now playing: mogwai, “nick drake”
(hit their site if for no other reason than to see the pic of tony the tiger with siegfried and roy…i almost pissed myself)
i love my children. i hate the holidays.
halloween, thanksgiving, and christmas, all within the span of 90 days, usher in the annual parental negotiation phase…where every waking moment of their lives are fodder for bartering and negotiation.
it should be noted, that i am typically a pretty capable negotiator, and i can usually compromise with just about anyone – i have to keep myself in check in some instances to keep myself from giving away too much, because i am, of course, perpetually concerned with how i’m perceived…but i usually fare best with a sane and logical negotiating partner. this is never the case with the person whom fate has cast as the mother of my children.
i won’t even go into what it is that informs my decisions where relationships are concerned – hell, that could well be a topic for nanowrimo if i didn’t already have a thought about where i wanted to go with that…maybe next year. but this woman hears nothing said by any voice that doesn’t come from inside her head, so there’s a huge amount of futility involved, which to this day only comes to light after i’ve made some attempt to communicate something to her, only to realize that she hasn’t heard a word i’ve said.
i’ve had two ex-girlfriends who were single mothers, one of whom i almost married. neither had any real contact with their parental counterparts while we were together, and i often mentioned to them how lucky they were that they didn’t have to fight/bicker/negotiate/bargain in damn near every aspect of their kids’ lives – this statement, of course, carries no weight when you’re calling the cable company to have the TV shut off because you can’t afford it and you’re receiving zero funds in the support category…but i lack that particular perspective on the situation.
i am tired of constantly having to barter for time that legally belongs to me, though.
as an adult who has pretty vivid memories of my childhood, knowing what i now know to be true about those times has given me some serious perspective about what was actually going on around me at a given point in my life. and both of my kids are extremely sharp. they get it. and someday, they’ll get it all, and it’ll be obvious to them what was going on at a given time, and hopefully will make peace with things as they turned out with a minimum of therapy.
this is my wish, anyway.
in the meantime, i have to try to scramble to gain their availability for halloween if they are to go door-to-door in my neighborhood at all.
it’s tough to negotiate when no one is talking back.