The Morning After

After a long hiatus where life got the better of me, I am making a new resolution to return to blogging - at least semi-regularly.

Happy Pesach (Passover) to everyone who observes it!

Seder was held at our house as usual with my Mom and DH's Mom in attendance and DD16 was with us this year for a change. DD16 was such a big help with the cooking! She loves to cook and she's very good at it and adventurous too.

We begged off of doing the big extended family bash this year by using our impending move to get out of it. It sorta worked. DH's married daughter tried to invite herself and her family (that's 4 people) AND her husband's family (another 4 people) to us for the seder. And when do you suppose we got this phone call?? TWO evenings before the seder!! I heard DH on the phone with her and figured out what she was trying to pull. I rushed into the kitchen where he was on the phone with her and started dramatically drawing my index finger across my throat. As in "if you agree to them coming at this late stage I will kill you, her or myself.....or maybe all three". So it seems her story was that they COULD go to her mil's for seder but she would prefer to come to us so that her kids will have ours to play with! I said to DH, "O I see. So she's gone from telling us that a gay couple having a kids was more normal that us having kids together to actually realizing that her Dad having young kids is a plus for her." In the end DH told her that if going to her mil's was an option then she should take it because we wanted a quiet seder this year but that next year we would be inviting everyone. We will be in the new apartment and it's big enough that if any one wants to get away from anyone else, they can. ;-)

So. Speaking of apartments, thank G-d we finally bought a larger place. Our street is two blocks long so it's just down the block from us. Kinda funny to be moving one block down but it's good. We won't need to change the shul we attend or the kids' schools. We are SO EXCITED about moving. We had been looking like CRAZY for about 10 months and had seen this place last summer. They were asking WAY too much for it at the time and their taste in furnishings/decorating had kinda put us off. We carried on looking at other things and then on Election Day which I had off work, I saw on the internet that they were still trying to sell and I suggested to DH that we go back and take a 2nd look. By this time they were desperate since they'd already bought something else and still had no buyer. This time the place struck us totally differently and we were able to look past the decorating style and see the place's potential. We came home and straight away made a silly offer which was significantly lower than they were expecting to get for it. Man, were we on pins and needles all day long! It was so hard to concentrate on anything, wondering if they'd accept our offer. But they did!

About 2 months before we found the place to move to, a serious buyer for our current apartment had come along and he liked it so much that he was willing to wait until we found something else we wanted to buy. We ended up signing both the sale and purchase contracts on the same day.

The "new" apartment is in a building that is actually about 40 years old but very well looked after. The building is set way back off the street and behind another building so we're hopeful that it will be quieter than where we are now.

The apartment is on the fourth floor of the building and faces east, south and west so it's very bright. Whatever sun is going, we're going to get. I swore I would never again live in an apartment that didn't face south. And I think this is the only apartment we saw that DID face south. Our current apartment is ~100 sq. meters (~1000 sq. ft.). The new apartment is ~160 sq. meters (~1700 sq. ft.). Heaven! It is four bedrooms so the extra bedroom will serve as DH's office and guest room. His work space will FINALLY be out of the way and out of sight. The kitchen is large and an older style and we will be redoing it, at least partially. The apartment only has 1 1/2 baths. DH thinks we need to figure out how and where to stick another shower but I hate to start dividing the place up into little bits just for a shower and ruin the effect of all that gorgeous SPACE! We looked at what other people in the building have done about adding another shower. Everyone did something different and I wasn't crazy about any of the ideas. We may just not do anything straight away and live with it as is until we see what our needs really are.

Our sellers were supposed to be in their new place by Pesach but they don't have the key to their new place yet. So until they get it we can't schedule a moving date. However according to the contract they HAVE to be out by May 1 at the latest and we have to be out of our current place by May 23 at the latest. That gives us a 3 week window to do whatever we're going to do to the new place.

On other matters.....
Mr. Ex has been giving me fits over 5 years of child support that he hasn't paid. I finally took a VERY difficult step and turned off his checks and credit cards. This was about 2 months ago. And since then, with my lawyer's help, we have been trying to negotiate a payment plan for him to pay off the debt of back support that has accrued as well as how he's going to pay going forward.

After I had his money "turned off", the idiot phoned up DD16 and told her I'd done that. WHY?? We weren't home at the time when he spoke to her and when we got home she was sizzling mad - at me. Her take on it is, "Poor Abba. How could you be so cruel?" DD16 has known that he and I had a money issue but I never gave her particulars. But since he'd already put her squarely in the middle, I decided she might as well have all the facts so I laid it out for her and said a few choice things to her about the situation. She said she didn't care and she was going to live with him. The next morning I left the house to do errands and when I got home she was gone. I was a WRECK for about 3 days. The feelings of being betrayed by her were overwhelming. You know, you give and give and give and give and do and do and do and do for your kid and she slaps you in the face by running off to the parent who has done - I won't say nothing - but, as I see it, SO little for her. I'm the one who sat up nights with her when she was sick and dealt with her tantrums when she was little and handled school issues which have been many and ongoing and I'm the one who worried about her mental health through the years (there were two long periods at different times where I felt she needed someone other than me to talk to about stuff she was dealing with, fallout from the divorce and other things, and I sent her to weekly sessions with a child psychologist), etc. And for some of her growing up years, I did all this on my own until I remarried. Her Dad hasn't been involved in any of this.

Long story short, she missed 2 weeks of school to live with him as a means of punishing me for my "cruelty" to her Dad. And while she was there, he was threatening to enroll her in a school near him. It was two weeks of stress that I wouldn't like to relive but in the end she came back. I had gotten myself together enough so that when she did walk back through the door, I said hi and gave her a hug and said NOTHING. I think she was expecting me to make a scene because when I hugged her she gave a huge sigh. Relief?

Two days later I felt there was a lot hanging in the air unsaid so I suggested she and I go out for a coffee and talk and she agreed. We talked for an hour. Both talked, both listened. We obviously don't agree about her Dad but that's ok. She apologized for hurting me by running away to him and she admitted that she probably took too much of the situation on herself by trying to be the mediator between me and him. So all in all, I think/hope she learned some things from the experience and I am proud of myself for handling it the way I did.

Now it's left for her Dad and I to either agree about the money or not. My lawyer has turned out to be pretty useless, much to my disappointment. If he and I can't agree, then I have no idea what will happen or more importantly what he can or will do about it. I hate to think.

My secret weapon is just to keep thinking happy apartment thoughts.

One of my FB friends posted the following yesterday which I found helpful: "Please keep in mind that whatever you're going through, this challenging time in your life is merely IN your life. It is NOT your WHOLE life. So be sure to keep this SLICE of your life in perspective and don't let it overwhelm you. Remember nothing is everything. The part is not greater than the whole."