So we have figured out why the treatment for the bedbugs didn’t work the first time around.
We’ve taken apart the bed frame in my son’s room and turns out, sure, the treatment may have killed all the live ones, but….those buggers had laid hundreds and maybe even thousands of eggs in the wood of his bed frame. Gawd.
So, the bed frame goes out the door and everything else in the room gets treated and then washed down with a bleach water wash. I’m so tired of bugs. Every night when I go to bed, no matter what’s going on, I feel my skin crawling even when there’s nothing there. One of my hairs falls out of my head and lightly lands on my arm? I’m scratching myself until I’m raw.
I haven’t been to sleep before 2:30 am once this week you guys. Not once. The night before last night, it was almost four am before I finally drifted off.
The good news is, my daughter Keisha is moving back home!! Yay!!
Look, we’ve all been teenagers and we’ve all felt at that time that we could rule the world and do no wrong (what I wouldn’t give for a smidgen of *those* feelings back some days now, am I right?) but the truth is that sometimes things in life don’t go the way you want them to. It’s a hard and not usually fun lesson to learn, but sometimes you just have to learn things by going through them.
At first she didn’t want to come home. She is so used to living by her own rules that she wanted to investigate the cost of renting her own place. So, she figured out what she could afford a month and started looking up what was available in the area for that price.
We went with her when she went to check out the crack house. I’m really glad we did. I’m also glad that she left there saying NO EFFING WAY because I would have allowed her to live there over my dead body.
I’m not kidding. There was a dude sitting on the porch who was trying to smoke a cigarette, was very obviously stoned out of his mind, had his shirt open and exposing his 50+ year old saggy man chest and looked at my kid with eyes that said “fresh meat”. I swear, just seeing this guy made my husbands hands clench into fists on reflex. Thank goodness, when we left there, she was so grossed out she almost wanted hand sanitizer even though she didn’t touch anything. Myself, I wanted to bathe in the stuff. Nasty.
So, with her new first hand knowledge that with bottom of the barrel rent prices comes bottom of the barrel neighbors, she’s moving home. Hurrah!
With a bit of surprise, my youngest son, the ten year old, seems to be the most excited about it. I hadn’t realized how much he missed her. It’s really sweet, he’s been counting down the days and when I told him today that she’d be home for good on Tuesday, he actually cheered out loud and got momentarily teary eyed.
I love my kids.
My 12 year old daughter and I had a heart to heart the other night. You see, about a month ago she came to me all sad and crying. You have to understand this about her, she’s still very young for her age. As the older girls in a household sometimes seem to mature quite quickly and take on more grown up characteristics before their time, so do the younger ones seem to cling to their youth for as long as possible. At least I have found this to be the case in my house. So Kathryn, unlike her 17 year old sister, at 12 is still my little girl. She’s not into make up yet or dying her hair like Keisha was, she still has barbies and stuffies in her room and on her bed. She still likes to be kissed goodnight.
But I digress
We talked about a month ago where she was crying because she ‘didn’t have any friends’ (she gets teased a bit at school, very much not one of the cool kids), she thinks her glasses make kids not want to like her, she is very self conscious about her teeth (Kathryn is a slow developer, her teeth came out and grew in weird and now she has two teeth, both on the upper and lower gums that grew in directly behind the front ones. She’s already had one dental surgery, but it will cost over $2000 to fix the rest and long story short, we can’t do it yet) and how the kids call her shark mouth sometimes. She’s scared about middle school next year and she’s very aware of the fact that a lot of the girls are already getting ‘shape’ to their bodies and she is not. Not yet anyway.
She thinks no one likes her.
My heart….broken.
But-the other night she came in to talk to me about it again and said that she’s trying to remember our last conversation and trying to focus on the positive more often and not so much negatives. She said, when she looks in the mirror from now on, or she has a bad day, she will try to think “how does my mommy see me?” and focus on that instead.
If that girl can’t reduce me to a pile of goo, no-one can. I was melting.
It is funny though, I am hard on myself all the freaking time. And just earlier this week I wrote a post about how I have to remind myself to try and look at myself through my husband’s eyes when I’m feeling down.
Maybe, through my daughter’s eyes too.
I guess what I’m saying is that even though I’m sleep deprived, my house is making me tear off my skin and there’s more work to do than time to do it, at the end of the day, my first job-mom-is going actually pretty well.
I’m always going to worry about them. I’ll always hate watching them go through hard things even though I know they will learn from them in the long run. Sometimes they’ll make me crazy, sometimes angry, sometimes even crazy angry.
But I’m always going to love them. Insanely hard. And I think they’re turning out pretty darn okay.
I’m proud of that. More so that I am of my accomplishments at work or of any book I’ve written. I mean, I can show a guy how to write a resume and find a job and I can write a story where characters that don’t really exist triumph over personal calamities, but I’M HELPING TO CREATE REAL PEOPLE at home. Sometimes remembering that and being proud of it and just sitting back and enjoying it is worth more than any paycheck.
It’s worth its weight in gold.
Tear
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It’s a good tear though, right?
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I have soooo much in common with you, Nuala! More than the blogging and writing thing…and the 5 kids thing. My 17 yr old is the young for his age one and my 13 yr old is the beyond his years one and the others all are somewhat normally placed but OMG it is so hard now that they are all teens.at.the.same.time. And I have to remember that THEY are my life’s work and that I should take pride in that before all else. Because as much as I complain about the daily one or two incidents with each that makes the day so long…the 9999 really awesome things that they each do daily makes my job so worthwhile. It also tends to make the years fly by.
Hugs and congratulations to being a great mom.
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Thank you Nikki!! It’s so weird, how this internet-y stuff can make people who would probably never have known each other become one another’s biggest supporters. You’re amazing and I’ve seen the pics of your kids and they are gorgeous. AND…I also know from reading your stuff that I’m not the only one whose kids make them stabby sometimes. Hugs back at ya, girl!
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Making mistakes as a teenager is what has to happen (unfortunately), but to make those mistakes in the relatively safe parameters of a family, your family, is one of the best things you can do for your kids. When they (the mistakes) happen you get mad, blow up, and then get on with life with love.
God Bless
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