Friday, December 26, 2014

Holidays

It's the day after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature is stirring except this web editor who would LOVE to be napping...

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We left Aiken at 10:30 a.m. Stopped for Chipotle on the way back. It was almost on the way, winkwink.

I sat down to the laptop at 3 p.m. I should be trying to do 25 sites today and 25 tomorrow. I'm skeptical that that will fully occur.

My anger and frustration are two-fold. I have an IT department that royally screwed me over last weekend, and there's no way they can or will make that up to me at all. It's my bad luck that I'm a freelancer, and I have to suck it up.

There's also the mother-in-law. She started trying to ingratiate herself and our niece into a visit here about a week ago. We balked, on several accounts: I'm buried in work, she was just here for Thanksgiving and we were visiting for Christmas, and we had my family visiting right after Christmas. For her, it has nothing to do with actually visiting us; she wants an escape from her home while the kid is on vacation.

We decided to work our way around to a hard "no" with her. She fished around the subject with me once or twice while we were down here, and I hedged and suggested they come up for the 3-day weekend that usually occurs around MLK in January, as that would be better for us. Honestly, I'm so buried in work worry right now, I tried not to answer her directly because I was spending the entire time down there just marking time through the holiday and holding my tongue. It's an unhealthy house, and they do NOT actually want my opinion on the situation.

Then Les went upstairs for something last night, and his mom, in a voice heavy with reject, said something about how she guessed she and Kylie wouldn't be visiting this week. Les got just pissed enough and said yea, that's right, that we're here visiting now (in Aiken), and that we just saw her at Thanksgiving, so it's not like it's been ages. She tried to throw guilt about disappointing Kylie. He reminded her that it's not his fault she told Kylie they'd be going when she hadn't solidified plans with us, and she didn't give us enough notice. She tried to claim she'd mentioned it at Thanksgiving, and he said nice try. But she's still his mom, so he wrestled with guilt and anger the rest of the night too.

It's a house of manipulators, and I've helped him see that we don't have to respond to that bullshit. But it's still family, so treading carefully is essential.

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I'm so damn glad to be home. We only visited for 24 hours, and it was more than enough for another year. But I'm coming down off the stress, and I'm exhausted; and that doesn't bode well for my focus or my ability to get this crazy number of sites done. There's coffee and sugar in my future, as I plow through my sites and thank the gods that I've created a safe and healthy haven for us to come home to.


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