[Warning!! I've got a big one here!!]
Wow... yesterday was pretty sucky for me. So I spent 5 hours driving home after a long hard slog at the workplace this week. Things had been pretty good with my communication with the wife... not perfect, but hopeful. I'd felt like I was spending this hour of "working on me" time pretty consistently and enjoying the ride. On the way home I asked the wife if she wanted me to pick up some food on my way in and she was nice enough to call and order some stuff and I stopped and picked it up... all was going well so far.
So I get home, stop at the MIL's house to pick up the kids. I'm standing there with bags of good food in my hand (food that both we [the grown ups] and they [the kids] like) and my son says "I've already eaten"... The first dart hits me and I try to shake it off and just move on and get the kids home.
It pisses me off that when I'm out of town, my kids eat dinner just about everyday at the MIL's house. It just reinforces my fury with the fact that my wife doesn't feel capable of handling "dinner" with the kids when she gets home from work when I'm not here. I mean, what does everyone else in the world do when they have a job and have to come home to feed the kids? They do what they have to do... And more than that, the MIL totally enables her to do it by always offering to feed them at 4pm instead of letting them wait til she gets home to make dinner like a normal family would. It really screws up any sense of OUR family routine when they are used to eating so early and we get home from work a couple of hours later.
I feel like the load is always on me to try to create a healthy family dynamic with things like this and then I have to compete to be "the parent" with my MIL.
So we get home, we're a bit rushed because my son has baseball practice in 40 minutes. Most of us sit down to eat... including my son who decides that he likes what we're having so he'll eat "some, but I'm not that hungry". I'd made a point to get home and have some food available because I wanted to take him to practice - it was a tight timeline, but I knew we could do it. It turned out that practice got cancelled due to rain and then the wife gets home.
The next bombshell hits when my son says "MaMaw picked me up from school today in the middle of lunch, but she says not to take it out on me because it wasn't my fault." I asked why this happened and he said it was because he lost his permission slip to go to a school outting and he was going to have to sit at school and do nothing for the rest of the day. I was PISSED!! But I didn't freak out in front of him and I didn't say any of the things that were going through my head. I just said, well, you know what happened there, don't you? Your MaMaw robbed you of the opportunity to learn your lesson for losing your permission slip. The wife didn't say anything... just made some gestures of agreement and we moved on. I did say "So what happens the next time you do something like that and you have to live with the consequences? Do you just wait for MaMaw to come save you?" He said "Yep." I didn't go on about it.. I just finished eating and tried to distract myself from my frustration.
I feel like this would be one of those things that I wouldn't have found out about if I hadn't been home and my son hadn't told me about it. My wife knows how infuriated I get when I have to compete with her Mother to raise our kids. This is how my wife was raised (to never have to worry about failure because her mom would always make sure she didn't have to learn a lesson - at least this is my estimation anyway) and now she's paralyzed with the fear of failure... to the point that she rarely if ever does anything to improve herself or our way of living.
At some point along the way the wife asked me what was wrong and I said I was tired... I went and laid down and then it happened... I said "Its my attitude and I can change it" to myself. I felt a little bit of release just then... and I did sleep a bit. The wife came in and again asked me what was wrong and I told her that we have to move (yea, we live next door to the MIL). We've been kicking it around for awhile anyway, but this just bolstered my motivation to get the hell out of here!! I told her that I was feeling pretty angry that her Mother would undermine our parenting efforts. She said "yea, I told her about it this afternoon and she didn't care". I was still pretty angry and made some off handed remark about me being the only one interested in moving and that she was just going along for the ride until we hit a bump and she'd "you made us move, I didn't want to, and now look what happened!!" She didn't like that too well and went away.
I got up later... the kids went to bed... and nothing else was said about it.
So anyway... thats that.. and I've resumed the house hunt a little more agressively than before. I just have to find a balance between affordability and the school districts that I want to be in. Today's Tools lesson was about responsibility. I totally understand taking responsibility for my actions and know that I can do anything I want to do if I want to bad enough... While the fire to move was already burning, this whole affair just tossed the gas on the "want to bad enough" for me.
No excuses... I'm saving money... I'm assessing the variables and looking for opportunities. I will move before the next school year begins.
Thanks for reading,
Shane13
