Clever Escape

Have you ever thought about how fabulous breathing is? How good it feels to fill your lungs with air, and then slowly let it out again?

I love breathing (lol). It just feels good to sit and feel the air going in, filling up my lungs, then slowly flowing back out again.

It is not easy to concentrate on breathing. Conveniently, it is one of those things you don’t have to think about doing, it just happens. Thank goodness or I would have issues staying alive, since I tend to get distracted easily. But when you do just sit there, feeling your lungs filling and then emptying them, feeling everything going in and out, it is refreshing and helps me to focus.

My husband will probably read this and laugh cause he says this is something that Sunshine would say. One of those things that children wonder about. He says that to me a lot lately.

For instance, the other day we were in the pool and I commented how cool water feels. If you stand completely still in still water, you don’t really know that you are under water. Except that, you know, you are wet. Then you move and it all ripples around you. Wiggle your fingers and it flows right through. You can float on it, or suspend yourself in it. You can pick your feet up and not worry about falling. Push it around and you move. It is pretty cool!

I like to float on my back in the pool and watch the birds flying around. There is a pair of hawks that fly around above our apartment complex. It is very relaxing to watch them gliding along through the sky.

If all this makes me like a child, oh well! I like thinking about these things. I like to wonder at the things around me, things that I would normally take for granted during the course of my day. I think it is part of truly enjoying life. Take a second and just feel what is going on around you. The sights, sounds and smells of the world. What things feel like.

When we grow up, I think we lose the sense of wonder that the world brings to us. We take it for granted. We are told, whether directly or by example, that grown-ups don’t think about things like that anymore. That a sense of having already “been there, done that” is part of being mature and experienced, and that is important to be mature and experienced. Yet so many people let life and time pass them by while they concentrate on working and doing what society expects them to do, valuing what they are expected to value, believing what they are expected to believe.

What a waste of the one thing we can never beg, borrow or steal - Time.

Sunshine called yesterday while my husband was sleeping so I talked to her for a while. She is sounding really excited about the summer, especially about soccer camp. I suppose I’d better jump on getting her registered! That and swimming, and possibly gymnastics. Should keep her (and me) busy for most of the time she is here.

My husband called her back after he woke up. Her mother hadn’t called him back (surprise) about flights so he asked to talked to her. Apparently she was sitting in front of her mother because she was not a bitch at all which is really weird. My husband got a little confused and actually thought she had been nice, but no, she was just not being a bitch.

He asked her why she hadn’t called him back since he had left her four messages. She said her phone was off.

Right.

I don’t know if you all have noticed, but you can tell the status of the phone by the number of rings. If her phone was off, it wouldn’t ring at all, or just once, and go straight to voicemail. It did not. It rang just fine.

If it was actually turned off by the cell phone company (which happens all the time) then we would get a recorded message saying that the number wasn’t available or something along those lines. My husband used to that and would have just called her father or Sunshine’s phone (though we hate doing that) to talk to her about the flights.

Pathological liars piss me off. Why not just say that you didn’t feel like calling back? Or was in a pissy mood? Or like to annoy him because you have nothing better to do in life? I hate it when people don’t just say how it is!

Does she really think we believe her when she lies about this crap? I mean, seriously. First, it is a stupid thing to lie about. Second, there is obvious proof that she is lying. Or is that the joy in it? Insisting on a lie despite all evidence to the contrary?

It is like this site about how to identify a pathological liar, which I believe I have posted before (but since I deleted all that, I suppose I should post it again). I just found another, shorter definition of both pathological liars and compulsive liars. I’m not sure which Sunshine’s mother is…maybe both.

Pathological Liar
A pathological liar is usually defined as someone who lies incessantly to get their way and does so with little concern for others. Pathological lying is often viewed as coping mechanism developed in early childhood and it is often associated with some other type of mental health disorder. A pathological liar is often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused - it is done to get one’s way). Pathological liars have little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others. A pathological liar often comes across as being manipulative, cunning and self-centered.

Compulsive Liar
A compulsive liar is defined as someone who lies out of habit. Lying is their normal and reflexive way of responding to questions. Compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, large and small. For a compulsive liar, telling the truth is very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right. Compulsive lying is usually thought to develop in early childhood, due to being placed in an environment where lying was necessary. For the most part, compulsive liars are not overly manipulative and cunning (see, Pathological Liar), rather they simply lie out of habit - an automatic response which is hard to break and one that takes its toll on a relationship.

I am leaning towards compulsive liar, based on these definitions. She lies for no reason. She lies about whether she got the mail. Whether she went to the store. What time she got up. That her phone was off. All silly things that there really isn’t any point to lying about. She only makes stuff up when confronted about the lie that she told, then she will insist that whatever she said was exactly what happened and never, ever admits otherwise despite inordinate amounts of evidence to the contrary.

I pulled a muscle.

Two, actually.

In the back of my right leg.

Which means no more running for a while. Which sucks because I love running and was doing really well. At least this is the week that I cut back on mileage.

Do you know how hard it is to go up and down stairs when you can’t use the muscles in the back of your thigh?

It is quite challenging. You have to do this thing with your quads and pull your knee back straight, which puts stress on my knee so then that hurts. I figure that by the time the back of my leg is healed, my knee will be busted.

I would try to avoid stairs, but that would mean not leaving my apartment since we live on the second floor.

At least it isn’t the third floor.

AND

I took the robots.txt file out of the root.

This makes me a little nervous.

I kind of liked being cut off so that people couldn’t find me. Well, I liked it, but I didn’t. This is more about refusing to stress about Sunshine’s mother anymore than being worried about random people reading my blog.

I absolutely refuse to let her have any control over my life.

At least any more control that she already has, which I am determined to lessen as well.

I wrote a new “About” page, since my purpose has changed since I first started writing.

And I started my list of things to do before I die. Which is a pretty short list, but I know there are more things I want to do, I just have to remember what they are…damn my memory!

I have yet to go to Google and let them put my site back on there. I am going to do it, damn it all!

Just not right now.

I wonder if we will ever have a summer that doesn’t involve arguing over when Sunshine will fly here, and fly back to her mother’s.

Realistically, it probably won’t happen for about ten years.

Exactly ten years.

For those of you that don’t know, no, we do not have a parenting agreement established with the courts as of yet. We are currently working on negotiating one with her mother. Hopefully that will work out. Until then, Sunshine comes to see us at her mother’s whim.

Usually she is completely agreeable to whenever we want to fly Sunshine here. She really doesn’t give a damn. We have had her for her entire winter, spring, and summer breaks, plus most of her off-track weeks from school. Yes, that would be every Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Summer Vacation, Spring Break…etc…for four years.

On occasion her mother feels the need to reaffirm the “power” she has over my husband by refusing to send her for her entire summer break. Like this year.

And we know that all she is doing is demonstrating her power over him. Showing him that she has the last word, and total control over everything and that she could crush him at any moment, should she choose, by denying visitation and suing for back child support for the first four years of her life. For which she, and Sunshine, lived with him for a big chunk of it, and he had been sending her money on occasion despite her absolute denial to wanting any. But it would be hard to find proof of any of that, and I’m sure she knows it.

This year is another example of her need for “control”.

Sunshine got assigned to a track that allows her an extended summer vacation. It is the entire month of July, plus the first three weeks in August. As is standard, and has been standard, and was declared by her the last time we were negotiating a parenting agreement with her, my husband gets her for the entire summer vacation.

Ah, but not this year. This year we will have her back to her house by July 29th so that she can go to visit her 86 year old great aunt in Pennsylvania with her grandfather. For three weeks.

And on top of that, she said that it had been Sunshine’s choice whether she wanted to go during the summer! She said that she wanted to be able to go to the fair that she loves going to when she is there.

Sunshine hates going there. She goes and sits in a house with two people that are over 75 years old for weeks. If they do not make food that she likes (like deviled eggs with olives) then she just doesn’t eat anything because they don’t make her anything else. She doesn’t go anywhere. And the fair she is talking about? It is for one day of the three weeks she will be there, and it is a picnic! For old people! There are no kids there! She called us from PA every day the last time she went (three years ago) crying about how much she hated it and how she wanted to be with us instead.

I know what happened, how she came about “choosing” to go there instead of here for the last part of the summer. Her mother talked up the fair and how much fun she would have and isn’t it great? Don’t you remember how much fun it is to go there? And you can do whatever you want? And blah blah blah? She hasn’t been there since she was FIVE! She doesn’t remember that crap!

Besides that, she is eight years old! Since when do eight year olds determine their own schedules?

My husband offered to fly her out there himself, on August 10th. Her mother said no. He tried for August 4th, so she could at least go to a camp she wanted to go to. Nope. Not even at our cost. She would not consider it. He asked if it would be easier if she went to school here so that her mother could have her for the summer and do trips like this. “Absolutely not, it will never happen” she says.

My husband asked if it was about money, because he would happily continue paying her child support. She had the nerve to get annoyed and say that it had never been about money!

Yeah? What about the first two months of the year, when they were establishing child support through the state, and my husband contested his income (which was incorrect) so she cut off all phone communication and canceled our scheduled visitation? For two months! We missed her birthday and she destroyed the balloons we sent her! Wasn’t that about money? She didn’t even respond.

He asked her about trying to get along, because this is not how he wants to spend the next ten years of his life, arguing with her. She blamed it on him and his “naturally rude voice”. Right. That discussion went no where.

Really. We would much rather just get along with her. We would LOVE to have her call and consult about when Sunshine goes on trips like that, because she could have gone on her next off-track time, when we can’t bring her here anyway. We do not have a problem with her going anywhere, so long as it isn’t on my husband’s visitation time.

We would LOVE to get along, and make decisions about her jointly, and communicate better.

He stopped arguing about the summer. It just isn’t worth it. And she knows it, and takes it as a victory over him. Yep, she won. Whatever.

I don’t get why she thinks it needs to be like this. Why she thinks that making decisions like that is important. Why she thinks that negotiating would give her less power or whatever it is she wants. It doesn’t. It just makes her look nutso.

Well, I do get it. But it is stupid.

I don’t even want to try and understand her. I just don’t want to stress over her anymore. All this takes way too much out of my life. I would love to be able to get along with her, but she made it clear that she is not interested in talking to me, ever (three years ago, when she told me off over the phone for being “perfect”).

I know she is just jealous. I am trying to have some sympathy for her. I know she is mad that both my husband and I have college educations, good jobs, our own apartment, a good income, and we aren’t dependent on anyone, like she is. She is jealous.

I wish I could help her. I know, I’m an idiot. But I still wish that somehow, I could make her life better. Maybe then she wouldn’t be so angry all the time. There was a point where we would talk on the phone weekly, and everything was cool between us. I wish that would come back.

We aren’t going to argue about the summer. We will send her back on the 29th. It isn’t worth the fighting, or the risk that she just won’t send Sunshine at all for the summer.

Until then, we will keep working on the parenting agreement. I think she will go for *most* of what we have written in it, and we will be able to negotiate down the stuff she won’t go for, which is why we are asking for so much. Hopefully, once it is established, there won’t be so much to argue about and we can have a little more peace in our lives.

I’ve been feeling restless lately, and for months haven’t been able to figure out why.

I had thought that maybe it is because I am at a stable point in my life, for the second time ever. I am not moving anywhere, or anticipating a move. I have a job I intend to stay in, and could stay in, for a very, very long time. My husband is gainfully employed at a company that will probably be able to help him meet his career goals for the next ten years or so. Sunshine is coming to see us more consistently. Everything is set.

It has been a long time since my life is somewhere stable. I think it makes me a bit nervous. Especially after the last two years and all the stuff that has happened. I think I am waiting for something else to happen. Something bad. I had been hoping that the “three’s” rule would apply to all this crap, but we are well over three, so I suppose maybe it is three groups of three things? Who knows. I think I am close to that, even.

Then I was wondering whether with all this stability, maybe I’m just not happy with my life, at all. I started doubting whether I liked my job, which is ridiculous, because I love my job. I thought about my marriage, and while we have our problems, I can’t picture life without my husband. And I thought about Sunshine, and although having her in my life brings a lot of grief and worry, it also brings a lot of joy.

This train of thought had me moving on and reflecting on my life as a whole, and what has or has not made me “happy”. The last time I remember being happy with my life was the last time we moved out here, across the country from home. After the first six months went by, life got good. Those six months really sucked, we were poor and I was waitressing, my husband was doing construction so we had opposite shifts which equals not seeing each other, ever.

We didn’t have any furniture except for a mattress and bins that we had our stuff packed in. I remember going nuts one day and going out to Walmart “blowing” money I was supposed to buy groceries with to buy those $5 plastic lawn chairs just so we wouldn’t have to sit on the floor anymore. We pulled them up to our table/bin and ate off toast off of two of our four plates, and drank koolaid from mismatched beer glasses that were borrowed from various bars around the country.

But life got better. We both got jobs making more money than we had ever made in our lives (as in, more than the $7.50/hr I got doing work study in college). We moved to a nicer apartment in an area of town where our cars, which had been broken into three times in the two months we lived at the first apartment, would be a little more secure. We bought furniture at Ikea that conveniently opened up right around that time. We got married and managed to get a full kitchen’s worth of dishes and pans out of that.

Life was good.

We were happy.

Then we screwed it up thinking that moving back home to be around family was worth not making as much money.

HA.

We ended up not only making “not as much”, but making none. We could not get jobs remotely related to what we wanted to do, and had been doing before. And we had to live with my in-laws.

But enough of that.

The point is, that is the last time I remember being happy. Happy, relaxed, stress-free, comfortable with my life and it’s direction…happy.

And I look back and realize that I was in the middle of reaching a number of my life goals. At that point in my life, I had accomplished most everything I had set out to do when I was a teenager.

Like, moving the hell out of the town I grew up in.

Check.

Move to a big city.

Check, check, check…did that several times over.

Live cool/new/interesting/different places.

Check, check, check…

Get a bachelor’s degree.

Check.

Get a job.

Check.

Get a master’s degree.

Check.

Get married to somebody I love with everything…

Check.

Get an apartment/house of my own.

Check, check, check…check…

Etc., etc., etc. (haha to those who know what that references!)

I am sure there were more, and am equally sure that I have met all of them. I am only 28. I am not even thirty and have met all my life goals? This reinforces the fact that teenagers are stupid. Life does not end at thirty.

Now I am looking at everything I have done, every goal I have met, every obstacle I have surmounted and I think that I am feeling like it is all done. I have done everything I wanted to do.

So.

Now what?

Basically, what I think I am feeling is aimless. My life no longer has a goal. No purpose, really. Sure, there are the usual suspects. Do well at my job, buy a house, have kids…blah blah blah. But nothing to really work towards. I need something to work towards. Something to plan. Something to break up into smaller steps and accomplish one bit at a time…you know?

This thought process in itself has created a goal for me.

Come up with a goal.

Or goals, I suppose.

My new goal is to create a goal. Come up with something I want to accomplish and do it. This is proving to be harder than it sounds because this time my goal won’t revolve around what is expected of me, such as, going to college. This time I have to come up with something uniquely me, or as unique as I can get it to be.

And that is what has been occupying my thoughts for the last week or so. If you were wondering.