Stretched
Okay, so I haven’t posted much recently, nor really replied to much. I’ve been busy. Well, busy is an understatement. Witness:
Saturday, June 2: Ran up to Circuit City and purchased a lovely plasma television for the family. Drove to IKEA and purchased a gigantic entertainment center/shelf unit to house said plasma television, media, and other assorted odds and ends. Tetris and I realized that the entertainment center would not fit in the previous television stand’s spot and began working out the placement for the new unit. Zach begins his descent into never-never land.
Sunday, June 3: Robi came over at the crack of stupid to pick up the old television (I will never have to move that heavy ass bitch again! yay!), stand, and assorted end tables. Tetris and I began putting the beast together. All went well until we realized one of the drawers was the wrong color. Mental note to return to IKEA and exchange. Realize we don’t have the right hardware to re-hang the shelves that we hung last year and are moving from one wall to another. Another mental note for the correct anchors.
Monday, June 4: Tetris goes out of town on business. After work, I head over to Home Depot and purchase paint, rollers, trays, edgers, tape, etc. Upon arriving home, I manage to get one wall in the dining room painted. Zach goes AWOL. We won’t discuss what transpired when he returned.
Tuesday, June 5: Get up at the crack of stupid and get into work early. Leave work early and head to the periodontist to have more scaling done, stopping at Home Depot on the way to pick up forgotten items. Fucking Joy. Go home and start painting again. Therapist arrives, takes up two and a half hours of my evening. Zach goes AWOL. Second verse, same as the first.
Wednesday, June 6: Get up at the crack of stupid and get into work early. Leave work at a reasonable hour. Go home and start painting again, stopping at Home Depot yet again for more rollers and tape. Therapist arrives, takes up considerable time. Zach goes AWOL. You know this tune by now, right? Had a very long conversation with Zach’s father and came to an agreement on what we are doing. Begin planning Zach’s move.
Thursday, June 7: Get up at the crack of stupid and get into work early. Leave work at a reasonable hour. Go home and start painting again, stopping at Home Depot yet again - you would think I’d have it all under control by now! Zach goes AWOL. You guessed it, still not talking about what happened when he came home.
Friday, June 8: Take the day off! Get up relatively early and carry on with the painting bullshit. By now, I’ve had it up to my ears with paint and can’t wait for this shit to be done. Don’t finish, but stop to start cleaning up the place and myself - at this point, I’m covered in sweat, paint, and tears. Tetris comes home! Yay! Drag him out shopping with me to, you guessed it, Home Depot and Target. Come home and Zach has once again gone missing. Call his father at 11:00, advise him that I’m going to report him as a runaway if he doesn’t show up by midnight. Zach arrives at 11:45, all communication has broken down by now, I send him to his room and advise him to not even bother to speak to me.
Saturday, June 9: Side trip to the storage shed to drop off a few items, and then a road trip to IKEA. Okay, by now, I am hating IKEA too. Exchange the drawer for the correct one, purchase a desk set for my corner of the family room for my computer (the old one? Yeah, older than dirt and falling apart. It had to go.) Put together the desk, Tetris gets the shelves hung (or was that Friday? I’m so burned out now I can’t remember.) Zach acts like a reasonable human being for the first time in over a week. He BBQs some burgers and a relatively reasonable evening ensues.
Sunday, June 10: More shopping. Fuck I’m sick of this by now. I keep reminding myself that the idea to transform the place into something resembling an actual home was initiated by no one other than myself. But damn, I’m tired of all this running around. Tetris runs cabling throughout the family room so that it is all neatly hidden and tucked away. I put together a much needed shelf for the kitchen. Gawd, it’s ugly, I hates it, but there’s not much to be done about it at this point. A friend of Zach’s shows up, they sit around outside, I remind Zach that he’s not to go anywhere. 15 minutes later he leaves. Returns home late, again, communication does not exist. Get some laundry done, and attempt to sleep. Oh, somewhere in there we made another trip to the storage unit and got Tetris’s end tables and coffee table for the family room.
Monday, June 11: Zach’s court date is moved to July. July?! I cannot handle this for another month. Make calls and am trying to get it moved to a closer date. Tetris goes out of town again.
Completed: Dining room is painted. Kitchen is mostly painted. Living room has one wall left. Family room is a totally new space. Entertainment center is gorgeous, desk matches. Tetris’s end tables and coffee table match perfectly. Tiny basement window now looks like a doorway with full length curtains. Beautiful.
To do: Finish painting the above mentioned and do sanding and touch up where needed; finish hanging shadow boxes and shelves in kitchen and dining room (tonight). Replace kitchen cabinet hardware; polish all wood - including cabinets (tomorrow night). Finish front yard work - we did one side of the steps, the other side needs to be completed (Wednesday night). Shampoo carpet and clean furniture; purchase new bedding and bath items (Thursday night). In between all that, I have to try to re-establish communication with my son, get his court date moved, finish up all of my name change details, make arrangements with the court system in Florida to adjust the support order to reflect his move to his father’s, write a witty blog entitled “Life Lessons in Painting”, get birthday shopping done, plan a birthday bash for Saturday, go to an awards ceremony, normal work, stop crying, return to the periodontist, bring the kids to their optometrist appointment, reschedule Cricket’s orthodontist appointment, pay the bills… shit, I just realized I could go on for another four lines without batting an eye. And I haven’t even mentioned the other painting projects on the list. Oy.
In short, I’m fucking busy. And stretched to my absolute limit. Ever blow up a balloon so much that you can tell just one little squeeze will make it pop? Yeah, I’m like that, except some asshole keeps trying to force more air in.
There’s so much going on with my son right now that I can’t even begin to coherently explain it. But throughout everything I am doing, there is this underlying, and overlaying, sense of disconnect that causes everything else to be such a mess. I’ve taken on too much, but it’s what I do to escape the things I cannot control. I push myself to the absolute edge. By Thursday night, I can guarantee you that I’ll be a quivering emotional nut basket. And by Friday? I’ll be better. By Saturday? It’ll be as if it never happened.
It’s how I operate. Push, push, push. Collapse. Get up and start all over again.
We’ll return to normal operating procedures after the collapse and subsequent boot strap pulling.