Olivia’s Mommy

Mother’s Day is over in 5 more minutes. We’re watching Inglorious Bastards, ate well, a lovely lunch and yummy pastries for dessert. A calm afternoon with a happy, productive husband.

But the day passed without a single mention of Olivia. Until I brought her up before the movie. Briefly. Tears stifled at the reply.

What should I have said, he asked.

Honestly I have no idea. I can’t put words to thoughts for anything. Yet I so strongly feel there should be something.

He eats like he was ravished, watches the movie with delightful curiosity, ignorant to anything hurtful in his words.

There was nothing hurtful meant, though. Yet I’m left remembering a child of mine who will never. She’ll just never. She will always be the reason Lily is introduced as my living child.

Nonetheless, it was a nice day. How is that possible?

Boring, Boring, Mundane

I am so sick of worrying about money. Money, money, money. It rules my life, makes all my decisions, punishes me for not having enough, makes me think there is an enough. I need to learn to stop wanting things. I need to stop going to Target. I need to stop going out to eat with people at work who clearly have more MONEY than I do.

There are people who know how to get by with what they have, and there are people who think they have more than they do. Unfortunately, I seem to be part of the wrong group because I am always  waking up to a Balance Alert telling me I have 35 cents left in my account and I don’t get paid for another week and a half! How the cuss does this keep happening? We used to get overdraft fees all the time. All The Time. It’s been several years since it’s been an epidemic in our house but every once in a while, we’ll get low and we’ll scrape by and then we somehow quit scraping fast enough and it catches up with us.

Ever since I opened that account for Lily and put $2000 in there, we’ve been needing $100 here, $300 there and now it’s down to $500. So on top of the fact that we can’t live within our means, I’m practically stealing money from my own daughter. Every time we pay her back, I turn around and need some more the next day. And the account is called LILLIAN. Every time I transfer funds, I’m reminded that I’m transferring funds from my 3 year old. The guilt is killing me. I can’t wait to get my bonus from work at the end of the month. It is ALL going into Lily’s account. I will not be happy until it’s back up to the initial $2000.

I read somewhere that one of the best things you can do for your child is make sure they don’t have to take care of you when you’re old. I want to do that and then some. I want to help take care of her when she goes to college. Who knows how much it will cost, if she’ll even want to go to college, but I want her to have options and a little bit of money. I never had that and spent the first 10 years of my adult life screwing around, making things difficult for the middle portion of my adult life.

I guess I can stop venting now. If you’ve made it this far, I apologize for the morning whine. I just couldn’t help myself and had to get it out.