Why Do I Even Bother?

I am seriously at a loss to understand how any mother out there keeps a clean house. Seriously. It is a real hit on my self esteem every time I walk into someone else's immaculate house and then come home to mine.

We have a lot of crap. That's probably part of it. People always seem to see us as that needy family that needs all of the junk that they couldn't sell in their last garage sale. We're the family that gets boxes of random expired cans of pie filling when someone else cleans out their pantry. We get hand-me-down clothes for our kids that are usually ratty and look like they were bought in 1970, not to mention that they don't fit. A visit to my husband's grandmother's house no matter how short always results in her shoving as much stuff on us as possible. The woman has even given my husband his grandpa's old underwear. Granted, the rest of the family tends to drop things off at grandma's house to give to us needy people. Part of being the black sheep and being married to someone who doesn't know how to control the info train means everyone and their dog knows every time we are low on money. They dare not actually help by sending money because, as I said, we are the black sheep and us heathens might spend their money on all that booze we're always drinking when we neglect our kids. We even get hand-me-downs as gifts, I suspect maybe because they worry that if they gave us something new we'd take it back to the store to exchange for something they wouldn't approve of us having.

We don't often have someone give us something new or useful. I always appreciate it when someone drops by and happens to have grabbed some dish detergent or baby shampoo at their last trip to the store, but I don't carry the same sentiment when we get expired food and items that look like they came out of the trash. To me it says a lot about what a person thinks of you if they use you as their own personal dumping spot for things they no longer want and expect you to be over the moon with their generosity. We're not so hard off that we can benefit from that expired pie filling any more than you could, and if you think the homeless need it shame on you. Throw away the outdated garbage, recycle the cans and donate the five cents to your local rescue mission if you really want to be helpful.

Of course I blame myself for being too nice when it comes to people like my husband's grandma pressing a box of grandpa's old clothes on us as we're trying to make an exit. At the time I'm thinking just take it and get the hell out of there and we can drop it by Goodwill later, but instead it sits in our car until we need the space, and then it comes in the house where the kids decide they want to play with the empty box. Then it winds up all over the floor and eventually in the laundry and the cycle begins again.

Between the mountain of laundry, broken toys and pantry full of things I can't make a meal out of I am overwhelmed. Every time I make a dent in one thing the others back up. My little natural disasters do their fair share to add to my stress. Every day my four year old argues with me over why he has to pick up the half eaten bowl of cereal that he left spilled on my floor, and during that argument my other kids are wreaking havoc somewhere else themselves.

I've considered buying those evil leashes you see attached to toddlers out in crowds. I'd use them at home and have them anchored into the wall to restrict my kids each to an area of three square feet. That'd probably be frowned upon, though.

As I write this my 16 month old is thrashing around and screaming at my feet because I have four times now removed him from digging in the garbage can. He had a solid two hour long tantrum this morning too, all I coul
d figure was that he wanted me to know that he hated anything and everything. Now he's screaming his displeasure that the netbook has a more prominent place on my lap than he does. He has gotten into a routine lately of waking at 2:00 in the morning just to scream. It makes me in part wish that pregnancy lasted a lot longer so I would have fully grown children before I had to be reminded again how annoying newborn babies are when you're getting two hours of sleep, but then the baby in my belly was laying on a nerve and I wasn't able to get back to sleep anyway so I decided he might as well be born when he's due.

I don't hate kids, I swear. I just need a break. Desperately. I need to get away from my kids AND out of my house and have someone else do the cooking and cleaning and take care of me for a change, and I very much need for my house to be clean when I wake up return from my dream vacation. I need to go a day without earsplitting screams, multiple requests for junk food, changing diapers, wiping noses, settling fights over toys, sticky fingerprints all over my things and an audience every time I use the bathroom. I'd like all of that without the judgement of other moms who have had the audacity to call me unfit. Not all of us have the sun shining out of our asses, some of us only feel that way with the aid of tequila and others would say that makes them better than us. Well they can bite me.

Now that I've wasted an hour writing an essentially useless blog and have one kid playing The Hamster Dance over and over while the other is poking his hamster with a stick, I think I'll log off for a while and save a hamster's life.