Say What You Want to Say

When did I become so afraid to offend anyone?

When did my opinion become so worthless that I hold it back no matter what because, yikes, it might offend someone (anyone!) were my opinion to be voiced and NOT match the opinion of everyone else around me?

I hate this about myself.

I hate that I hold it all in, that I keep my words to myself, my thoughts, my opinions because I don’t want to offend anyone.

I feel like the Katy Perry song “Roar” where she says, “I stood for nothing, so I fell for everything.”

I don’t want to be that person.

I’m just…tired of choking it all down. I’m tired of backing down because I feel backed into a corner or even ambushed and the surprise always makes me shut down and then the words, the thoughts just don’t come out and I sit there, fuming and sputtering and wondering what the hell just happened.

And the longer I fume and hold it all in, the more likely at some point, I’m going to explode.

When that happens, it won’t be fair to the person upon whom I’m exploding because, as stated above, I’ve been biting my tongue, sitting back and swallowing my ire for so long and yet, no one else knows this. They don’t know they’re dealing with a ticking bomb.

So it’s going to seem as if my anger, my frustrating, my irritation is coming out of nowhere. Even though I know it’s been building for freaking ever, no one else knows this and so I need to figure out how to let off some steam in a way that isn’t a rude awakening to all around me.

Example: I’m trying to teach my girls that they were not put on this earth to be ‘pretty’ for anyone. If they want to be pretty for themselves, great, fine. But random people who say shit like, “You’d be so much prettier if you’d smile.” Those people can bite it.

Last night after marching band practice (The band invited all the parents to the football field to see a preview of their football half-time show. It was great.) I mentioned to Alyssa how happy her friend Nora is. Lyss said, “Yeah, she’s always smiling.”

Another member of the family said, “Everyone is better looking when they smile.”

I said, quite calmly, “Yes, everyone is. Especially when the smile is genuine, like Nora’s always are. But when you force a smile because some stupid creep tells you you’d be prettier if you just smiled, well, that’s not necessarily prettier than your resting face.”

And the response I got was a snippy, “I didn’t say anything about that, did I?”

And I was so taken aback by the snippiness of the tone that I shut down and fumed. I thought we were having a conversation. But when I got what felt like nasty push-back, I had no response.

What I wanted to say, now that I’ve thought about it is, “You’re right, you didn’t. But because YOU have probably never had some random person tell you how much prettier you’d be if you smiled, you don’t get to shut me down when I share my opinion on something that I HAVE heard, more times than I can count. I want to teach our daughters that it’s okay to shut those creeps down. They don’t have to give a cringy smile. They don’t have to take the misogyny our society pushes at girls until they can’t even voice their own damned opinions for fear of being shut down. They can either shrug and walk away, leaving the awkward in the hands of ‘smile’ creep or they can voice their opinion, as loudly, as rudely, or hell, sure, even as kindly as they want. They get to own their bodies. They get to decide if something is worth smiling about. THEY get to decide. Not the old, white dude at Arby’s.”

And I will probably say something like that soon and it will shock the hell out of the people around me.

And I’ll probably cry either during or after my ‘speech.’ I hate that I cry but my emotions are very close to the surface and I feel strongly about this shit these days.

Damnit.

Snippets

I bought Olivia new shoes for school this weekend. The shoes I bought are an adult size 8. She’s ten and a half. Yikes!

I think it’s starting to hit Alyssa that we are heading to Indy for a Pentatonix concert on Thursday. We get to see Julie and Riley – YAY!! Alyssa said yesterday, “Only four more days…” Then her eyes got all dreamy. She’s just so flipping cute.

This summer has been…different. We didn’t go on our ‘big’ vacation to Cedar Point this year. With my mom heading off to Alabama with her sisters and her mother to see her mom’s long-lost, newly-found sisters, we just didn’t fit the Cedar Point trip in the schedule.

Instead, we’ve done a day here and there and honestly, it’s been kind of awesome. We did the water park, the lake, the pool. Last week we spent a day at my mom’s and the kids just played on the slip-n-slide and ate outside on her deck and roasted marshmallows over candles. And I got to just be with them. We weren’t on a schedule, we didn’t have anywhere to be. It was really nice.

We’ve seen a few movies, gone shopping at the mall even when we didn’t actually need anything. Those are days where the stress is low and the fun is high. I’m all about those kinds of days.

Alyssa has had band ‘camp’ (I put camp in quotes because it’s really been more like band class, in that she goes to the school, plays her flute, marches and learns music and choreography for about seven hours a day and then comes home. To me, camp should be an overnight thing. But whatever.) and she’s enjoyed it. I think she’s like seeing her friends daily this for a few weeks this summer.

Olivia has spent a lot of time in a giant box Tom brought in and cut a door and windows into. He even cut a small hole through which she could feed the plug of her tablet through. She sits in there (the walls are decorated with pictures she printed off) and reads/writes fan-fiction about the Despicable Me girls and the Inside Out emotions. I leave clean pajamas for her to change in to each morning when she wakes up. She doesn’t get dressed in actual clothes unless we’re going somewhere, which is usually just on Saturdays. I envy her Summer of Pajamas. She’s growing up and figuring out her own interests. I’m excited to see who she’s becoming.

Tom works in the yard and the garden. He lists things on Ebay, sells crap from the end of our driveway and basically just takes good care of us.

I do the laundry, bake all the berry things and sit back and marvel that this is my life.

The Teenage Boys at the Park

This past Tuesday, my mom and I took the girls and J to the lake for a day of sun, sand, and swimming. It was lovely. The weather was perfect, the lake was not very crowded, since it was, you know, a Tuesday.

We swam for several hours, the kids played in the sand, we ate lunch out of coolers and then swam some more. There was also frolicking on the narwhal floaty. I’m pretty sure we had the coolest floatation device in the lake that day.

After we’d eaten again (swimming makes you hungry, don’t you know?) Alyssa asked if we could go to one of the local parks. We hadn’t been to that park yet this summer and so, why not?

This park has a pavilion in which there are quite a few picnic tables. The bathrooms are also part of the pavilion building. There is a play area with swings, a slide, a fireman’s pole, you know, all the fun stuff available at most fun parks.

When we got there, we noticed that there were probably about six or seven teenage boys hanging out on the picnic tables under the pavilion. I almost said they were loitering but that seemed unfair. I mean, it’s summertime. What are local kids supposed to do if they don’t have jobs? They go to the park. So what if they’re all around fifteen or sixteen years old?

Anyway, the kids were playing on the slides for about ten minutes when the teenage boys decided to join us.

Yeah. That was awkward. They climbed up the slide, up the outside of the playground equipment and basically looked like a bunch of chimpanzees taking over and staking their claim.

Alyssa, Olivia, Jaxon and I headed for another area of the park where a lone slide hangs out in the sun. They kids played on that a bit, Alyssa made her way to some bouncy things shaped like a motorcycle, a horse, a car and something else. She rocked back and forth. Olivia tried to climb up the lone slide (no one else was trying to go down. I always tell my kids if there are other kids trying to go down a slide, don’t ever try to go up it.) Jaxon found some dirt to play in.

When the teenage boys realized their antics were impressing exactly no one, they went back to the picnic tables.

We headed back to the shaded play area and Olivia found her way to the tall spiral slide. Jaxon went down the fireman’s pole twenty-two times. He counted.

And…the chimps came back. Well, sort of. They made their way to the giant turtle sculpture that has been at that park for over forty years. It’s one of the original pieces of the park. And once there, they egged each other on. I think they were trying to get Alyssa’s attention but she was so over their stupidity. At least two of the guys took of their shirts. She was NOT impressed.

We finally started walking toward the car, still ignoring the mating call of the pathetic teenage boy.

My mom is sure she heard one of them call, “But we didn’t get a number!”

I didn’t hear that and neither did Alyssa. But even if we had, we’d have ignored it because, please. As if!

For one, even if she doesn’t look it, she’s fourteen. For two, every single dude there was still waiting for his ‘glow up.’ They were just this side of hoodlums. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and not calling them actual hoodlums because, well, they were never actually harassing anyone but that first time they descended upon the playground was verging on feeling like harassment so…yeah, just this side of hoodlums.

Good thing they don’t live near me or I’d be yelling at them to get off my lawn and shaking a fly swatter at them.

The Emoji Movie

Alyssa really wanted to see The Emoji Movie. I was a little meh about it but figured it was worth the price of popcorn just to get out of the house on a Sunday afternoon. The laundry would wait.

I went in with very low expectations of this movie and was pleasantly surprised. It was cute and clever and I laughed out loud a few times.

But that’s not actually what this is about. It’s about the cinema we chose to visit to see the movie. We live in the middle of nowhere. We have to drive a minimum of twenty minutes to see any movie in the theater. And the closest theater is tiny, and old and doesn’t have Icees.

So instead of going to the Bryan theatre (the closest) we usually toss a coin and choose between Auburn, Indiana and Coldwater, Michigan. Coldwater might be five minutes farther away than Auburn.

On this glorious day, I checked the website for the Auburn theater, saw that they had a 3:20 showing of The Emoji Movie and the girls and I headed out at 2:15. It is maybe a forty minute drive but I’m nothing if not early for everything (right, Julie?) and I hate, HATE feeling like we might be on time because on time to me is late.

We arrived at the Auburn NCG Cinema at about 2:52. Perfect. That gave us time to buy tickets, popcorn, Icees (two blue, one Coke) and use the restroom.

I glanced at the ticket stubs I’d received from the attendant and saw that we were in Auditorium 1. I babysat that popcorn and Icees while Lyss and Liv went to the bathroom.

When they came back, we gathered our snacks and headed for auditorium 1. The door was closed. Huh. We could hear the sounds of a movie in there so we headed back to the counter where I asked the young woman from whom I’d purchased our tickets if the tickets were correct.

She confirmed that they were and then I saw it. She’d sold me tickets for the 4:15 showing of The Emoji Movie. I told her we’d wanted the 3:20 showing. She glanced at her screen and informed me that there was no 3:20 showing at that cinema.

Huh. Weird. I told her it showed that time on the website.

She said, “Well, you have to go to our actual website. Sometimes, if you just google movie times, it will pull times from surrounding theaters.”

Oh. “I actually did go to your website,” I told her.

“Weird,” she said dismissively. “Well, the popcorn is free refills so you can sit at the tables and eat your popcorn while you wait.”

Okay. Except…I don’t wanna sit in the stupid lobby of the cinema for over an hour due to a mistake on their website.

I told Lyss and Liv what was going on and Lyss said, “Wait, so their sign is wrong too then?”

I glanced up at where she was looking and right there, on the sign above the popcorn maker was the times listed for each movie. And get this, there was a 3:20 listing for The Emoji Movie. I made my way back to the counter, this time avoid Miss Weird and asked the first dude I came across if there was a 3:20 showing of The Emoji Movie. He looked (rather than just glanced) at his screen and said, “Oh yeah, it’s in auditorium 5.”

I asked, “So, even though we bought tickets for the 4:15 showing, can we just go into theater 5 and see the 3:20 showing?”

“Sure,” he said.

And away we went.

It was 3:10. We were the first ones in auditorium 5. We were followed rather quickly, though, but another family. And then another.

Then, before we knew it, it was 3:25 and…nothing. The screen was blank. The lights were still bright in there in auditorium 5.

And I decided that enough was enough. I did something I NEVER do. I got up out of my seat, went BACK to the snack counter and asked, “Uh, is there supposed to be a showing of The Emoji Movie at 3:20 in auditorium 5?”

The lady behind the counter said, “There sure is.”

I declared, “Well, it’s 3:25 and the screen is blank.”

She told me she’d inform a manager.

I returned to auditorium 5 and less than a minute after I sat back down in my seat, the movie started. No previews, though. I guess they lost their time for that when they didn’t start the movie on time.

I considered standing up, bowing and blowing kisses to those behind me in the theater, telling them all, “You’re welcome.”

But I decided I’d made enough of a spectacle of myself at the stupid snack counter that day.

For the record, we’re going to be heading north to Coldwater for our future movie excursions. In all the times we’ve seen movies up there, we’ve never had to work quite as hard just to see a movie as we had to work yesterday in Auburn to see The Emoji Movie.

Tendonitis, Plantar Fasciitis, and a Bunion

So my stupid left foot has been hurting for, oh, probably about six months.

When I told the podiatrist I finally saw last week how long it’s been hurting I may have even said, “Oh, only about five or six months.” He actually laughed and said, “Only? That’s about five or six months too long.”

I think I love this guy. At the very least, I almost cried in his office when he acknowledged that the weird bump on the outside left foot is not normal and that I do indeed have something wrong with it.

These last few months have been very much about me feeling like a big baby. Alyssa has been telling me for months to see a doctor. Olivia has, well, been being Olivia and Tom, well, I think he things I’m a whiny baby. He would never actually say that, though. But yes, I do tend to be whiny when I’m hurting, which is why I’ve been whiny for the past five or six months.

Anyway! I finally saw a doctor. Well, let me back up just a little. I saw my regular family doctor three weeks ago. He didn’t want to do an x-ray because, as he said, if I did end up at a foot doctor, that doctor would want very specific images of my foot. Dr. S wasn’t sure what those images would be and he’s not one to order unnecessary radiation. I like that about him. Instead, he gave me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory and said that if that worked to ease the pain in the outside of my foot and my heel (and yes, sometimes my bunion) I could take the anti-inflammatory for the rest of my life.

Uh, no. I don’t want to do that. That’s a downhill slope. First you start with an anti-inflammatory; then you start taking meds for hypertension. Then there is something else and before you know it, you’re taking twelve pills a day. No thank you. I’d like to put that off for as long as I can.

So after x-rays to determine if there were any breaks in my foot that were causing the sometimes breath-taking pain, it was determined that I have tendonitis in the outer left of my left foot. I also have a lovely plantar fasciitis going on with the heel of the same stupid foot. And to add icing to the cake that is my ridiculous left foot, I have a lovely bunion going on too.

Now, obviously, that bunion is no big surprise. I mean, that dude has been growing for years. I think I noticed it first in my late twenties. It’s a genetic thing. My aunts on my dad’s side all had bunions. I think Olivia will end up with them too. Sorry for the crap genes, kid. I was kid of the eighties and nineties. I work giant, comfy shoes. My bunion is not the result of fancy, pointy-toed shoes. But really, the cause doesn’t matter because it’s there all the same.

The good news about the bunion is that at this point, there is very little internal damage. However, the damage is going to accumulate over the coming years if we don’t go in and straighten out the big toe. So yes, the doctor is recommending surgery.

Surgery will mean two weeks of being off my feet complete and then six more weeks in a boot, with doctor’s order to sit frequently while at work. Yay!!

For now, we’re treating the tendonitis with a brace that provides extra stability to my ankle and the outside of my foot. I have a knobby ball I’m supposed to roll on my foot to stretch the tendons and relax my arch. They want me to wear custom-made orthotics too. We’re waiting to hear back from insurance on that one.

I go back in two weeks to review how the treatment of the tendonitis is going. At that point, I plan to discuss surgery options and hopefully just get it scheduled. If we’re going to do this, we need to do it now, before my place of employment closes at the end of December and I hopefully start a new job in January. I need to get it done while I have the insurance and the ability to take two weeks off work.

So yes, there’s a lot going on right now.

Oh, look, it's my stupid feet. That left one there is causing more trouble than it's worth.

Facts vs Opinions

When I said that I don’t have a lot of strong opinions in my last post, what I meant is that I don’t argue with people about opinions.

I mean, what’s the point? We all have an opinion and usually it’s not right or wrong, it’s just our opinion. I mean, my opinion that Dean Cain is the best Clark Kent of all time is no more right or wrong than someone else's opinion that Ben Affleck is the best Batman of all time (he's not...no, really, he just isn't.)

But facts? I’ll argue those…when I know I’m right.

It drives Alyssa crazy that I won’t argue with her (or anyone) if I don’t know, 100%, that I’m right.

Remember that time my step-dad tried to tell me that he had the universal donor blood type and then declared that his type is O positive? I simply couldn’t let that erroneous information stand without correcting it. I mean, there were other people in the room. My children, for example, who weren’t actually paying attention but might have taken in that information and filed it away to be used at some point and it was WRONG.

I gently corrected him, saying that the universal donor for red blood cells is actually O negative. He got a little huffy and when I explained about rH factors, he shut down and declared, “Well, O positive used to be the universal donor.”

Again…no. I mean, science and biology don’t change. So I had to argue with him. He hates being wrong but dude, don’t argue if you don’t know you’re right. Just saying.

On Wednesday night, Tom asked what I’d fed Olivia. He was a bit surprised that she hadn’t had some of the left over lasagna. I told him I’d fed her some of that the night before and she’d specifically asked for something different the next night. I mean, give the girl a break, she’d had lasagna Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. She deserved a break.

When I said that I’d fed her lasagna the night before, Tom interjected, “You mean, I fed it to her.”

I blinked at him for a second and said, “No, I fed her last night.”

He started to argue and I pointed out, “You fed her the night before last, which was Monday night, while I took Lyss to the school for marching band practice. Last night was Tuesday. I fed Liv.”

He gave it some thought, realized I was right and let it go.

Dude! You have been with me for 16 years. Have you not learned that I do not argue if I don’t know I’m right?

And honestly, it wasn’t even an argument. It was me saying something, him trying to say I was wrong, me proving I was right and us both moving on.

Alyssa so badly wants me to insist on something and then be proven wrong. Oh, dear sweet child. As if.

All this is not to say that I’m always right. I’m not. In fact, that’s why I don’t argue very often. If I have even the slightest doubt, I don’t argue.

But how fun it is when I do prove I’m right. That’s right, I gloat. I can’t help it. I’m not all that proud of my status as a gloater, but I’m probably not going to work all that hard to change it either. You’ve been warned.

A Tale of Two Dish Soaps

My husband has an opinion about most things. I don’t say this as a criticism, just as a fact of his personality.

I do not actually have an opinion on most things. Most things just aren’t important enough for me to think about deeply enough to have a firm opinion.

Dish soap, though…let’s just say that I’ve been buying Dawn dish soap for years because my opinion of it is that it cleans better than other, lesser dish soaps.

My husband, however, likes a bargain. His favorite store of all time is Aldi. He loves buying bread and milk and ice cream there. And most recently, he discovered Aldi has sells dish soap. And because Dawn was on my list to buy that week (this was probably a month ago) he bought Aldi’s apple-scented dish soap.

He was so proud of himself. He declared that he’s saved a bunch of dollars because the price of Dawn is so much more than the price of the green off-brand soap.

Sure. Okay. Whatever. I didn’t say anything. I just used up what was left in the bottle of Dawn I had under the sink and then moved on to the green soap.

I never once mentioned how awful that soap was. I didn’t tell my husband about how much more soap I felt I had to use to get a decent amount of suds when washing the dishes. I didn’t tell him that I often felt like the dishes needed extra scrubbing because the soap didn’t quite cut the grease the way Dawn did.

Because, see, even when I have an opinion, I don’t necessarily feel the need to share it if it feels like sharing it might come across as a criticism of a member of my family. I love my family more than I love my opinions.

And, this is the best part, I knew that if I was patient, Tom’s greasy hands would figure out on their own how much better Dawn is than the other stuff.

This past weekend while I was at the grocery store with my handy dandy list, I saw that my dear husband had added something to the list. He’d written in all caps “DAWN DISH SOAP”.

I smiled. I did not cackle. I may have gloated a little but I was so happy to be buying a new bottle of Dawn that I just accepted my own wisdom with grace and went about my day. Okay, wait. I did tell my mom this story because I needed someone (other than my three readers out there (you know who you are)) to know that my patience had paid off. I hadn’t had to fight about the dish soap. I didn’t have to shove my opinion of the dish soap down my husband’s throat. I waited and the grease and oil he works with daily made my case for me.

I used the last of the green, apple-scented soap last night and was so happy to throw that bottle away. Tonight the dishes will be washed with Dawn and I couldn’t be happier. We tried the other soap, learned it didn’t work and for that, Tom couldn’t be happier. I’m calling it a win/win situation.