Contrition Thy Name is Me

Is your happy place a real place?  Or is it a state of mind or a feeling? I just got finished scanning Twitter for the morning and came across a tweet by one of my favorite writers Christine Coppa (@JDSMOM2007).  It said ‘When life Sux wear red lipstick.”  I love that.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be red, or even lipstick at all.  The main point there is to take care of yourself at least a little when everything is going wrong.  I know precisely the lipstick I would use, too.  It’s a lip pencil from Sephora.  It is bright fuchsia with sparkles.  It is far too lurid to wear most of the time, but it makes me so happy to wear it.  I don’t wear it all the time because Dave usually gives me hell for wearing bright colors, telling me I look like a child playing with makeup. We all need to be able to find a little happiness.  When money is nonexistent, laundry isn’t done, kids are screaming, things look hopeless…this is when it is most important to find a little happy place.  I am in pretty dire need of a happy place these days, for all sorts of reasons.  One of the few things that would make me briefly happy, I get ridiculed for.  Wow, that’s really not fair. I am thirteen weeks pregnant and only now am I starting to not feel quite so tired.  I’ve let the laundry pretty much go and that was a colossally bad thing.  With three small children plus my husband and myself, I will NEVER have all the laundry done.  NEVER.  And I’m just adding to the pile with number four here.  Dave got a new job a couple weeks ago and they are scheduling him every day.  The pay isn’t great so the more hours the better so I really know better than to complain.  I know he’s happier working because being a stay at home dad was never really his thing.  At least once a week I would get a call at work from him bitching that the house was a mess.  I always said the same thing, how was I supposed to clean it when I wasn’t even there?  That was just never good enough. So for the last two weeks Dave hasn’t been home almost at all but when he gets home, in true Dave fashion, he complains that the house is dirty.  Again, him, not me.  Then he goes on to say something that is very familiar.  “I can’t clean it if I’m not even here.”  Hmm, I wanna say I’ve heard that before…somewhere.   It hasn’t registered yet in his head how that has always been my most valid point as well.  I guess I’m supposed to be magic. We no longer have a functional dishwasher so we have to do them ourselves.  Correction: I have to do them myself.  I’ve been the only one doing them lately.  I never like to use pregnancy as an excuse but it does make you tired.  Some days it’s all I can do just to stand for a prolonged period of time.  As for laundry, it looks like a Laundromat threw up in my house.  Everywhere.  I am the only one who does laundry and, as I previously stated, I have been somewhat more than lax on it.  I admit it. To add insult to injury, the flies have set upon our house.  Seriously it looks like one of the plagues in there.  Of course, I have to hear the bitching about it as though I caused it or can do something about it. I didn’t write this to complain about my husband though I do realize that’s what it looks like now.  My main source of anguish right now is the state of the house.  Mostly because of the fact that I am constantly having to hear what a dumpster it is.  Not my wording, merely a quote.  Honestly, I think that even if it were sparkly clean I’d still have to hear some type of complaints because, well, Dave just really does not like the house we live in.  And what’s worse is, we are in no position to move.  There are some things I would like to have fixed, the assorted holes in the walls for one.  Some fist sized, some big enough to put my 19 month old through.  I challenge you to find a square foot of wall lower than four feet off the ground that is not covered in crayon.  I also take the blame for that. Some things were already kinda jacked up when we moved in.  The walls are in terrible shape.  In the kids’ room, you can tell there was once a border put up because that is where the paint changes color.  That, and there’s still strips of it here and there.  That I can deal with but there are grease stains and what I perceive (and hope) to be food caked on the walls.  That was there when we moved in.  I have no idea how to go about cleaning it. My theory is if you live in a house you’re ashamed of then you have no reason to make it better.  If cleaning it is only going to better it by like 30%, there’s almost no point.  Now if the walls were patched and clean and painted nice colors, I would want to keep the rest of the house nice. I want to take more pictures of my kids, but I don’t.   I don’t because we are usually at home and there’s no way I can take a picture without getting some ugly house in the background.  The massive hole in the wall or the crayon mural.  Our furniture is all mismatched but there’s nothing that can really be done about that right now. It’s damn near impossible to work a full-time job, be pregnant, and maintain a clean house with clean laundry when you have three little kids.  I’m not sure it’s fair that I’m expected to either.  If you have kids then you know what it’s like at least to some degree.  You clean the living room, sweep, and by the time you get back from putting up the broom it already looks like you never even touched it in the first place.  How do you fight that?! I am asking anyone who reads this to share.  Comments, advice, stories, sympathy, copious amounts of chocolate, whatever you’ve got.  Help me see that I’m not the only one.  I really need it.