February 29, 2008
Peeved.
I think I’m going to change the name of this blog to Crabby Mommy.
Today’s extremely trivial yet blown-out-of-proportion gripe? It’s Mother’s Day in England on Sunday. And my dipsh*t husband forgot to send anything to his mother, despite the fact that I reminded him, oh, I don’t know, 12 or 15,000 times before he left for Argentina.
She and I can’t stand each other. I’m the daughter-in-law who can do no right; the evil manipulative conniving yankee who stole her precious son away. I believe most of my in-laws know me as “That American Woman”, and couldn’t tell you my first name if their Earl Grey Tea depended on it.
So, what did I do? The honorable thing of course. Sent her a beautiful bouquet of lilies & roses to be delivered tomorrow, at a whopping cost of $112.98. I really wanted to send her black carnations and a dead skunk; but the local skunks are still hibernating and seem to be in short supply. Oh, well. I’m sure she won’t like it and the greenery will make her sneeze and the lillies will be overwhelming and I’ll hear all about how much she hates pink (in an e-mail which will be deleted before it even gets opened).
But that……that’s not even the point. While I was flipping through my calendar, I got hit with an enormous slap in the face. This will be the first Mother’s Day I get to enjoy as a mother-to-be. This will be the first Mother’s Day where I won’t want to stay in bed and cry all day. This will be the first Mother’s Day where I can officially celebrate the day without feeling like a fraud.
And where will my husband, father of the child I’m about to become a mother to, be? In bloody Brazil, on yet another work assignment. We won’t get to celebrate our anniversary, which falls on a Saturday night, because he’ll be leaving at 6:00 the next morning. We won’t get to celebrate his birthday AGAIN (for the 4th year in a row, I think, because he’s always been somewhere else). And he won’t be around to spend our first real Mother’s Day together, which hurts me most of all.
Over the span of eight months, my husband will have gone to South Korea for 4 weeks, missing Halloween and Thanksgiving. Followed by Peru in January for another 4 weeks. February and March? Argentina for almost 4 more weeks. And what about May and June? Brazil.
I’ve been coping with it so far, because what else can I possibly do? But it’s lonely when he’s gone, and I can’t talk to him about all of my pregnant pains or childbirth fears or include him in all of the ups and downs this pregnancy has brought. I think I’m going to have to attend breathing classes and breastfeeding classes and newborn care classes all by myself, because I don’t know that I can count on him to be here.
His employers already are asking when he needs to stop travelling. My suggestion? Throughout my 3rd trimester, starting in mid-June. But I’m sure they’ll squeeze in another trip or two in July and August, leaving me to deal with all the shopping and nursery preparation on my own. Dammit.
And I’m grateful he has a job with a steady income. But it’s hard to feel like a single mother, when my absentee husband is never around.
