.

And then that fear scares me, too. Because I know it’s not good.

Ambivalence

I know this seems like an odd and possibly awful post to be writing one week after an anniversary, but: I have lately been feeling terribly ambivalent about the SA.

It feels awful just to write it down.

See, I’m not supposed to be on this planet to make myself happy, but to make other people happy; so anything I think about that might make someone else unhappy tends to get driven underground pretty quick and stay there for a while. And I know he’s crazy about me.

The Good is: he’s clever, sweet, generous, and we are on the same page socially and politically. He’s very talented. I love talking to him (in person) about almost anything. When he’s here he tries to be helpful and pitch in. As a person, he’s great.

But as a partner, I am less sure.

For one thing, he is terrible about money. I mean his financial planning skills are practically non-existent. He has one collection of value that he is currently working to sell off and he figures it could pay the bills for the next seven months. So he figures this is what he will do, while looking for work and trying to freelance, possibly until the money runs out. I pointed out that, since this is his cushion and once it’s gone there’s nothing else, he might want to designate some of it an emergency fund and try to keep it for future lean times–especially if he wants to freelance–and he hadn’t even considered this. Which I find honestly kind of terrifying. He has no savings. When he’s saved money, he finds a way to spend it.

Which, if I didn’t have Polly Pocket, might be a risk worth taking, but I can’t help thinking that anyone I combine finances with has to be solid enough to maintain a stable living environment for my daughter (barring unforseen accidents yada yada–but embarking on a freelance career without keeping a few months’ living expenses in savings is not an unforeseen accident!).

And it might be a risk worth taking if my own financial situation were exceptionally stable; but while I can go back to my job whenever I want basically and it pays enough to keep me and PP comfortable, a) it is not enough for 3, and b) if I had to give up on my ambitions so that the SA could keep doing what he loves, I’d hate him for it.

It’s the single mom thing. I feel like if any relationship is to progress to the next step (i.e. living together) then I have to be as certain as possible beforehand that it will last–that the big conflicts (money, housework) have been resolved or at least that there is a way to resolve them–or I am exposing PP to another “divorce” a year or so down the line.

I just don’t see how money can be resolved.

This is a bad time to come to this decision b/c he’s unemployed and has no new work coming in right now, though he’s trying hard. But it’s kind of a scattershot, unplanned trying hard. Career planning seems to consist of getting good ideas from his friends when they go out for lunch. I’m not sure if he has ever tried actual research on how to go about finding reliable sources of work–looking at books or magazines or websites or taking courses, for instance. He complains vigorously that no one in university ever taught him how freelancers find work but so far as I can tell he’s done nothing in the intervening fifteen years to fill that gap in himself. And I’m not a freelance artist, but as someone who’s had written work published I assume there must be publications, books, courses, the way there are for writers, that will tell you how to do this–it can’t be possible that every freelance artist or illustrator is just out there flailing in the wind waiting for work or inspiration to come their way. Can it?

So the money thing is the big one.

It feels shallow to say it. It’s not that he’s broke–it’s that his finances are so unplanned and so inconsistent and he can’t seem to look more than two weeks ahead and I don’t want to be the breadwinner (since that would mean putting my own dreams on hold again indefinitely) nor do I want to take on the role of family banker or manager. I want him to know what needs to be done next and do it by himself.

Also the clinginess can be a little grating at times. As in, we will be having a discussion about something and he’ll be really excited and into it and I’ll get up to go the bathroom and he will follow me and I will have to shut the door in his face to pee. Give me five minutes! I’m coming back! I already have one person who follows me into the bathroom (though she’s a preschooler), I don’t need another one. And we have to talk on the phone every day–if I don’t call him when I’m done my writing he will call me later which sometimes means I’m in bed, I have to arrange in advance the days we won’t be talking on the phone–even when we have nothing to say, so that most of our phonecalls end up being him telling me that nothing exciting happened and he feels bad about it followed by a few minutes of dead air then when I try to tell him I’m going he spends five minutes talking about how neither of us has anything to say.

Not that this sounds anything like ambivalence (more like unvarnished negativity) but when he shows up Friday evening I know we will have a wonderful weekend. And I’ll appreciate all of the good things that he brings to the relationship. And then he’ll leave and PP will come back and I will spend the next several days thinking that I can’t possibly build a life with someone who has no financial or career planning skills and that if he moved in I might never get any time to myself again.

Some of this has been building for the last few weeks (as his savings ran out and he sort of cast shots in the dark to find work) but I didn’t even want to think about it with his birthday and the anniversary coming up. Now that they’re over it’s a bit more consuming. And since I have–let’s face it–no reliable relationship instincts, I don’t know how I should balance out the wonderful times we have when we’re together with all the fears I have when we’re not.

A fun, happy post! For which I am shamelessly soliciting feedback.

What do you get the Starving Artist (for a birthday/anniversary combo) who has hardly anything but nowhere to put it anyway?

Requirements: Small. Fun. Not outlandishly expensive. Not requiring extra cash to operate or update.

Other Hints: He’s writing a graphic novel and knows a lot about the genre–way too much for me to be able to choose a gift intelligently, though if I could I think it would be ideal. He’s read all of the ones I’ve heard of. He loves books but I don’t know what he’s itching to get. I thought about film tickets but none of the movies he wants to see will be out next weekend. I know what kind of music he likes but I don’t know his library well enough to pick out something he doesn’t already have. I can think of a few dvds he might like, which is a possibility; I was also thinking about an iPod shuffle since he has an mp3 player but he doesn’t like it very much and I know he likes my iPod but then I’m worried he’ll feel he can’t get a bigger one of his own if he’d rather have a more sizeable one. Don’t even ask me to try to pick out art supplies. I don’t know anything like enough about it.

He’s not a gadget guy. He’s not really into video games.

Also, I’m a gift person. I hate giving people gift certificates.

Am I forgetting anything? Any brilliant ideas?

We keep making plans to rent Persepolis but never get around to it–so a copy of Persepolis might be good….

breathing

So the doctor’s appointment last week led to a phonecall this morning which led to the promise of a follow-up phonecall in six to eight weeks, followed by an actual appointment with someone who knows what they’re talking about. I think this is fine, personally. Even preferable to something soon, since this way she’ll have some time to adapt to the latest slate of changes before we lob a psychologist at her head.

And this gave me the pretext to talk to the Ex, during which phonecall I made very sure to use a lot of “we” phrases and asked “have you noticed…” a lot and mentioned all the changes PP has had to contend with last summer and then again this summer, and I hate getting my hopes up only to have them dashed, but I think we actually made some progress.

By, you know, pretending that I haven’t been doing this all along. But whatever. I don’t care. He’s indicated that he plans not to have PP around the new girlfriend and her son for at least the next three weekends. So. Phew.

We’ll see if it actually happens. I do possess some learning capacity, after all.

The Ex even shared a few anecdotes that showed that perhaps it isn’t just sharing Daddy she doesn’t like, but that she doesn’t necessarily get along with the new girlfriend’s son very well, which–and I hate to say this, but–makes for a very convenient blame-free hook to reduce contact for a while. (For instance, while driving both kids somewhere, the son–what should I call him? Should I call him Jo? I’ll call him Jo–insisted that he could get PP out of her carseat but she insisted that she wanted her Daddy to do it which led to Jo insisting that he could do it and PP said she wanted her Daddy to do it. I don’t know what that tells the Ex but it tells me that PP is not comfortable around him. But when I told the Ex that PP told me that Jo doesn’t like her, and he was flabbergasted because Jo likes her very much, I suggested that maybe this is PP’s way of saying that she doesn’t particularly like Jo yet, and he agreed!)

I will not tell you the depths of self-control it took not to tell him that I’ve already been limiting PP’s contact with the SA or that I have been dating the SA for several months and they still see each other less than once per month–especially when I found out that the Ex and his new girlfriend have been seeing each other for 2 1/2 months total, so one month before the big introduction and all of the time they’ve been spending together this summer. Which makes me want to pound my head into a wall.

But I will gladly eat a bit of unearned crow if it means Polly Pocket gets a few happier weekends this fall.

now this is getting repetitive, but I can’t get over being shocked

This weekend: Cottage trip. The Ex. His girlfriend. Her kid. PP.

Want. To. Kill. Him.

They met 1 1/2 months ago and now they’re having overnights with the kids there?

I think you’re going to be hearing a lot about this over the next little while. Sorry. I just can’t get over being shocked that anyone could be so clueless.

You should have seen the way her little face fell when she found out who she would be spending the weekend with, after she was looking forward to seeing her Daddy for days. You should have seen how she plastered a little smile on for him, and it was so fake, and he couldn’t even tell.