#EyeTwitch

I do my best to be a positive person.

Lately, it's been hard. The stress of being away from F has been greater than I could have ever imagined and the lack of sleep is starting to make me a little crazy. After spending most of the last year alone, I've overcompensated by filling my days with people and I haven't taken a quarter of the alone time that I really need.

Enter the eyetwitch.

It takes a lot to really grate my nerves, and yet for the past two weeks everything has been abrasive and irritating. Little comments and actions seem huge, bad drivers seem to have multiplied and all of the stupid people in the world seem to be out in full-force when I'm in a rush to get somewhere or get something done.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Negativity spreads like wildfire. Little irritations snowball into massive pet peeves, bad days spiral into bad weeks and the next thing you know you've become that douchebag you can't stand. You're irritated just listening to yourself be irritated, you're pissed off by your own bad mood and yet you feel powerless to stop it.

Once it begins, it's almost impossible to stop it. I'm exhausted by my own exhaustion, and annoyed by my own annoyance. It's tiring and it's unfulfilling. It sucks the joy out of everything, and I've decided to put my foot down.

I can't change the past two months. I can't undo all the crap that happened, and I certainly can't go back and adjust my attitude but I can look forward. I can make sure it doesn't happen again. My patience my wear thin from time to time, but I don't have to let it get the better of me. In fact, I won't.

I've decided to implement a 10-minute rule.

I can bitch and complain for 10-minutes every day, and then put it all away. Whether it's a person at work, the ass who cut me off in rush hour traffic or the neighbours who play their music too loud, I can complain for 10 minutes. I can be angry, sad, annoyed, frustrated, WHATEVER for 10 minutes and then I have to let it fly.

I can't take on the frustrations of others. I'm too empathetic. I will tune out the "Debbie Downers" and I'll ignore the gloomy moods that I run into in class or the office. I'll be the irritating, cheerful person that all the cranky people can't stand.

And they can bitch about me all they want.

#EyeTwitch

#EndRant

Unstuck

I have a really bad habit of getting stuck in my own head.

All manner of little things can do it to me. I worry about this and that, one stressor feeds another and the next thing I know I'm on the verge of tearing my hair out and crying into a glass of something alcoholic. This last month has certainly taken it's toll on me. Tomorrow, for example, will be one month since the day I found all of my belongings missing from my old apartment. The property rental company finally settled last week, and while it was only half of what it should have been, I just couldn't do it anymore. I was too tired.

I've left the dishes to pile up in the kitchen, laundry overflowing in the baskets, clothes strewn across my closet and eaten more than one bag of popcorn for lunch. I was tired, and most of it was my own damn fault.

Yesterday, I woke up sour. It may have been the fact that it was day two of a hangover (it would seem I'm not 19 any more), and it could have had something to do with the fact that my neighbours choose 4:48AM as the perfect time to blast really loud, really bad music. Must be nice to not have to get up and do anything in the morning. I texted my friend and expressed my displeasure at the whole thing. The texts ranged from "Are you going to go to class?" to "Today might be the day I finally lose my shit," but I managed to put on pants (real ones, with a button), and I went to class.

I went grocery shopping with one friend and ranted about how tired and frustrated I was. Another friend came over for movies and dinner and she and I ranted about how frustrated we both were. Then we put on hilarious music and danced. We went for hot chocolates, and I came home to a hot bath and I sat in front of my laptop for the better part of two hours, too wrapped up in my own head to write anything.

It was past my bedtime before I finally got out of my head, and it took a Skype call and a 5-minute laughing fit to do it. As it turned out, I went to bed two hours later than I should have and woke up positively exhausted with bad hair and a smile on my face. I needed a good laugh it would appear.

And I've already watched the 19-second video evidence I have of the hilarity twice.

Meltdown: Accomplished

Unless your kid is perfect - which I highly friggin' doubt - you've had to deal with your fair share of the dreaded middle-of-store-meltdown.

Usually toy-related, but not always, the MOSM is loud, ugly and makes you wish you could evaporate or pretend the child belongs to someone else. Neither of which really works, believe me I've tried. Evaporation is just physically impossible, no matter how much you pray to the temper-tantrum gods and kids have this nasty habit of swinging at you or latching onto your legs screaming "NO, MOMMY!!" and it kind of spoils the "who's kid is that?" act, does it not?

I love F to pieces. 99.7 per cent of the time he is the sweetest little boy any Mommy could ever wish for. He's full to the brim with unexpected bursts of love, surprise kisses and snuggles, not to mention he's so damn cute it hurts. He is shockingly caring, unbelievably smart and he never shuts up (which I take full responsibility for). But then there's the 0.3 per cent of the time that I wish I could pretend he's not mine, and he decided to use all of that today. One melt-down was bad enough, but he didn't stop there. That would be too easy. No, we laid on the floor in three different locations and kicked, screamed and acted generally nasty. Super duper.

I hate seeing the MOSM. I can usually sense it coming and try to escape to higher ground before the tears drown me, kind of like when you see rats right before a major disaster. I'm the rat, only less germy and hopefully more attractive, but I have been known to wiggle my nose and give stink-eyes. Sometimes, we escape to a less populous spot, but mostly not. Today, I managed to miss the signs altogether.

It all started with the fact that we're living in a hotel room and F hasn't seen his own toys, slept in his own bed or been in his routine for the past four days. We've been eating in restaurants or ordering in at weird hours, and spending a lot of time in malls and stores because you can only sit in a hotel room for so long. He hadn't eaten a proper lunch, mostly because it's generally frowned upon to stuff food down an unwilling child's throat and I was tired of arguing with him to eat his sandwich. Finally, it was the three-year-old "everything is mine" mentality that did us in.

We went into Chapters partially because I wanted a Caramel Macchiato at Starbs and Mom wanted to get some books for the little monster himself. In we went, walking hand-in-hand (F and I, not Mom and I - although that would have been significantly less embarassing), through the Best Sellers and into the Kid's Section. Four other kids happily played around the Thomas and Friends train table. F tried to fit in with their dynamic, but they were not having it: I'm talking absolutely no sharing. He was hurt, but he handled it pretty well (read: no tears) and we decided to go look for books he might like and check out the different toys. When the mean kids had finally left, I let him go back to the train table and he was stoked.

He played there alone for about five minutes before the next kid came along. F asked him to play with him, and they drove little Edwards along the track and flew Harold over the Island of Sodor. Then, kid number three came along and it all went to shit.

"Get Mater off the track. You must put him back on the road" F said, getting increasingly emotional. He reached over and put his hand on the other kid's hand. I semi-intervened, knowing that F was just trying to maintain control over his game. "We don't put our hands on other people, sweetie", I said gently. Realizing we were about to open a can of worms, I suggested we go get a treat. F got agitated, spit at me, and then started screaming. I picked him up and started carrying him out of the store. Having skipped breakfast and lunch, I was absolutely starving and desperately in need of caffeine. "Let me take him, he's just angry with you right now" my Mom suggested.

She's pretty well always right, so I left him sobbing onto her shoulder. I figured by the time I got him a juice and myself a large, hot, caffeinated, delicious soy caramel macchiato (excuse me while I drool on myself) he would be totally calm. SO WRONG. He was worse than when I had left him. He was screaming, hitting, kicking, flailing on the floor, spitting and screaming some more. Aaaaaaaaaaand, MORTIFIED. He eventually calmed down, but we had two repeats of this before the day was out.

The reality is that toddlers have meltdowns. Every parent or caregiver has dealt with it, and we all feel like shit when it happens. The looks of pity, disgust and utter fear we get from the other shoppers don't help, and that sense of "how can my kid be acting this way?" just seals the FML deal. Learning that you can't always have what you want is a hard lesson - especially for a spoiled kid like F. I know he's spoiled - he's my only child and I want him to have the things he wants whenever I can make that possible. My parents absolutely dote on him. But F has also had a little life filled with unease and change - he's been shuffled around with me for the past three years, from my return to school when he was an infant, into our new home, back to my mom's and now on this new journey. He's not old enough to process it and he's not old enough to understand that wanting something doesn't make it his, and we both survived the meltdowns - even if just barely.

And I love him too much to really pretend he's not mine anyway.

Eruptions

We've all been there: so overwhelmed with anger and frustration that, in spite of our best efforts, we just can't hold it in for another second. And then it happens, as we are powerless to stop it: we lose our shit.

Yesterday was what you might call a let-down. Big disappointment. I'll go one step further to call it an absolute piss-off. I drove five hours with my Mom and F to the new apartment. The building manager looked at me like a crazy person.

"We didn't have an appointment for today, did we?"

"Um, yep... I was supposed to take ownership today... I called twice this week to confirm. My power was supposed to be hooked up yesterday..."

Meanwhile I'm looking out the window at tenants in the building across the driveway smoking. In their apartment. Wait, didn't I sign a lease that stated I absolutely could not smoke in the building? Why is she still looking at me like I sprouted a second head? She scrambled around her office looking through paperwork, occasionally glancing quizically at me and then announced, "I don't know why this wasn't written down."

I watched her write it down the day of the lease-signing. I spoke to her last week. I called again this week, twice. Once to confirm my move-in date, the second time to confirm that the power corporation would be setting my power up. Somehow, she missed all of that.With a sick feeling in my stomach, I started wondering if I had made a mistake. Is this what I'm going to be contending with in this building, with this company?

The truth is that the series of events that led up to my gasket-blowing started long before my meeting with the building manager. I was overtired, feeling unwell and stressed out about moving. Finley was feeding off of my anxiety and acting up in the way that only two-year-olds can. I awoke yesterday with a heavy heart and a sense of dread. I snapped at Mom, Dad and F. I grumbled the whole way to the apartment, my bad mood stewing.

When I went to let myself into the apartment, I was greeting with the smell of fresh paint. YAY! They told me they didn't think they would bother repainting it when I had asked (three times). Sense of happy disappeared when I got completely through the door and saw that the apartment was in complete disarray. Shelves were laying on paper on the floor, wet paint all over them. The walls were tacky with their first coat of paint, but the ceilings looked fantastic! Cigarettes laid on my counter top and the lights were on. No one was there, but it was pretty obvious my apartment would not be ready for me to move in.

Nope. Wednesday. Great. My plans to get the apartment ready before I started classes on November 1 were thrown up in the air and smashed into smithereens. The only bonus is that a full carload of stuff has been unloaded into the middle of a bedroom and thus, that work is done. Angrily, I locked the door and drove away from the apartment. We went to the mall to walk around after five hours spent in the car, only to have Finley launch himself into the world's biggest meltdown. As I drove down the highway I could feel my frustration boiling over, and then it happened.

MOMMY MELTDOWN

I cried and grumbled and yelled and then I felt instantly better.

For how mad I was about leaving the apartment, I felt like a million bucks (except for cramped legs and a soreback from sitting in a car for nearly twelve hours). I got to sleep in my bed, snuggle with my dog and after F's bad mood had also passed, we bought a new movie for the car DVD player.

Once again my plans fell through and things looked bleak, but once the cranky skies cleared I was able to reroute and snuggle with one floppy eared dog. Just one more blessing in disguise to add to the list.