Thursday, February 4, 2016

Whew!

This week has been…tough? No, not really tough so much as…off? Yeah, off.

I mean, Sunday was a wash what with the time spent at Urgent Care and The Walmarts (with a stop in between at McD’s, can’t forget that one) and then Monday was just weird.

I mean, most Mondays see me and the girls heading to my mom’s house for an hour or so of visiting and then home for dinner, reading and bed.

But this past Monday, the visit needed to be cut short because Olivia desperately needed a bath. Not only to wash off the sickies as much as we could but also because she hadn’t actually bathed since the previous Tuesday.

Don’t judge! She’s nine, so she doesn’t get nearly as stinky at the rest of the people who live in our house if she goes a few days between baths. And sometimes, it’s just tough to get it together. Just saying.

Anyway, she NEEDED a bath. So we cut our visit with my mom short so we could get home and have dinner before heading up for O’s bath.

Ten minutes after we got home, two minutes before I was about to put food on the table for the girls, our doorbell rings.

“No way!” I say, looking across the room at Tom. We both assumed it was my dad because no one else ever visits us, especially on a school night.

But no. It wasn’t my dad. It was one of my aunts. My mom has a lot (A LOT!) of sisters and this was the youngest of those sisters.

She had a carload of things she wanted to drop off for Alyssa to go through. She was quick to tell me that she wanted the hangers back. I assured her I’d get them back to her.

As she carried in the third armload of clothes, she asked if we were busy. I told her I was about to feed the girls their dinner.

She was visibly upset but said she was just tired and stressed from helping her brother (their oldest brother, my mom has a lot of brothers too.) I told her I hoped she felt better soon and we said our goodbyes.

I got the girls’ dinner on the table and was just sitting down with them when the doorbell rang again.

Are you FREAKING kidding me?!? This time, it WAS my dad. See, he usually visits on Friday but he’d missed the last Friday.

He showed up with some junk mail in his hand, which he considers his ‘in’ whenever he knows he’s coming over at an inconvenient time.

I let him in and informed him that he’d arrived during dinner. He followed me to the kitchen where he sat while I made sure she girls ate.

After they were finished eating, he followed me around the house for another ten minutes or so while I said again and again, “Okay, Liv, almost bath time. You have to have a bath tonight.”

Finally, since he wasn’t going to take the hint, I said, “Okay, so I really have to go up with Olivia while she takes a bath.”

He followed me to the front door where I said goodbye to him and whew, that was that.

After Olivia’s bath, I found Tom and asked him if I’d been rude to my dad because, yes, sometimes I border on rude when it comes to setting boundaries with that man.

Tom was kind enough to tell me I hadn’t been rude, that it was a school night, Olivia needed a bath and my dad was impeding our progress toward that bath. He was, in fact, an uninvited guest who needed to leave or HE was the one being rude.

Whew. I feel kind of bad even writing that but honestly, I think I need to get over that bad feeling because Tom was right. When someone comes to your house on a night that they know you’re busy, it is not rude to let them know, kindly of course, that you are busy and so can’t visit with them.

Boundaries people! I’m learning them and enforcing them and working on not feeling guilty about it.

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