lost my pants

Ugh, ugh ugh I'm so glad last week is over! At times I really wanted to run away and not be an adult anymore, if only for a few brief hours. But I took a hour to myself after visiting my Grandma, bought two pairs of jeans at Old Navy and wound up leaving them at the grocery store to be taken by whoever noticed the bag in the self check aisle. The only thing I'm thankful for is that I bought cheap jeans, if they were fancy $100 plus jeans I would have felt like shooting myself. I found out my Dad needs to go in for an angioplasty tomorrow. No real surprise given his lifestyle, which really isn't all that conducive towards living, but still it's upsetting and stressful to receive that news. My Dad's an alcoholic and a chain smoker who lives under the radar doing construction, which is all rather pitiful since he's very intelligent (he can complete Friday & Saturday NYT crosswords when I hit the wall at Thursday) and has a degree. When he's not drunk or in braggart mode he's unbelievably charismatic and the man is one of the best generalists I've ever met, he knows something about every obscure topic under the sun. Unfortunately he has a number of problems, which I think are probably biochemical in nature, and he's lost any good job he's ever had. To be blunt my Dad is delusional, he has no health insurance but isn't worried because he has friends and all these doctors he's seen have done stuff free and the cardiologist isn't charging him for the surgery so he'll only have to pay the tech bill, so my Dad said. He doesn't seem to realize that hospitals charge four dollars for a tylenol and he needs to go under general anethesia and stay overnight which all adds up to thousands, but he doesn't seem troubled at all by this. Maybe because he has a mountain, I'm talking Kilimanjaro, of debt so it's just more to that which will never be paid. But he's my Dad, how ever many faults he has, I can't cut him out of my life because I think that would hurt me more. So we're going to go visit him over the weekend to see how he's recovering. I have been so upset this weekend though, feeling like I should be with him when he goes into surgery but Toby has class that night and I'm supposed to volunteer at Owen's school that day and when I talked to my Dad he said he'd rather spend more time with us over the weekend, but I constantly have guilt chipping away at my tenuous hold of self worth. In a lot of ways I'm mad at my Dad, he has blown off coming to visit us so many times because he's working or not working or is embarrassed of his situation. I still have a Christmas gift wrapped up for him, that's how long it's been. It saddens me that he can't understand that I want to see him regardless of how much he makes or drinks or smokes or lies. As long as he doesn't drive drunk to see us. I want the kids to know who their Grandpa Boo is. Owen loves when he wraps his limbs up into a pretzel, but Oona can't even remember him. He's only seen her two or three times. Sometimes I feel so reactionary with everything I do. My Dad was a lot of fun when I saw him (on weekends) as a child, but he wasn't really a parent. He thought it was fine to spend the night drinking in a bar at an airport while his seven year old played on the escalator just outside. And this was in the seventies, before they had those emergency stops at the top and bottom of every escalator in case a shoe lace or pants hem gets caught in the teeth of the stairs and you're maimed or worse. The man has been bringing me to bars since I was little, which when I was twelve seemed super cool because I got to stay out late and the bartender would let me have one real drink, but as you get older you see how sad and pathetic that is. I am so the other side of the pendulum with my kids. I won't drink until their asleep and even then I have maybe one or two drinks a month. I sometimes feel that they won't get a chance to make mistakes or get hurt because I won't let them. I know part of being a parent is letting them strike out on their own, but I panic about every possible calamity that could happen to them. I am someone who never should have been a parent. My worrying makes it feel like torture at times, to have these two children in the world. I know I shouldn't worry so much, if I look back at all the dangerous things that happened to me while growing up (and I survived!) my kids should be fine but my mind doesn't work that way.

On the bright side though, an old friend was out in Pittsburgh on business and I got to have a lovely dinner with her. It was so wonderful to catch up with her and spend a grown up evening out eating dinner without tears or screaming or crayons/food/toys/fill in the blank thrown on the floor. My kids are usually well behaved at restaurants but just anticipating a possible meltdown can be exhausting. You can't ever let your guard down eating out with kids, but eating out with a good old friend and no kids? Heaven.