total control

I'm having serious control issues. To be perfectly accurate I probably should say serious lack of control issues. Some of it can be blamed on the weekend, but for the most part this is an ongoing thing recently. And it's gotten to the point where it's about to drive me completely insane. My problem is not that I'm trying to micromanage things into the next millennium, but that I feel I have no grip on what's going on around me. For example -


My house looks like an explosion in a paper factory. Every kind of paper - bills, newspapers, school work, scripts, junk mail, magazines, half finished kid's artwork - name it. It's on my dining room table. And my kitchen counter. And my kitchen table.


My living room is a huge pile of gaming equipment sitting in front of an entertainment hutch with a broken off door that has a chair pulled in front of it because Sasquatch is afraid a dog will hurt his XBox 360. There is an ethernet cord running from the computer room next door through the dining room and into the living room so that the most precious 360 can be internet capable. It is physically impossible to walk from one room to the other without tripping on it.


We've lived here a year and we've only painted five rooms. There is almost nothing on our walls. Our computer room, which you can't get anywhere downstairs without seeing, has become the designated trash dump for orphan furniture and exercise bikes no one uses. There is a huge roll top desk in there which is too big even with ten foot ceilings, but we need the storage because in our lovely Victorian we only have one closet downstairs. And it's tiny. The desk has become the great piling ground for every piece of crap you can imagine and is so loaded down that every time someone walks by something falls off.


I had a list of things to get done last week that all came to a screeching halt when Gumby came home sick from school Wednesday. Luckily he was the only one of my kids to get this bug, although it's tearing through the school and I certainly had a hit of it myself. He was out for the rest of the week, not leaving the house once, including for the annual School Carnival Friday night. I stayed home with him and Sasquatch and Surfer Dude went. It's the first Carnival I've ever missed.


Sasquatch seems to not care a bit that he is having serious difficulties at school and we have not been able to find the magic key to make him care. Everything is a power struggle, even when I refuse to engage. Take the backpack for instance. An innocuous piece of cloth that helps ensure that whatever you need - in class or at home - is where it should be. It should not be a loaded topic, the backpack, and yet he absolutely refuses to carry it. He has a wonderful one that I forced on him at the beginning of the school year, but it has been sitting in his locker ever since. And he is always in the position of having whatever it is he needs somewhere he isn't. I am here to tell you that, like leading a horse to water, you cannot make someone carry a backpack. The question is why in the world should you even need to make them? Why can't he just do it? I'm about to stop trying to help and just let him fall on his ass. He's never going to be the kid who learns anything the easy way, but this is killing me. He's killing me.


And Sunday I found Ratfink, the oldest of our three pet rats, dead in his cage. I had to tell Gumby that his rat had died, and he lost it. The Film Geek is, of course, out of town. Sasquatch was a huge help, and, I have to say, an absolute love to his younger brothers, who were both beside themselves. We carefully laid Ratfink in a shoe box filled with pictures from his younger days that we printed off the computer. Gumby picked out the rat's favorite colors from my Pratt and Lambert sample chips that were sitting there and we all wrote notes on the chips to put in with the rat. Then, in the pouring rain, we buried him in a corner of the yard. (I had better not see a dog anywhere near that corner). It was not an easy day.


And then there's the Fitness Regime with a Monday D-Day. I've actually been looking forward to it because that at least is something I have some control over. I arranged my day so that I could go to the gym as soon as I dropped the younger kids off at school. After that I was going to go pedal to metal on all the errands and grocery shopping and recycling and everything I didn't get done this weekend because of one thing or another. I've not gotten to my regular blog hopping either and I apologize for that.


As I was writing the sixth paragraph of this post I heard a strange noise from the bathroom and walked in to find Surfer Dude sitting on the pot and vomiting all over the floor. As I was cleaning that up Sasquatch came in wrapped in a blanket and said "I don't feel good."


You know what? Neither do I.


I feel like this...

Total Control by Martha Davis (live 2007)

[via FoxyTunes / The Motels]