Puke in Her Hair Would Make a Great Band Name

I am going to have to take back my last post.

My dad booked his ticket.

I am proud of him. Yet still oddly angry (my anger with my dad is only ever 50% reasonable--we have a lot of baggage). We will never talk about it so . . .that is all there is. I am glad he is going.

I am making no sense since I have been up since 5 this morning after getting something like three hours of sleep. My child puked a scary amount today. Screaming and crying and eventually there were no tears she was so dehydrated. We rushed to the doctor and fortunately they were able to give us something to make her head stop spinning around. And even luckier, she should be better soon and I won't be contagious as a carrier when I go see my sister and her new baby this weekend.

But the day was so hard. She was so sick. She puked on almost everything we own. Never, not even as a newborn, did she wear eleven outfits (in this case pajamas--we had to wash and rewear them a couple of times) in one day. She would apologize each time she threw up. She also has other digestive issues which made the day just more vivid.

I remember being sick and my mother would hold me and wipe my forehead with a cool cloth and just somehow make things better. After her medicine kicked in Mo looked at me and said, "tummy better, Mama rub tummy and tummy better."

Modern medicine deserves the credit baby but I will take. I am the one who has puke in her hair.

Cowardice

My grandmother is dying.

As in, she is in the hospital and my aunt called my dad to tell him that he should get his ass on a plane if he wants to say goodbye. He is not going, of course, ostensibly because of money or work or some other made up reason. It is really because my dad is a coward. He will talk a good game and know the right thing to do but he will come up with a lot of reasons to not do it. It is why he skipped his parents' sixtieth wedding anniversary party last May and then has been crippled with guilt since his dad died in July.

Note to everyone: if your sister, who you have a good relationship with, calls you to tell you that your mother, who you have a good relationship with, is probably not going to make it much longer you GET ON A DAMN PLANE.

I love my father and I am SO sympathetic to his fear and his worry and why he is not going. I am basically a carbon copy of his in his chicken shit ways. Except I see what this has done to him and well I just suck it up. Because he will torture himself for a long time about this instead of just going.

And apparently I am angry. So angry at him. Which is pointless and not helpful.

And I am angry that she is dying. She is very old, yes. And very sick. But much of it is very much self inflicted and her behavior wore my grandfather out and basically killed him and THEN AFTER ALL OF THIS she is finally getting the help that she needs. She is taking pleasure in the small things and just loving her family and appreciating what is left and NOW, now she dies.

Things often just work out in a cruel way.

If you had asked me yesterday if I was prepared for my grandmother to die I would have said yes. But I was just crying about it in the shower two hours ago so apparently that preparation only goes so far.

Hopefully I will stop being pissed at my dad soon enough to avoid screaming all of this at him on the phone tomorrow. It's been a while since he and I have fought and it is much better for both of us. He just needs to get on the damn plane.

Jobhunting While Losing Your Damn Mind

I was with my last employer for eight years. The irony is that before that I worked for a series of start ups and strange employers--none of whom lasted more than a couple of months. My resume would take reams of paper to print and trying to explain it all made me sound crazy. "Oh, that was the place that had heroin junkies on the front porch each morning" "Oh! I quit when my boss urinated on my desk." "Oh, that place was brought down by the affair a managing partner had with our banker--I testified in his divorce."

It was not good.

I went to Former Employer because I needed to be somewhere a year. I needed to pay my bills and keep my head down and not be threatened by a Black Panther/drug dealer who wanted to barter cocaine for his kid's school tuition.

Eight years later Former Employer had become a career but also ground me down to a little nub.

But I didn't have to interview anywhere for a long time. I mean I did interview occasionally--never doing well because it is hard to sell yourself when you are really not sure why you would leave your job anyway. It doesn't work. I realize that those interviews (I think maybe three in eight years) did me a disservice because they made me afraid of interviewing.

Yesterday I had an interview for a regular job. One of those epic all day meet everyone in the building interviews. I spent the week between the phone interview and the in person one freaking out about what to wear and did I want to do this at all. And wondering if I should just cancel. I got stress acne and bought new pants and was really really freaked out by the whole thing. And then I went to the interview and it went good. I think. I guess I am not a good judge. But the people were amazing and the job is perfect and I am fairly certain the money would be great. So now I want the job and I keep rolling it around in my head. It will be at least a week before I hear and I might not get it and the stress of it all is killing me.

So don't worry about me. I am stress eating cookies and yanking on my hair. I suspect I will be here a while.