now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

My wonderful husband brought me Chinese food and sat me down and made me eat wonderful things.

I got a shitload of Christmas cards in the mail. I have 16 more to go, to people who know me and won’t give a rat’s ass if they’re there on Dec 27 instead.

I wrapped and boxed up the presents to my grandparents, I wrapped the stocking stuffer to Gramps. I wrapped one of the gifts to the cleaning woman.

I got five rows done on the sleeve and did all the math to convert the shaping and bind off. I got the bedroom a little picked up. There’s now another batch of cookie dough (yes, using those damn sticks of butter) in the fridge.

Slowly but surely, it’s all getting under control again.

I’m tired. I’m blue. I’m sick again, and lordy lord, am I sick of being sick. I have a one day trip to Chicago which is not enough time to see the gang but enough time to miss the little man entirely. The tree’s not up (little man’s school is doing a ‘gift of time’ on saturday morning- he gets dropped off to decorate cookies, we put up the tree), the house isn’t decorated, I just finished the last batch of addressing cards today and now have 17 more to write. I’ve taken the same pound of butter out of the fridge to soften to make cookies every day for 5 days running, and have failed to make them. My arms hurt, my sinuses hurt, my mother’s christmas present isn’t done, the box isn’t ready to be shipped to VA for a very merry Christmas.

I’m trying to make to do lists, and hit things in order, but sometimes, it’s just like can I not get a fucking break? Wait, let’s not use that word. Because that’s what’s wrong with Sean.

Yes, folks, the ER missed a broken leg. A broken leg so special it has its own terminology in the medical literature.

Wait for it.
Wait for it.

Sean has. “Toddler’s Fracture.”

Yes.
An injury so common in toddlers it accounts for 29 out of 100 cases of limping or refusal to walk in preschoolers. So common, in fact, it’s called….Toddler’s Fracture! And the ER missed it, focusing instead on the miniscule chip off his patella (Toddler Fracture, because of how pain messages work, is sometimes self-reported as knee pain).

I’m so angry at them and so gobsmacked they missed it I can’t think straight. My poor sweet boy, running around with, well, a broken leg. And I do mean running. “Children self-limit.” BullSHIT they do. Please observe the monkeychild who apparently has taken to yelling, “BATMAN!” and jumping off things at school.

I just want to cry. I want a hot meal brought to me and nothing to go wrong for 4 hours- no exploding sinuses, no arms hurting, no child maiming self. Mostly, I want my poor sweet kid to have a day free of injury, coughing, or runny nose.

Sick sick, sick.

Did I mention sick?

Amen the ‘a gift of time’ from the school next saturday, otherwise? our tree would so not be put up this year.

Last night, after years of hearing about him, we were supposed to finally meet Leather Pants Grrl/Angeltiger/Autercake’s (jesus woman, litter the net with a few more nom de plumes, why don’t you?) dear, dear friend A. Ally was going to come over and keep tabs on a peacefully slumbering Sean, while the four of us met up at 40 for an evening of good wine and great food.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

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So, we got spanked by snow on Wednesday, stretching into Thursday. Our yard is a winter wonderland (which Sean keeps reminding me, at great volume, was designed expressly for him to play in for hours on end save when he is inside being fed cookies and hot chocolate by little girls with blonde pigtails). One of the nice things about the snow is we can sort of get a survey of what creatures live in our yard. So far we’ve counted tracks from multiple bird species, rabbits, fox, raccoons, squirrel, and possum.

And oh. Oh the possums. We had not seen them (though we had gotten phonecalls about fornicating furries when we had left our garage door up). But oh, how we had heard them.

Apparently, our yard is a veritable possum brothel. A possum bathhouse, the site of countless meaningless hookups and drive-by-fuckings. And so help me god, each and every one of them has taken place in a tree not 15 feet from my head, with all of the sudden attendant grunting and uulating screeching startling the hell out of me and sending laptop, knitting needles, and yarn flying.

Tonight, the Lad was standing at the back sliding glass door and exclaimed, “What the hell is that?” At first, we thought it was a dog, it was so big. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got the ‘fat bottomed girl’ of possumhood living- and fornicating- in my yard. Big and furry is beautiful, yo.

I’d give you the rest of my grammy rant, but lo, lo I am ill.

And stressed.
Cause mom’s sweater? Not done. Other Christmas stuff? Not done. Being sick? Not helpin. Tree not up, many but not all cards mailed, package to VA for Christmas not mailed, flailing and windmilly and behind.

Dear Santa. Please to get me an extra TWO FUCKING WEEKS, it’s all I ask of you!

And a gift card to jimmy beans wool or yarnmarket.
Or Amazon.
Or Williams Sonoma.
OK Santa, I’m a whore. Yarn, books, cooking, I don’t even believe in you but I’m asking for stuff.

Not to mention a rift in the time-space continuum, which really ought to be easy given that you and the 8 reindeer make it around the globe with a bajillion cookie-milk-gift-pee breaks in a single night.
I’m just sayin.

With the reverbarations of my aggrieved shrieking of WHAT. THE. FUCK?! at the Grammy nominations. In what has become an annual tradition Chez Wench, the lad looks at me in addled confusion as I begin spewing obscenities as I read the morning news, until he realizes that in amidst my rantings there are references to ‘acultural morons’ and ‘Weezer is not hard rock!’ and rolls his eyes, wandering off.

And it’s that time. So come fly away, come fly come fly with me, through this year’s nominee list. And I thought the year Rush and Hoobastank got nods was bad. Foolish, foolish wench.

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…in infamy, and if I were a better person, this entire entry would be about the greatest generation. My own family has both the best (my paternal grandfather, who spent 4 years in the navy, in both Atlantic and Pacific theatre) and the not so best (my maternal grandfather, who moved heaven and earth to score himself a sweet sweet nondeployable gig at Great Lakes, teaching fresh faced youngsters how to go off and die in tin cans). Every Pearl Harbor Day for me is a fresh pang, a reminder that generation is aging, and soon enough time will take my beloved paternal Grandpa away from me. I had toyed with the idea of taking him to DC to see the WWII memorial, but a few things crushed that. For one, it is a period of his life he does not talk about, doesn’t engage with, and has made it clear it’s not something he wants to embrace. For another, he adores my career, and I know- just know he’d turn to me and ask me what I think of the design, and we’d spend our time bitching about how the thing was designed by committee and by being so disparate fails to capture the emotional resonance and grandeur of other memorials.

Instead, today’s overriden by the immediate HOLY SHIT IT’S ASS COLD OUT. Like, spectacularly, my toes have reached maximal ya-ya freezing capacity much to my husband’s chagrin, cold. The high is in the teens. The snow is bitchslapping us. Mother nature? Is Izumi-ing our collective asses. I can only assume this is divine payback for the intelligent design hoohah in this state (You idiot people! Stop doing these inane things in my name! Religion isn’t science! Here, let me give you an unholy smackdown! Guess what, if you think I made everything, I MADE CHARLES DARWIN, TOO)

But in a lovely bit of circularity, my Grandpa did email me today, telling me how horrifically cold it was out up by him. I’d been wondering what the hell to do- I grew up in warm climates, so I don’t have warm fuzzy memories of what my parents did when we were housebound in the snow and cold, and there was Grandpa’s email. Waxing poetic about what he and Grandma did with my dad and his sister when it was wintery out. It’s all the more poignant because Grandpa missed much of this when my dad and aunt were Sean’s age- because he was somewhere at sea, listening to transmissions and trying to make sense of them, and so many of the suggestions begin at age 4-ish for my dad.

Grandpa missed seeing a toddler wenchdad, face pressed to the glass, trying to lick the snow as it fell outside. As I sat there with Sean on my lap this morning, drinking warm milk with maple syrup and reading about Snowflake Bentley, Pearl Harbor Day seemed awfully, horrifyingly close. Not for the surprise immediacy of it all, but for the number of dads who then went on to join up, and missed so many moments with their children. So many books, and batches of cookies, and drawing in the frost on the windows. And knowing that it is going on still, fathers and mothers in the middle east and Afghanistan, so far away from their children.