Marriage

Every day, everywhere you look. Separation. Divorce. Separation. Divorce. In life, friends, on TV, in magazines. Articles on 'How to cope'. On 'How to be civil with the children'. 'How to properly address divorce and moving out with your children'. No, I am not a divorcee. So some might say I may not understand. But you're wrong. I do understand. I've spoken to so many divorcee's and asked 'the' question. What made you finally decide to end your marriage. I won't say what response I got because every one was different. Just like every situation was different.

My husband and I are happily married. However, we can argue with the best of them. My husband and I have had wars. We have moments that make both of us want to pull our hair out and I'm sure each others. There are even days (though I realize you're just not supposed to say this), that I wonder what it would be like to be someone else for a day. Or to have a different life. Days that make you wanna 'shake the shit out of a bitch' as Chris Rock so eloquently put it. But as much as I dearly Love my husband, and our life, that doesn't mean I haven't thought about the fact that I could use a bit more freedom. Not for the purposes of meeting another guy, but to be my own person, come and go as I please and do whatever I want at any given time. We don't always get along. We don't like the same TV shows. He's technical and brilliant and I sometimes get caught off guard by a blond joke. We are also completely 100% opposite on how we handle finances. It's called, he handles them and I have no clue how. I'm not unintelligent. I just don't know how 'not' to spend money. Then again, who wants to be with someone who is exactly like themselves? Aren't the differences why we like the other person? Aren't the mysteries of today worth to know what will happen tomorrow? Isn't that why we married the person? (Most of the time?) What's so wrong with having a heated discussion anyway? 

As far as I'm concerned I come upon far too many people that don't talk to each other face to face. They complain until they are blue in the face about their spouse. What's bothering them, what they've done or said to hurt their feelings. Yet never sit them down to tell the person they are bitching about what they feel.  Subsequently before you've realized it, 10 years or more of all that 'lacking' has done some pretty irreparable damage and there is no other solution and no other way to discuss it other than to say good-bye. What's worse, chances are at this point, there are kids involved. All because you weren't honest with what you wanted in your lives. Or because you didn't have the energy or make the time to talk. Divorce has just become altogether too popular.

Infidelity, miscommunication, getting married for the wrong reasons, physical, emotional, and mental abuse. Drug abuse, deadbeat parents, the list goes on. I get it. Very very legitimate reasons. But still, the fact is overwhelming that the quantity of divorces far outweigh the quality of marriages and the success of them as well. It's become such a normal part of society that it begs the question. What does marriage mean today? In this day and age what does it mean that if you get tired of the old you can just say eh, fuck it and go out and start over?!

I've heard people say 'you shouldn't stay with someone if you're unhappy'. I get that. Who doesn't want to be happy? And anyone who is or was married understand that it's certainly not all peaches and cream most of the time. But isn't that a bit of a cop out? Well ya see I just wasn't getting enough blowjobs and we just didn't seem to get along so I figured eh, let me just go ahead and get the hell out of here. As they say, 'The grass is always greener'. But is it really?

As 'glutton for punishment' as this may sound I happen to love the chaos. And I do realize this is me personally and not everyone else, but I love the craziness, the unpredictability, and even the negative things about marriage sometimes. Because I know that when things are better and they do always get better (if you want it enough), they are phenomenal. You feel euphoric, whole, 'at home'. Despite the differences, the lack of freedom, or even the lack of money. When two people want to be together above all else, they will do what it takes. And that does mean EVERYTHING. That feeling when you know you have someone there regardless of circumstance, that has your back, and will be right there at home waiting for you. well, lets just say nothing compares. So in my opinion the real problem isn't necessarily that you got tired of the old. Or even that the other person works too much or even that they cheated! I think at the end of the day the same problem exists with keeping a marriage alive and well, just as with the majority of the problem in this country. 

Accountability. It's easier to get away from what you did wrong. In the marriage, in your life. Even if it has nothing to do with the marriage itself. What faults you have that may be very visible to someone that knows you sometimes better than you know yourself. The responsibility and the work it takes to be a wife/husband. The loss of freedom. The loss of oneself sometimes. The loss, the loss, the loss. It's easier to get away from who YOU are when you keep starting over. Instead of being accountable for who you are and loving yourself and loving someone else. Or being accountable for your actions regardless of how trivial. How you act. What you say. The dissection of your entire being. It's not for everyone. Many people don't even know themselves before they get married let alone know the other person entirely. Or even just a smidgen. 

Now I realize that this is not always the case. There are many stories on both sides to attest to this I'm sure. And I am absolutely NOT saying that people who get separated or divorced are bad. At all. Some of my best friends are divorced and I support them 100%. I love them dearly. And I wish them 'nothing' but happiness.

So in light of that, lets raise our glass and give a toast to all relationships, marriages and the like and hope they have found what they are looking for. If not, I wish you luck in doing so.  -V

'Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, but simply purgatory' -Abraham Lincoln

Fakeality TV

We've all watched them. We have all sat there and thought to ourselves, 'What in Gods name is wrong with these people?' and 'Why am I watching this'? Yet somehow, we can't seem to pull away. 

People generally start out on these shows familial, and genuinely interesting. But as fame always has it the 'plastic' so to speak takes over. The producers get hold of their personalities and fill their pockets and they end up money hungry self centered conflict ridden messes. We've seen them come and go. That's right people, Fakeality TV. OH I'm sorry, Reality TV. Granted, I am myself guilty of the pleasure of watching an others demise on screen. Everything from the very first Real World on MTV to now Keeping up with the Kardashians, Little People this Little People that, John & Kate plus 8 to now Kate plus 8. The Duggars. Bret Michaels Rock of Love, I could go on. Just to give you a perspective here is a link to the ridiculously insane list of all the reality shows that have ever been in existence. This list is pretty eye opening. (Copy and Paste if necessary.)


http://www.realitytvworld.com/realitytvworld/allshows.shtml

So it made me think. What is it about these shows that compels us to follow them? Scandal, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, and even shows ending in murder. Yes, Murder!! Then of course you have the innocent shows with the 'family'connotation but are they really just wolves in sheep's clothing?

Even the most wholesome of these shows holds some bit of drama and intrigue. If anything, those shows almost force me to question why they are doing this. However we know why. Money. But why are you watching it? Is it to escape from your own life or drama? Or mine? Is it to sneer at the whining of a spoiled brat bride? I do have a theory about this.

In Howard Sterns movie Private parts(which is about his life) NBC couldn't understand why he was getting such high ratings. But the rating information told them that people whether they like you or not will tune in to listen. Because they just want to hear what you are going to say next. Now if you know anything about Howard Stern he's out there. Anything racy or even slightly in the direction of gross or distorted good or bad, it's usually on his show. Well, I believe it's the same with Reality TV. The more you dislike, the more you may want to know. The louder, more obnoxious, more dangerous and ridiculous things seem with these characters, the better for us. Why? Because it's safe. We thrive on it. It's something to look forward to when you in your life have had a crappy day. Or week. Or month. Or if you just feel like it's all you've got. It's a way to get inside of a life of people who are mostly rich if not billionaires and living vicariously through them. Most of us will never own million dollar houses or Ferrari's. Or have a personal 'everything' assistant for every need known to man. But it sure would be nice to pretend it. And to revel or baulk or whatever it is that sucks you in. It's certainly nice to know you'll never be stuck on a deserted island with a slough of strangers to persecute and possible wilderness to conquer but what if? And these shows also do something extremely important. They give you a view of what people, big, small, rich, poor, middle class, educated, or otherwise, can be like. They are cunning and manipulative in convincing us that they are real, honest to goodness human beings. When it's so quite obvious that they aren't.

So what about you? Why do you watch reality TV?

When do we teach our kids about death?

Death is an inevitable part of life. Yet for a parent it's that gray area that you don't ever want to touch upon with a child. Ever. We all want to keep our beautiful innocent children young forever don't we?
 aahhhh if only(sighing)...OK, maybe not. Hey I don't want to change diapers forever!

But why not discuss this subject well before they have the opportunity to learn from an uninformed scary source? Or from other kids who maybe had a hard hitting very real approach by losing a family member from cancer. Or their favorite pet be it a goldfish or a dog. My husband and I had that reality just recently. Our dog who is my daughters playmate and 'best fwend dog' as she calls him got sick. He ended up having a walnut sized cancerous tumor growing on his stomach lumen(don't ask me what that is) and it turned his intestines inside of itself. He lost 19 lbs. in 9 days and we had to make the decision before we knew what the mass was whether to go ahead with the surgery or put him to sleep. Needless to say, I wept. But it hit us like a brick that if the worst case scenario was going to happen, 'how are we going to explain this to her'. I also reminded him that she would continue to ask every single day for quite a while before she gave up and moved onto something else. But Luckily for him(and his name is Lucky) he is OK now. After raking us across the coals financially, we averted the crisis situation and still have a few years to spend with our spastic, crazy lab.

Now on to a more trivial yet influential example. I'm not allowing critters in my home. I used to try to remove them humanely because of my love of insects. I am referring mostly to spiders and carpenter ants. But I have since become a mom and my protective animal instinct is very present. So now as soon as I see an insect that is not a beetle I kill it. I just have it in my mind that beetles could care less about anything other than fruit and vegetation so I assume they won't bite. Will they? Well, in any case, my daughter follows me around everywhere. So she sees that. Well, she sees everything I do. And one day my son will as well. So there is reasoning behind it. I have no idea if the spiders are poisonous or if she ever got a bite from a carpenter ant would cause a very unwanted allergic reaction. And I am already full aware though the thought freaks me out, that these things are crawling on them at night. Come on, we all know that spiders crawl everywhere at night. How else did you get that nice red bump on your leg? Then there's my husband. Killing bees, flies, and anything else that creeps him out. (Or scares him regardless if he admits that or not) He even started talking about eradicating the adorable little chipmunks on our property lately! I had to be their advocate though because they don't really do anything to us. However think about it, they are rodents. And they are dirty and can still spread parasites and diseases with their urine and feces.

Then there's today's TV, movies, influence of other kids, and even something as simple as clothing, at any given moment it can come up. Look at the movie Toy Story.(my daughters new favorite movie!) Woody the cowboy pushes Buzz Light year out the window because he's jealous that he's taking all of Andy's playtime. At which time all the toys begin to yell at him and call him a murderer as they believe Buzz died in the fall. Obviously they realize later that he isn't dead, but that's just one example.

Granted, my child may only be just under 3 but she is extremely intelligent. So much so that she has already used the words kill, die and dead. And not in the right form. So at some point sooner than later I will have to talk to her about it. So, in doing research on the topic I found a site that offers a list of books that teach kids about death in an honest, yet gentle way. Here's the link for those that are interested. I hope this helps in your quest to teach your kids about death and I do hope you plan to anyway. After all as king Mufasa says in 'The Lion King', 'We are all a part of this great circle of life'. 




http://www.parenthood.com/article-topics/books_that_teach_children_about_death.html

The things no-one told me.

So here I am. A stay at home mom. I have an almost 3 year old girl and a 4 month baby boy. And still I sit and ponder how this all came about. I wanted a family. It's something I've dreamt about for as long as I can remember. Smacking my little baby dolls around and yelling at them to stop crying. Ahhh memories. And I absolutely love my children. I am positive I am a wonderful mother. I smother them with love, and affection and take care of them to the absolute best of my ability. We go places and do things and I am there. Through everything. And I plan to continue that. However there are things about having kids and  even being at stay at home mom that no-one tells you about. It's as if your parents have this information that will be helpful to you and yet like a snake in the grass they keep it from you so they can have grandchildren. Well as much as I Love my children genuinely and cherish every moment spent with them, there are days where I do wish for more. UUhhh??!!!(GASP!) How dare I ?!!! But then again if you knew my introduction into parenting you might understand why. But that's for another time. What I can tell you is that I spent 28 years of my life without children. And now that I have the perspective I have, well I had no clue what 'real' responsibility was until now. I'd take a nasty day at my old job entailed with a reprimanding from the owner of the company, along with about 100 pissed off customers, 6 cups of coffee(hence palpitations), and me sitting in the bathroom crying at one point from stress over this any day of the week. For those that don't know, the minute you bring a child into this world your entire world turns upside down. Even that to me is an understatement. It is an all consuming, lack of sleep, entirely way too much exposure to childrens excrement and bodily fluids, teaching, cleaning, washing, guiding, protecting, sacrifice of self job. And I don't say job to be mean. But make no mistake. Being a parent is a job. Even for those that already have paying jobs. Unfortunately stay at home moms don't get paid. What we get instead, is all the brutality mankind can enthrall on a person on a daily basis. It's the truth too. (So if you don't like it, don't keep on reading).

I have no social life to speak of. Facebook and yahoo news are my life. I don't get to read books although I'd love to. I barely exercise because of lack of supervision for my children and where my exercise equipment is(in my basement). I usually end up doing little things here and there on the floor while my son is doing tummy time(mind you while I'm getting a pummeled by my daughter.). I don't have freedom except to a quick jaunt to the supermarket or the CVS every once in a while. I don't have nice clothes, cute shoes or handbags. I live in exercise type clothing unless I'm leaving the house and that always leaves me thrilled to put makeup on just going to a friends house or the supermarket. I don't go out. I don't go to bars or clubs or anything. All my friends live far away so I don't have dinners with friends just us talking about adult things. I live on the thrill of a good movie or TV show nowadays and now understand why my parents spent so much time in front of the tube as well. I don't get my nails and hur did. I cannot go #2 without a pair or 2 or 3 of eyes on me. So that's that.

So even after my long diatribe about all I don't have or am able to do, there is all that I do. For one, I have my best friend and husband that I married that is there for me no matter what. Thick and thin. Despite our differences and even different responsibilities we are there for each other and we do what we have to do. And for most part with no complaint. We have kids that are so cute I just want to eat them alive. (Not literally of course). Despite the fact that being a parent is one of the hardest jobs, I still get to see their smiling faces every day when they wake up and know that although I have a mountain of work ahead of me, it's an amazing feeling to know they need 'you'. And that you can help them and guide them to become happy, successful, functioning human beings. And hope that they'll come visit you in the nursing home more than once a month one day. Ok Just kidding!...uhh, ok, maybe not.

And although I don't have nice clothes, and handbags, and shoes. Or go get my nails and hur did. And although I don't exercise or read book after book in barnes and noble sipping on my starbucks. I still wouldn't trade the poopy diapers, sleepless nights, arguments with my husband about money, endless array of laundry and work, for anything that's out in this crazy world. Because it is my life. My family, my kids, my friends and all of that in itself to me is 'home'. I proudly accept my mess, chaos, noise and all that comes with this nutty little thing that is my life for the time being. Because after all, nothing lasts forever.

-V 2010