I’m glad this weekend will be filled with frantic activity. As usual, there is yet another kid’s birthday party to attend.  I’ve had to seriously budget money to afford birthday parties every weekend.  With two kids in preschool, it seems like there is one every weekend.  Cristin arrived tonight for the usual Easter festivities and Anja’s baby shower.  Tomorrow we’ll be dyeing (dying?) eggs at Christine’s house and Saturday we’ll be bouncing around at Pump It Up (which Mike always says in his best SNL Hans and Franz voice:  Ve are comink to Paaaaamp you Ahhp . . . ).  Sunday is the shower and Easter dinner. 

I need some distraction right now.  If I had to wear a badge this week, it would announce my weight struggles and frustration, a nasty argument with a member of my extended family that resulted in me feeling like the worst mother, daughter-in-law, and wife on the planet, and the ugly reality that my relationship with my own brother is going to be strained for the foreseeable future.  For some reason I still balk at writing publicly about what is going on with my family.  It’s not like he or his wife read the blog, but I guess I still feel like the skeletons we still have in our family need to be contained.  And I’ve been forbidden to speak about anything regarding Mike’s family, and I even got my hand slapped with the proverbial ruler lately because of my inability to be a good fake and act like everything is peachy even when the house is burning down around you. 

Jennifer and I were definitely on a high at the end of the show last weekend.  We had great results and we really needed it.  We turned over a bunch of inventory, we met some great people, and had a lot of fun inbetween working our butts off (well, I still very much have my butt but it’s just an expression).  Under my glossy exterior of joy and drive, I am still very much insecure about a lot of things.  Additionally, show me a working mother who feels no guilt about working and I’ll show you a liar.  Being called on the carpet about a variety of things, and having all of your hot buttons pushed (sometimes simultaneously) after a week of ridiculous hours and no sleep didn’t help at all. 

At lunch with Sara and Jennifer today we talked about how difficult it is to be married sometimes, and what a weird thing marriage is.  You get married and suddenly you have this new “family”.  You have to adjust to all their own weird quirks and customs, and your partner has to do the same.  Things that are totally acceptable in my family (and I’m not talking about anything crazy, like farting at the table or something) are totally unacceptable in Mike’s family.  Holidays are treated differently.  Even little things, like the fact that in Mike’s family, anniversaries are a big deal and in mine we don’t even bother with a card, create little tiny problems where you would think there shouldn’t be any.  This week, I’m tired of feeling bad about who I am, how I was raised, or what kind of person I am today. I used to be a little proud of the fact that I would speak up for myself, and especially for the underdog (or my perception of the underdog).  The most current strife in Mike’s family is that I don’t fit.  I communicate completely differently than they do, I find things funny that they really don’t, and I have gotten to the point where I have accepted that I am better served to repeat the same 4 phrases over and over again.  Those phrases are:

“I’m great, how are you?”
and
“Love the necklace!”
and
“How’s the weather there?”
and
“How’s the job?”

Regardless of the answer, when the question is politely returned to me, the only answer I need to say is,

“Great!  Couldn’t be better!  Thanks for asking.”

Actually, it makes my life more simple.  Nothing to think about or worry about.  And hey, I’m all about simplifying my life.

My big problem has been that I’m black or white.  I either have meaningful relationships with people, or I have no relationship at all.  I don’t have “kind of” friends.  That means we either talk about what’s really going on with us, good or bad, or we aren’t friends.  I’m lucky enough to have a few great friends who don’t waste time trying to be fake or pretend like everything is perfect.  Nothing is. There’s no shame in admitting your life is hard at times or it’s difficult to be in business or that worrying about money can really suck the joy out of you or that a little tiny blue ribbon, like the one from last weekend, could mean so much. 

As for my brother, I miss him.  I know that someday in the future, his daughter is going to want to know why none of us were there for her during this time in her life.  Why they weren’t with us on holidays or birthdays.  And I’m going to have to explain where I was coming from and why we did the things we did and hope that she can understand.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and she won’t ask me, or maybe she already knows the answer.  In the meantime, knowing that I have a brother and niece 20 minutes away physically but not accessible is a tough thing to swallow.  I feel even worse for my dad, who at 82 is dealing with things that he really shouldn’t have to deal with.