lulz

He rang in the new year while counting us down to simultaneous orgasms. He is so much fun, srsly.

Of course, I was stuffed under the desk oblivious to the time but concentrating on his countdown to my own celebration (snicker).

I was (am still, haha) a bit shnockered, so he stuffed me under there with a pile of pillows to prop up the parts of me that I was too inebriated to prop up myself for him. See how caring he is? All loving and romantic and shit.

All in all, not a bad new beginning. :)

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Soup

(cross-posted to Domestic Servitude and stolen from Slave 2.0)

Slow Cooker Ham and Bean Soup

A meaty ham bone or ham hock or about 2 cups diced ham (the ham bone really adds flavor though!)
16oz northern beans
½ large onion diced
2 to 3 stalks celery, sliced
8 cups low sodium chicken broth
2 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
2 Tbsp minced garlic
2 Bay leaves
½ tsp thyme

Soak the beans overnight in cold water. In the morning, rinse and place in the bottom of a crock pot. Place the ham bone on top of beans. Dump in the rest of ingredients and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours (depending on your cooker’s cooking time. It could take up to 8 to 10, but mine was done in 6) until the beans are tender. Can be thickened with a little cornstarch and water, if you like a more stew-like consistency.

Plugging this into Calorie Counter’s recipe analysis, and roughly calculating that my slow cooker made about 12 cups and a serving size was about 2 cups of soup (as the main course of a meal, 2 cups sounded about right?), it gave me these nutrition facts:
Calories: 130
Total Fat: 3.7g
Saturated Fat: 1.1g
Trans Fat: 0.0g
Cholesterol:20mg
Sodium: 621mg
Total Carbohydrates: 15.4g
Dietary Fiber: 2.9g
Protein: 9.4g

~~*~~

Last night Master and I had a date night. We went out for dinner and then strolled the stores for the after-Christmas clearance sales. Then we came home, disappeared into the mancave with some beer and peanuts (penis!) and proceeded to get buzzed. And then we got tired and went to bed. haha. We were *supposed* to have sex but we’re old, so… sleep won out.

Jes and Babygirl have gone to visit BabyDaddy for his last few days of leave, so we’re enjoying a small break from that stress. I don’t worry too much about her when they go there because BabyDaddy is really good with Babygirl when he has her (too bad he seems to forget about her when she’s not in front of his face), plus they’re staying at his mother’s house so I know she’s being watched and cared for (though *obviously* not nearly as well as *I* do it, lol)

Oh, and, yes, Babygirl did have a UTI. She’s being treated now.

Re: his military insurance: She is supposed to be covered; there’s been the matter of her parents getting their shit together enough to gather the proper paperwork, plus some stipulation that Babygirl needed to be present at the recruiter(??) (which sounds completely odd to me. What if your child lived in another state? Like, gee, Babygirl does.) So whatever. Who knows. Probably Jes just figured Medicaid was easier as she was already on it. I spoke with Babydaddy and asked him to finish up the paperwork so she could be covered so we’ll see what happens.

Re: Am’s job/college/etc.: I’m taking your comments to heart and I’m inclined to agree. Thanks. :)

Re: Jes’s diagnosis: The BPD will make things harder for her, but I’m not using it as an excuse for everything. Her inability (or unwillingness) to be a parent to Babygirl may or may not be related to the BPD. She may have been this way as a teen parent without the BPD, we’ll never know. We are cracking down on what we’re willing to put up with from her, including the stipulation that if she continues on this path of unemployment/partying/ignoring her responsibilities/skipping therapy, we are going to kick her out and if I have guardianship, Babygirl won’t be going with her. She understands our position, agreed to it, and here we are. Her group sessions start this month, and she’s attending her individual sessions (so far).

There’s a big part of me that thinks she’s not going to be able to cut back on the drinking and partying, even if she does manage to hold down a job and stay with her therapy.

But bah.. I’m tired of talking and thinking about her right now. They are elsewhere and, dammit, I’m on vacation.

~~*~~

So what are you all up to for New Year’s? We ain’t doing shit. We never chance the crazy drivers on New Year’s Eve, plus there’s supposed to be a snow storm heading this way later tonight. We’ve got some drinks, some movies, and some plans to have sex. Perhaps not in that order though. :D

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Dump

I am so confused on what to do about this guardianship business. I can’t get Jes to give me straight answers, she talks one way and acts another. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do or if it’ll just push her further down the wrong path. I can’t shake the feeling that she’ll use it as her excuse to not have to change/get better and I don’t want to hand her that on a silver platter, but then I come back to the bottom line being Babygirl’s well-being. But then if I’m only focused on Babygirl’s well-being, am I abandoning Jes’s well-being? And should I or shouldn’t I? She *is* 20 years old, after all. And yet– she’s *only* 20 years old. I didn’t have it together at 20, and I didn’t have the added pressure of a kid, nor did I have the added difficulty of her diagnosis.

And this affects the smallest things. Babygirl comes to me first for (almost) everything. “I’m hungry, Beebaw”, “I’m thirsty, Beebaw”, “Beebaw, I gotta go potty!” I try and redirect her to her mom, even when I can tell that Jes is somewhere else mentally, or is irritated with Babygirl. Sometimes Jes takes care of it, sometimes she snaps out “I thought you were taking guardianship!” (translation: do the work for me. Right?), other times she ignores Babygirl because she’s ‘lost’ in her head/phone/tv, or she’s too tired, too hungover, too… insert whatever word you want because it fits, I’m sure, and I do it because the only one suffering is Babygirl.

I don’t know what to do about Am and her unemployment and college. She’s looking, but probably not as hard as she could. Do I ‘punish’ her by making her drop out until she has a job, which seems drastic, really. She’s doing well in her classes, not flunking, not partying, not skipping, not fucking off… and there is no denying the unemployment rates here. I don’t give her ‘extra’ money so I don’t feel like I’m overindulging her. We’re covering the tuition that her financial aid and loans don’t cover; the gas money to get to classes and back; and some of her food costs, but not all and certainly not what I would consider too much. She’s good about eating here before or after classes, and only needs to eat in town when she has classes all day and it’s cheaper to eat in town rather than drive home and then drive back.

But she seems pretty content with that arrangement and is probably not incredibly motivated to find a job. Am I just making things too easy on her? And shouldn’t I, anyway? She’s 18, attending a university full-time, and passing every class. Maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe they’re too low.

Gah. You can’t even imagine the circles my head is running in. Constantly. I’mma get an ulcer.

One place my head isn’t is on slavery. I’m barely staying afloat there. M has completely (mostly, almost) backed away from these decisions. He’s put his limitations out there, given me the go-ahead to decide what I want to do within those limitations, and has otherwise said he’ll support me in whatever decision I make. And I’m not suggesting he force any decision on me to make it easier because it won’t make it easier. It’ll make it harder. I appreciate that he’s giving me some breathing room, even if I am struggling with it.

I wish that I could separate all of that from the well-behaved, adoring, devoted slavegirl I usually am (Bwahaha!), but, no dice. Sometimes I feel like I spend all fucking day waiting on people and wouldn’t it be nice if at least one of the adults in this house could wait on themselves? Not very gracious, huh?

And don’t even get me started on my sex drive. Jesus. I want to want it, but fuck if life isn’t conspiring against me. Take yesterday for instance: It started out well enough. With the exception of going to the gym later, I had no plans to go anywhere or do anything else. I got busy right out of bed- I had supper loaded in the crock pot, four loads of laundry done, the bed stripped, the kitchen clean, had been outside shoveling snow and burning Christmas trash, and had taken the dog for a romp in the back-forty, all before 9am! Then I came in, got Jes up and moving and got Babygirl her breakfast and such, woke Am up to babysit and me and Jes went to the gym for an hour and a half. When we got back, Am said that Babygirl had been to the potty about 4 times in the time we were gone. Then Babygirl immediately wanted to go again and proceeded to scream that it hurt (“Too hot!”) and hop around grabbing her crotch. So a quick call to the doc and we got an appointment within the hour, and 30 minutes of that is just driving there, so pretty much rushing out the door. Of course Babygirl wouldn’t cooperate at the doc because by then she’d equated peeing with hurting and wouldn’t go at all, so we were sent off with a ‘script for a cream in case it was a yeast infection and a cup to catch a sample when she’d go.

Off to the store to fill the cream, with an increasingly unhappy and uncomfortable 2 year old. I’d have loved to have taken her home first, but again with the 30 minute drive/price of gas/multiple trips into town issue. I’d hoped to fill the prescription and, if possible, get that sample from her so we could take it right back to the lab before I left town.

Of course Jes’s medicaid wouldn’t cover the prescription but they’d put a call into the doctor to get a different kind. In the meantime we tried to keep Babygirl distracted by walking around the store while we waited. She kept grabbing her crotch and screaming that it hurt, that she had to go potty, but if we got within 2 feet of the toilet, she’d scream louder. At one point Jes and I were both in the stall with her trying to convince her to go while she screamed bloody murder. Finally, figuring that some concerned citizen was going to call CPS on us, I just wanted to get the fuck out of there.

Naturally the doctor wasn’t returning the pharmacy’s phone call so I said to just forget it, I’d pay for the prescription. $30.00, whatever, let’s go. Babygirl continued to cry most of the way home, wet her pants (first time since being potty trained) and spent the next several hours hopping around crying about needing to go and refusing to go, while wetting herself in tiny amounts because she couldn’t hold it all in but was too afraid to go. Between distracting her with Toy Story and Dora episodes on the dvr, she ran from me to her mom, screaming, until she finally went to sleep at about 10pm.

We didn’t get back from the store until 5pm, I had to finish getting dinner ready, was trying to help a woefully unprepared Jes soothe Babygirl and in the middle of all this, Master rubs my crotch and wants to fuck.

SERIOUSLY? I think my head spun all the way around.

And this is the unplanned chaos that runs my life. Now today I’m going to have to go back into town to drop off the sample that we *finally* got, I have an appointment at 1 at the gym, and then I’ll probably have to go back into town later on to pick up the prescription that Babygirl undoubtedly needs. Unless they’ll call the ‘script into the local pharmacy, which would be sweet, but the only way to get Jes’s medicaid to cover it is to call it into the pharmacy that already has her medicaid on file. Because she lost her card and her numbers.

/brain dump

There now. I’ve made room for it to fill back up again.

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Gifting

“May I go to the bathroom, please Sir?” I whispered, leaning in close and out of earshot of anyone close by. He smiled that secret little smug smile that he always smiles when I ask him that question. “You know,” I continued hopefully, “you could take that rule away as my Christmas present.”

As we’d elected not to buy presents for each other (other than the purchase of a new dvd player with surround sound as a ‘house gift’), choosing instead to concentrate on the teens and the tot, I didn’t feel out of line in asking for such a simple gift!

We had a really nice Christmas. Peaceful. Though we’d cut the spending budget almost in half, it didn’t feel tight or restricted at all. The kids all got a lot of gifts that they wanted, plus a couple that they didn’t ask for but that seem to be big hits. Typically we ‘gift’ each of them with about $150 in cash along with the presents and we didn’t do that this year. I really debated on whether I wanted to buy less so that I could still give them cash as I know they really enjoy cash (who doesn’t? heh), but in the end I decided on gifts instead. Somehow this business of Christmas having become some occasion in which I’m expected to fork over cash for unknown reasons (as none of us are religious anyway!) niggled at me this year.

If Christmas has boiled down to an event in which I gift my loved ones with things I want them to have for no reason whatsoever, then that’s what I was going to do- gift them with things I wanted them to have. Of course I took their interests to heart, but not to the extent of not enjoying it myself. So. No handing over cash to people who haven’t earned it; shit we do that all year long! I enjoyed shopping for them because I enjoy giving gifts that make people happy. They were happy. Surely they were a tad disappointed in not getting cash, but if they were, none of them expressed it. Good thing, too. >:-)

Babygirl, of course, got more toys than she knew what to do with. She was exempt from my existential-christmas-crisis this year. Nothing but pure joy emanated from her all day. :)

M and I didn’t walk away empty-handed, either. We both got books; he from my parents, me from Am; I got an electric griddle from my parents; Jes got us a picture frame with a quote about happiness on it.

It was just a really nice day. I don’t get homesick at Christmas like I seem to do at Thanksgiving so I wasn’t sad to have missed the big family get-together. I enjoyed having us here, alone but together.

Master and I both have birthdays coming in the weeks immediately following Christmas (Jan. 11th for me, Feb. 5th for him), so ‘skipping Christmas’ isn’t a huge sacrifice for either of us. It always seemed like overkill to have so many gifts in such a short span of time. And it sure eased the ol’ pocketbook as he typically spends a stupid amount of money on me. :)

As for my ‘Christmas wish’ that he drop the bathroom-permission rule: In reply he merely reached out for a fistful of hair and gave me a little shake before swatting me on my way to the bathroom.

I guess that was a no?

Ah well. The gift of his continued dominance is better anyway. ;-)

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Mojo

I’m missing my mojo. If you see it, send it home. Otherwise, I’ll be back when I find it.

I hope everyone has a terrific holiday!

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Busy, Stressed and Tired. Gee, it must be Christmas time!

So just a quick note– The next few days look to be pretty busy. We’ll be out of town over the weekend finishing up the other house. No more procrastination allowed, as the new renters are moving in on Monday, haha.

There was no big drama surrounding Jes or my recent inquiries about the guardianship. She is most agreeable and cooperative, actually. Now to just hope she uses the time to better herself and not as an excuse to not have to. I’m well aware of the odds.

However, Baby-Daddy is coming home on leave (tomorrow, actually) and I fully expect all of the plans we just made to change drastically before he goes back. Because that is life with her.

Anyway, I’ve nothing much else to talk about.

See ya’s later!

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N/A

Some time ago (several months, maybe a year?) someone in the comments here mentioned having knowledge of the temporary guardianship procedure and paperwork for the courts. I was wondering if that person was still around. If so, could you contact me please at kaya(at)underhishand(dot)com?

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BPD

In Jes’s case, BPD is Borderline Personality Disorder, not Bipolar. I should have clarified. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. :)

She is on medication, and has been since she was diagnosed (and weirdly I can’t recall when that was. A year ago? 2 years ago? The days, they blend). She’s been in and out of therapy, depending mostly on her mood, where she’s taken off to live, and whether or not she hates her therapist that day. Or whether or not she can get out of bed if it’s a morning appointment. Nighttime sleeping problems are common in BPD sufferers.

I’m looking into online support groups (and thank you for the link!). Master probably would not attend a meeting, and isn’t likely to read an online group, either. I’m pretty sure we’ve reached the limit at which he’s willing to invest himself in her “problems”.

She’ll be doing CBT (no, not that kind, pervs!), and of course, that’s not set in stone, either, as she’ll likely attend once or twice and then be done with it.

However, I’m going to assign an ultimatum to this step. Attend the sessions or move out. I’ve had enough of the wheel spinning to last me a lifetime.

I’m limited in how much I can protect Babygirl from Jes’s illness. The illness itself isn’t reason enough to take custody- and nor would I, as long as she’s providing basic care. About the only thing I can do for baby is be the stable influence in her life and try and counteract Jes’s instability as much as possible.

Jes knows I’m here, she knows I’m watching, she knows I’ll not hesitate to step in and take baby if it’s necessary. I think she’s seeing that her rights as the biological parent aren’t unbreakable. Being ‘allowed’ to parent her own child IS dependent on her actions, and that’s not over-protective grandma talk, that’s just fact. Laws are in place and I had nothing to do with that, but I will use them to my advantage if I feel Jes is going to take Babygirl down with her.

I won’t go down with her. I won’t let my marriage go down with her. I won’t let my other children or her child go down with her. The ball is in her court.

The other day when I picked Jes up from therapy, she said to me, “If I don’t take care of this, I’m going to mess up her (baby’s) life, too.” Maybe she was only parroting her counselor (probably she was), and maybe the seed won’t take root, but it’s planted. She’s influencing her daughter negatively, right now. Every day. To be honest, I’m not sure she comprehended that until very recently. BPD, at least as it manifests in Jes, is something of a self-centered syndrome. I think she’s so bogged down in how everything and everyone affects her-because it really is that overwhelming for her-that it’s difficult to internalize how she’s affecting everything and everyone around her.

It’s a step, anyway. An obvious one for you and I, but a revelation for her.

Now to see what she does with it.

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“Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.”

The closer it gets to Christmas the less inspired I am to finish putting decorations up. It seems like every year my Christmas spirit shrinks a little more.

Pretty soon I’ll be a shriveled up old hag, walking around kicking mall Santas in the shins.

But the tree is up, at least. More for the benefit of Babygirl than anyone else, though. She was so cute helping us decorate it. She kept running around going, I so assighted, Beebaw! (that would be ‘excited’ btw, in case you don’t know Babygirl-ese.)

Speaking of her language, for those who are not on my Facebook and miss my constant blathering about her, her pronunciation of “Pixie Stick” is highly inappropriate and funny as shit. The ‘x’ is an ‘s’ and the ‘st’ is a ‘d’. I am amused and refuse to correct her. I’m a bad granny.

So, for awhile Jes was talking about moving. She’s so flighty, though, and I know I say that a lot. She makes my head spin and I have trouble keeping up. The other day M made a comment about how I never tell him anything (about her doings) and I said that was because by the time I have a chance to tell him, she’s changed her mind and is on to something else already.

I think the last I shared here was that she was planning on going to the university and getting into the family housing on campus. The whole registration process required a $175 down payment fee, that, when it came to Am’s registration, we paid without hesitation. With Jes, I was waiting until the last possible due date. Because….

…within just two weeks of being accepted, she started talking about getting married to ‘Baby Daddy’ guy, with whom she still has an on-again/off-again affair going on, and who is currently at basic training in the army (yay for a step in the right direction from ONE of them, at least!).

So, yes, she was going to get married and follow him to where he was assigned to base housing. Which was, apparently, in El Paso, Tx.

But not a week prior to telling me this new plan, she was telling me about some guy she was skyping with on the net who lives in Colorado and she wanted to meet him and did I think it was weird to meet people off the net (haha).

As much as the idea of Babygirl being all the way in El Paso, Tx. pains me horribly, I latched on to the idea of Jes being all the way in El Paso, Tx.–and thus out of my hair and into someone elses. I liked that idea. A lot. A lot more than I should have.

Honestly, people. Bad mom label or not, she is WORK. A vacation from the chaos sounded wonderful. You have no idea.

But then.. just yesterday… she signed herself up with a group therapy course for her BPD. I know she needs to do that. But… fuck me if I wasn’t FILLED with disappointment when she then said that she probably was not going to go with Baby Daddy. At least not yet.

Seriously. Disappointed.

Unless you’ve lived with someone who has BPD, you just don’t know. You can’t know. I feel terrible thinking and feeling the way I do. My first thought when she said she was going to marry him and move out was “Finally! You can be someone elses problem!” Isn’t that awful?

That does it. I’m going to hell. -nods-

I read this recently about BPD: “People with BPD are born with an innate, biological sensitivity to emotions, e.g. they have quick to fire, strong, reactive emotions. Children who are emotionally sensitive take special parenting. Sometimes, the parents of the person who develops BPD just aren’t as emotional and cannot teach their child how to regulate intense emotions. We tell clients that they are like swans born into a family full of ducks. The duck parents only know how to teach the swan how to be a duck.”

I’m a duck, see? Quack.

Probably the most frustrating thing for me about living with Jes and her diagnosis is that M isn’t really on board with it. The diagnosis, I mean. It doesn’t seem to matter what material I present him with, there’s a part of him that is convinced she has more control over it than she does, that it’s, in part, deliberate; thus, he takes a good bit of it personally.

I not only understand it, I am aware of how it manifests itself and even *I* have a hard time not taking some of her behaviors and outbursts personally. So I get it. But I can generally talk myself back into what her reality is. I’m not sure he does- or even tries. :(

I always feel like I’m in the middle, with no one to really turn to about it. If I try to talk to him about it, even just to vent a little bit and get some of the frustration out, he holds on to what I say as evidence or proof or… something.. i don’t even know what. He adds it to the arsenal he seems to be building against her.

I know that he’s stretched real thin right now. I know that the resentment is building and building, primarily over finances and supporting not only her, as an adult, but her child, as well. And I don’t want to keep making excuses for her or trying to justify her actions, yet.. there IS justification and there is reason.

It’s all hell. Seriously.

I’m no psychic but I can predict how this is all going to turn out. I really can. He’s going to lose his shit at the same time she loses hers and all. fucking. hell. is going to break loose. I’m praying, praying, praying that she makes some significant progress in therapy before he comes unglued.

I don’t mean to trash talk him either, because, as I said, living with someone like her is difficult and he’s been phenomenal. Phenomenal. Hell, even I break sometimes and lash back at her. I’m not made of stone. Neither is he.

I just feel like I’m holding my breath all the time, and I just want to breathe for a minute. I’m sure he feels the same way.

I have a voicemail that she left me a few weeks ago saved on my phone. She was mad at me, of course, and just… ranted and raved for a long time. About how much she hates me. How she’s going to take babygirl and disappear. How I need to just shut the fuck up. On and on…

I saved it, initially just to let my mom listen to it; which may be playing dirty but every time I try and talk to my mom about Jes, she dismisses me with this “Jes doesn’t talk like that. She would never.” End of conversation. So suddenly I had this proof and I wanted to be validated.

Now I’m just holding it and listening to it the way a person pokes a sore tooth with their tongue. It’s painful. And I can’t bring myself to erase it.

Bah.

She’s going to drive me to the looney bin.

So get this, all of you who tried to tell me I was “overreacting” back when she was living with those fucked up people over the summer and had Babygirl with her and I was threatening her then with a custody fight because I *knew* that was a bad situation going on over there.

Last week, Jes *herself* called and turned the other girl she had been living with into CPS. See, once she was removed from the situation and got a good look at it from the outside, gee, shooting up and being drunk and having violent fist fights and wild parties with kids in the house really IS a big deal. Jes went there a few days ago to catch up with her “friends”. There’s a 2 yr old (not babygirl, another one) and a 4 yr old in that house, who were hiding in the closet while mom and her boyfriend shot up in the bathroom, started cooking food on the stove and forgot about it, had a fist fight, and were still sleeping the next day at noon when Jes left, leaving the kids unsupervised and unfed.

So you see? I’m NOT making this shit up. I’m glad she called and reported them. That’s a sign of progress, no? I think it is. The ability to recognize a bad choice and how it affects a child? It has to be.

Well shit. I hadn’t even intended on talking about her today. Things are just really frustrating right now. Am still hasn’t found a job. Jes had one and got fired. M’s irritated. I’m irritated. It seems like we’re both trying to avoid having everything blow up.

And yet, it isn’t nearly as bad as it all sounds when it’s typed out like this, either. We’re not fighting or anything. We’re tired and stressed and struggling, but not with each other. Sometimes I get fed up with him seeming to blame them for everything, and he gets fed up with my refusal to blame them for anything. Heh.

Kids are just a special sort of hell, aren’t they?

Joy to the world, and shit.

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Avoidance Syndrome

We’ve been talking about what we wanted to do this weekend, if anything at all. We miss our friends, but we have so much stuff to do here that we are behind on, plus the other house STILL isn’t done, and blah-blah-blah…

Him: So? Do you want to have a movie night and invite people over?

Me: I don’t know. I do, but I don’t want to commit to other people because what if we don’t want to when the time comes?

Him: Right. If the weather is good, we should get stuff done outside.

Me: I know. Besides, one of us might get sick…

Him: …or get called into work…

Me: …or the kids might go away and leave us alone…

Him: …and then we could pull out those feeder cable toys that Sally made us.

Me: We should totally plan a movie night with our friends.

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