Summer’s Coming

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Mrs Odie

I have never been so excited for summer in my life.  For the past ten years, I’ve worked summer school EVERY summer except the last two.  Two years ago, I MADE a baby in the summer, and last summer I had a newborn.

Last summer was hard.  Odie and I were adjusting to being parents.  It wasn’t so long ago that we were newlyweds.  Pregnancy and parenthood changes a marriage. Not surprisingly to me now, it often destroys a marriage.  It tested ours.  Last summer was more full of tension and fighting and tears than it was of joy.  I’m not slamming Odie here.  He did the best he could, and I did the best I could.  I was hormonal and fat and terrified of the responsibility I’d taken on by having a child.  He was making the adjustment to father and sole provider while still trying to be somewhat young and have a good time with his friends.

My dad told me recently that fatherhood is nothing like motherhood.  That dads don’t go through it the way moms do and they NEVER will.  I know Odie loves Baby V more than he’s ever loved anyone or anything, including being young and free.  Including me.  But I also know that the love was not an all-consuming, full-body CONNECTION of the soul like it was for me.  I fell in love with my child in an almost romantic way.  The love was instant for him too, but it was easier for him to walk out the door and go back to the person he was before.  The person I was before died in the delivery room and I was reborn someone else.  I think Odie felt the weight of responsibility in a different way.  And it didn’t always feel like a blessing to him.  He needed to get out and away from us sometimes, and back then I didn’t understand that and so we fought.
But it’s a year later and everything is different now.  Baby V isn’t a helpless little larva-like being anymore.  She’s a full fledged little human with giggles and teeth and little curls.  She looks adoringly at her daddy while he reads to her.  She loves the swings at the park.

 

I can’t wait for this summer because Odie will be home from work and we get to play with our daughter.  We have 10 whole weeks to enjoy everything Southern California has to offer: beach, mountains, desert (and the over 100 degree heat of our own, non-air-conditioned house).  We get to BOND.

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Smug Satisfaction Feels So Good

Posted on May 19, 2010 by Mrs Odie

I couldn’t just give you the taste of the ex-boyfriend story and leave you hanging.

I’m not going to call him Jim anymore, because I actually DO have a friend named Jim now.  Jim Krieg.  And he wrote a book for kids called “Griff Carver, Hallway Patrol” (buy it here! www.amazon.com/Griff-Carver-Hallway-Patrol-Krieg/dp/1595142762 ).  So from now on, let’s refer to my ex-boyfriend as “Tiger.”  Because he plays golf and is obsessed with golf and it cracks me up on the inside.

So it’s Mother’s Day, and I wake up and check my phone and see that I have a notification: “Tiger has sent you a message.”  I have to admit, I get a little adrenaline shot from this.  Not sexy excitement, mind you, just, “WHAAAAAAAT?” a la “RAAAAANDY” in “Funny People.”  And when I check Facebook, he sent me the message late at night on Saturday, like around midnight.

And I am SO happy.  Why?  I’ll tell you why.  Because the guy for whom I was never good enough, never pretty enough, never girlfriend or wife material enough is so bored that he’s emailing me at midnight on a Saturday.  And call me crazy, but that just makes me feel like I won.

And to make it even more delicious, his message says something like, “When did people get so uptight about sex?  Is it our age or is it just the people I know?”  Clearly baiting me into a discussion that involves sex.  I will have you know that I behaved very appropriately and did not flirt or write anything even vaguely suggestive.  I told him that I didn’t know what he was talking about and maybe too many of his friends were Republicans.

He then asked me if my husband got jealous or if he has access to my Facebook and email accounts.  This is where it got interesting for me.  I almost got up and ran around the house yelling, “I WIN!  I WIN! I WIN!”  He DOES regret not picking me.  SUCK IT, TIGER!!!  I wrote that my husband was not a jealous man, having no reason to be, and that while he did have access to those accounts, he never looked at them (due to the first thing).  I could not resist paving the way for him to write something to ME that he would not want HIS wife to see.  Petty?  Maybe.  Satisfying? Definitely.

He wanted my opinion about his theoretical plans for a Las Vegas 40th birthday celebration.

“I thought it would be fun to hire some local entertainment to play a round of golf. Have them go around the course with us.”

“Just to be clear, we’re talking hookers here, and not Celine Dion or Cirque de Soleil, right?”

“Strippers are NOT hookers because hookers are for sex and strippers are for looking.” The writer/rhetoric and argument teacher in me wanted to argue that his prelude was that his friends are too uptight about sex and if he was only talking about looking then what was there to be uptight about?  But I didn’t want to pick a fight.  Much.

My ex-boyfriend who is married with many kids writes me after midnight on a Saturday (technically Mother’s Day) to ask if I think he’s out of line to pitch playing golf with strippers on his birthday.

If you do not understand why I found this so personally fulfilling, then you’ve never been rejected the way I have, and I congratulate you for not having to live through that.

To give you an idea of how well the idea went over with the wife, I checked his Facebook page about a week after his birthday.

“Thanks for all the birthday wishes! We had a great time in Las Vegas. Saw Dana Carvey!”

Every lingering wistful feeling of “what if?” died with that email from him.  Died laughing.

 

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