Six Word Saturday (7/13/13)

Coming Home, Problems, and My Birthday

Sunday the 7th after breakfast at the hotel we started the long drive home, making it all the way to Raton, N.M., and stayed overnight at Holiday Inn Express (indoor pool again).  We ate at Pizza Hut and the people there were exceptionally nice.  Even though we warned the kids continually about swimming safely and avoiding swimmer's ear, my daughter finally confessed to me that her ear had been bothering her for two days and was getting worse.  My husband got some items at a Wal-Mart to help clean her earwax with but she still couldn't hear out of it even though the pain was better.

The next day we drove the rest of the way home, stopping at a Taco Bell in Belen.  Belen is out in the middle of nowhere and this Taco Bell was out in the middle of, out in the middle of, nowhere.  When my husband saw it, he commented in this little wistful voice, "It's like a little Taco Bell oasis out in the desert."  Too funny!

The 9th was my 46th birthday.  Dunkin' Donuts was supposed to have their grand opening but we drove by and it looked like it was still being worked on, so my husband took me to Burger King for lunch instead, and then for dinner we went to Texas Roadhouse and had a great dinner.  My kids and husband got me some Turtles candy and two pairs of earrings.  My mother-in-law got me a pedometer that you hook up to your USB drive on the computer every night and a program keeps track of how many steps you walk.  I like it.

At counseling on the 10th we did this exercise where a tender, compassionate version of yourself sits in one chair and your hard-nosed unforgiving (i.e. regular) self sits in another.  I'm really hard on myself about people not liking me, blaming myself for it, feeling like I should be able to fix it somehow.  Then my compassionate self commented that it seriously hurts me to be rejected and I am just really desperate to have friends and it can't be all my fault things aren't working out.  I felt listened to.  I felt real.  The surprising thing was I truly didn't need "references" to back up how I feel.  (Like saying "my husband feels like this too" or "remember when so-and-so felt the same thing.")  I could just say "I feel like X" and mean it, and it didn't cross my mind that someone might disagree or might want me to feel something different.

On Friday after my husband's helping my daughter nightly with ear washing, my daughter went to my husband at 10:00 at night complaining about her ear and he went ballistic.  He helped her begrudgingly and I walked in as she was laying on our bed while he was doing it.  He yelled at me to go away and I said I was getting ready for bed.  He was glaring at me.  My daughter looked miserable and mouthed to me "I'm sorry."  After she got done, my husband quickly turned off the light and pretended to be asleep before I could get in bed and talk to him about what happened.  The next morning my daughter had emailed me that he got mad at her for flinching one of the times he squirted water in her ear.  She said whenever he took wax or water out of her ear after that, he squirted it directly on her face.  My heart was broken.  I told her that was mean of him and disgusting and I told her I'd take her to the doctor, even though she has already been there twice for swimmer's ear this summer and my husband didn't want her to get any more antibiotics because he thinks she will become immune to it if she ever gets genuinely sick.  The worst part of this was both Saturday and Sunday he refused to speak to my daughter at all.  She's usually his errand buddy but she never got to go anywhere with him.  Because he was being so childish, he didn't even talk to me Saturday!  The most hurtful thing about the weekend though was he would talk to my son like normal and act all friendly with him, and then my daughter walks in the room and he'd glare at her and walk out.  Having to deal with that treatment from him myself is hard enough, but it was torture watching my daughter suffer from it.  He loudly told my son that "maybe your mother should take your sister to the doctor."  Oh sure, it's a great idea if he's the one who thinks of it, huh.  I told her to stop going to her father for help