Ok, Blogger still won't let me post comments on my own blog...any idea why?!
So, quickly, Polly - :) that's what I meant, I was just sorry I made you angry at all!
MM and Kezzie - thank you :) I'm a lot less hormonal the last few days and thus a lot less all over the shop!!
Wednesday 31 August 2011
Friday 26 August 2011
Pity Party
Lately I have been feeling a little sorry for myself.
I am getting to the point of counting as VERY LARGE with Martian. Husbink is revising so hard for his upcoming exams alongside working long hours at a hospital over an hour away that the only help he can give me is about an hour to lie in on a Sunday morning and doing bathtime with Diddy G on the evenings he happens to be home in time (currently not very many.) Diddy G is absolutely amazing, extremely fun and increasingly funny too. But. He's very hard work, I feel like i'm letting him down a lot of the time when I simply don't have the energy for a bit of Quality Parenting and if we have all day together without any respite, I often lose it with him around bedtime and have no patience with the tantrums that are after all part of being a toddler. We make up very fast usually but I still feel completely hideous for shouting at him when he won't brush his teeth/lie down for his nappy/stay still/come here.......
So I've been feeling a bit...exhausted...by all that. And then a few weeks back there was a teeny tiny straw that broke the camel's back of any sense of perspective that I might have had left. A very good friend said something along the lines of "Ooh, Husbink's home for the weekend isn't he? Hope you have some lovely family time and do lots of nice things." I saw Husbink for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I saw Husbink as I made my way up the stairs to bed and he made his way down the stairs to unwind after finally finishing revising. I saw Husbink plenty while I failed to sleep overnight and he slept deeply (and noisily...). That's it. That's our weekend of lovely family time.
So I've been having this lengthy pity party and getting cross with everyone who just doesn't get it. I have the odd moment of clarity and realise that i'm sure there is plenty I don't get about other people's situations and I can't assume that all is easy with them. The clarity doesn't make me feel particularly less sorry for myself but at least less grumpy with everyone else!
It all means that we're into mega countdown time. To the exam. The the due date. To the date Martian actually arrives (a little tricky to count down to!). To the date we find out the exam result... Not a way I like to live but sometimes it just happens. I'll get back to "the moment" soon enough I hope!
I am getting to the point of counting as VERY LARGE with Martian. Husbink is revising so hard for his upcoming exams alongside working long hours at a hospital over an hour away that the only help he can give me is about an hour to lie in on a Sunday morning and doing bathtime with Diddy G on the evenings he happens to be home in time (currently not very many.) Diddy G is absolutely amazing, extremely fun and increasingly funny too. But. He's very hard work, I feel like i'm letting him down a lot of the time when I simply don't have the energy for a bit of Quality Parenting and if we have all day together without any respite, I often lose it with him around bedtime and have no patience with the tantrums that are after all part of being a toddler. We make up very fast usually but I still feel completely hideous for shouting at him when he won't brush his teeth/lie down for his nappy/stay still/come here.......
So I've been feeling a bit...exhausted...by all that. And then a few weeks back there was a teeny tiny straw that broke the camel's back of any sense of perspective that I might have had left. A very good friend said something along the lines of "Ooh, Husbink's home for the weekend isn't he? Hope you have some lovely family time and do lots of nice things." I saw Husbink for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I saw Husbink as I made my way up the stairs to bed and he made his way down the stairs to unwind after finally finishing revising. I saw Husbink plenty while I failed to sleep overnight and he slept deeply (and noisily...). That's it. That's our weekend of lovely family time.
So I've been having this lengthy pity party and getting cross with everyone who just doesn't get it. I have the odd moment of clarity and realise that i'm sure there is plenty I don't get about other people's situations and I can't assume that all is easy with them. The clarity doesn't make me feel particularly less sorry for myself but at least less grumpy with everyone else!
It all means that we're into mega countdown time. To the exam. The the due date. To the date Martian actually arrives (a little tricky to count down to!). To the date we find out the exam result... Not a way I like to live but sometimes it just happens. I'll get back to "the moment" soon enough I hope!
Riiiiiiiight....
So apparently when signed in as myself, I do not have the right to add comments to my own blog at the moment. Ok blogger...
So thank you Polly and Kezzie for your kind comments. Polly, I'm sorry I made you angry! I did have a bit of a meltdown after writing it but seem to have recovered for now!
Let's see if Blogger let's me publish a post now...!
So thank you Polly and Kezzie for your kind comments. Polly, I'm sorry I made you angry! I did have a bit of a meltdown after writing it but seem to have recovered for now!
Let's see if Blogger let's me publish a post now...!
Tuesday 23 August 2011
Long Lost Friendship
(Sorry for the absence, won't bore you with the whys...)
When I was 16 I briefly went out with a boy. Let's call him Dougal. Prior to our little interlude of dating, Dougal and I had been very good friends. We hadn't always been. For a long while, I tolerated him. But ultimately we were very good, possibly even best, friends. Then we dated. Oops.
It ended extraordinarily badly. I'm still, in some ways, not over it. I don't mean I'm not over him, that went very quickly, but what he said and what came out in the break up was the most hurtful stuff that has ever been said to me. It wasn't what he thought of me, it was what other members of his family thought of me. Unfortunately, they continued to be relevant to my life being people from my parents' church. Scrap that, if i'm going to get anything off my chest, I might as well do it properly. His dad was the vicar. He said (allegedly) awful things about me. He also said that they were common opinion in the church meaning that all kinds of people that I trusted (youth group leaders and the like) also thought these things of me. (I've since come to realise that that part at least was not true.) The night when all this came out was actually a couple of weeks before we split up and I still remember that night so clearly. I was staying at a friend's house. I didn't sleep all night I was so upset. Just waiting for it to be a decent enough time to phone my mum and tell her. It was horrible. Anyway, a few weeks down the line, Dougal split up with me saying that he'd never been really sure anyway but he thought that it would make his dad happy if he had a girlfriend. Having found out what his dad thought of me, that logic crumbled rather.
We continued to be "friends" because...well, I'm too polite sometimes. And we had friends in common. And he was at boarding school most of the time so I didn't have to see him much. We kept in touch most of the way through uni but then, thankfully, we didn't. His dad had left my parent's church by then and although I spent years being terrified of bumping into him (the dad) somewhere, it all slowly died away. I did see the dad once, about seven years ago now I would guess. It was therapeutic. He was out right rude to me. I felt that was a whole heap more honest than all the years he'd spent saying "how nice it was to see me" whenever I went to my parents church (you'll be surprised to hear I left and found my own "home".) This isn't meant to be about the dad though. (I'm still working on forgiving him actually, I keep thinking I've managed it and then I realise the huge upset that builds up whenever I think about it all...and relax...) This is about Dougal.
So, we lost touch. But then, of course, Facebook happened, didn't it? And perhaps about three years ago, Dougal befriended me on Facebook. I ummed. I ahhed. It was weird timing, he did it within days of my only other significant ex also befriending me on Facebook. I don't like refusing people on Facebook. (I've done it twice - once with a guy I really truly can't stand and once with a girl we knew in NZ who made Husbink's life very difficult by trying to blur his professional and private lives too much (she spent a lot of time in A&E with psychiatric issues...).) So after a bit of ignoring, I accepted Dougal as a friend.
We didn't "catch up", we just started to appear on each other's news feeds. After a while he "liked" a few things and then started to comment. A while longer and I "liked" things back and made the odd comment. That's all the communication there has been but it has made me really rather sad for friendships lost. Because the kind of bitesize bits you get about people's lives on Facebook, well, I still "get" pretty much all of his. We still like the same things, we still make the same references to films that we loved as teenagers. There are certain status updates that I know he'll be the first to comment on because I know he'll understand. If only we'd never dated we might still be friends. Yes, there is still the potential that the "stuff" would've happened but it might not have been such a big deal given a different context. Sometimes I wonder about emailing him about it, asking whether it was really all true and so on. But I think it better to let sleeping dogs lie. And I think it better to just remember the friendship. It's never coming back now. But perhaps a good thing from Facebook is that I at least don't think badly of Dougal anymore.
When I was 16 I briefly went out with a boy. Let's call him Dougal. Prior to our little interlude of dating, Dougal and I had been very good friends. We hadn't always been. For a long while, I tolerated him. But ultimately we were very good, possibly even best, friends. Then we dated. Oops.
It ended extraordinarily badly. I'm still, in some ways, not over it. I don't mean I'm not over him, that went very quickly, but what he said and what came out in the break up was the most hurtful stuff that has ever been said to me. It wasn't what he thought of me, it was what other members of his family thought of me. Unfortunately, they continued to be relevant to my life being people from my parents' church. Scrap that, if i'm going to get anything off my chest, I might as well do it properly. His dad was the vicar. He said (allegedly) awful things about me. He also said that they were common opinion in the church meaning that all kinds of people that I trusted (youth group leaders and the like) also thought these things of me. (I've since come to realise that that part at least was not true.) The night when all this came out was actually a couple of weeks before we split up and I still remember that night so clearly. I was staying at a friend's house. I didn't sleep all night I was so upset. Just waiting for it to be a decent enough time to phone my mum and tell her. It was horrible. Anyway, a few weeks down the line, Dougal split up with me saying that he'd never been really sure anyway but he thought that it would make his dad happy if he had a girlfriend. Having found out what his dad thought of me, that logic crumbled rather.
We continued to be "friends" because...well, I'm too polite sometimes. And we had friends in common. And he was at boarding school most of the time so I didn't have to see him much. We kept in touch most of the way through uni but then, thankfully, we didn't. His dad had left my parent's church by then and although I spent years being terrified of bumping into him (the dad) somewhere, it all slowly died away. I did see the dad once, about seven years ago now I would guess. It was therapeutic. He was out right rude to me. I felt that was a whole heap more honest than all the years he'd spent saying "how nice it was to see me" whenever I went to my parents church (you'll be surprised to hear I left and found my own "home".) This isn't meant to be about the dad though. (I'm still working on forgiving him actually, I keep thinking I've managed it and then I realise the huge upset that builds up whenever I think about it all...and relax...) This is about Dougal.
So, we lost touch. But then, of course, Facebook happened, didn't it? And perhaps about three years ago, Dougal befriended me on Facebook. I ummed. I ahhed. It was weird timing, he did it within days of my only other significant ex also befriending me on Facebook. I don't like refusing people on Facebook. (I've done it twice - once with a guy I really truly can't stand and once with a girl we knew in NZ who made Husbink's life very difficult by trying to blur his professional and private lives too much (she spent a lot of time in A&E with psychiatric issues...).) So after a bit of ignoring, I accepted Dougal as a friend.
We didn't "catch up", we just started to appear on each other's news feeds. After a while he "liked" a few things and then started to comment. A while longer and I "liked" things back and made the odd comment. That's all the communication there has been but it has made me really rather sad for friendships lost. Because the kind of bitesize bits you get about people's lives on Facebook, well, I still "get" pretty much all of his. We still like the same things, we still make the same references to films that we loved as teenagers. There are certain status updates that I know he'll be the first to comment on because I know he'll understand. If only we'd never dated we might still be friends. Yes, there is still the potential that the "stuff" would've happened but it might not have been such a big deal given a different context. Sometimes I wonder about emailing him about it, asking whether it was really all true and so on. But I think it better to let sleeping dogs lie. And I think it better to just remember the friendship. It's never coming back now. But perhaps a good thing from Facebook is that I at least don't think badly of Dougal anymore.
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