Tales from the Shark Tank

For quite awhile now, I’ve had a problem with WordPress, the program I use to write this blog. It’s hard to put anything new online when the “Publish” button has disappeared, y’know? So I’ve been poking at it off and on for awhile now, trying different ways to figure out where the controls had gone and how to get them back.

So as is the usual thing, the fix turned out to be both very simple and not terribly obvious until I tried something and it worked. So maybe now I can start writing again. I’d like that habit back.

Well that was a pity-party to end all! I won’t delete the last post, because, well, it’s where my head is, and the mood is the primary reason for the extended silence. But wow do I need to adjust my own attitude!

It’s snowing, and the wind is, to quote my husband, “howling like a banshee with a smashed toe.” If it were snowing harder, it would be a genuine blizzard; as it is, it’s “simply” a winter storm. By 5:30 this evening we’d gotten notice that school would be delayed two hours, and by 7:30 the Powers That Be had decided canceling altogether would be the better part of valor. I couldn’t agree more; I might have kept our boy home even if school was in session. We had freezing fog earlier, with the result that I watched my neighbor’s car slide majestically where she didn’t want it to go twice. The first time she recovered; the second, she had to be pushed out lest she go into the marsh altogether. Neither my beloved husband nor I had to set foot out the door today, and set foot out the door we did not.

Better yet, my husband has his work computer, so that unless our internet goes out (always possible when things ice up), he can work from home. There again, I’m very glad he can stay safe.

On the other hand, that will give me the job of keeping our son out of his hair so he can actually get work done. I love our boy dearly, but he demands a great deal of attention, prefers to claim it from his dad, and needs frequent reminders of such things as “leave [insert parent of choice] alone; s/he is working/ sleeping/ otherwise doing something that precludes playing a game with you.

Normally that’s fine; I enjoy doing things with my kid. But life has been unusually frustrating lately mostly due to the need to play construction manager for my mom long-distance. I get to be the heavy hand that insists that they aren’t getting paid until all the work is done. I get to coordinate with both insurance and mortgage companies. I get to explain things, then explain them again, and then again, because I’m telling the contractor things he doesn’t want to hear, like that he’s not getting more money until the work is done. I get to call and take them to task repeatedly for failing to show up when they say they will and not calling. And I get to tell them they put themselves in this position when they complain bitterly that they haven’t been paid for the portion of the work that’s done, when if they’d just showed up when they said they would the whole thing could – and should – have been done before Thanksgiving.

All that makes for a rather short-tempered Alisa, and even when I try not to let it, that sometimes splashes over. I do well enough when my son wants me to watch a video that he’s watched at least 20 times already with him, or at least he takes it with good grace when I say I will watch it once but not more than that. I handle it with less grace when he asks to decorate a cake every five minutes while I’m trying to actually get something done like oh, say, dishes. And I know I need to take a weekend off when the sound of him humming a single note – his form of autistic “stimming” behavior – makes me want to either scream or dissolve into tears. I deal for the afternoon and evening, but a full day of it? Now? I just wish it weren’t right now.

I feel guilty for feeling like I need a break from my kid, or just a break, period. But guilty or not, it’s there. Anyone got a desert island I can borrow for a few days?

We’ve lived here for 5 years now. I expected to have deer nearby, and have not been disappointed. Sometimes they’ve been a source of great amusement, as when the little fawn came up and peered at me and the cat through our side door, nose pressed right up against the glass, while mama had quiet conniptions at the edge of the field about 10 feet away. I swear I could almost hear her wishing for hands so she could scoop baby up and get the little idiot out of reach. Eventually, baby put her nose down and Sophia-cat stood up on her hind legs, they touched noses through the glass, and then the little one bounced off to Mama. I see them bounding across the road about a block away or browsing at the edge of the fields on either side of the house, but I’d never had a problem with them on the road.

This year all that has changed. I swear Clan Cervine has a collective death-wish. I came home one day a month or so back to tell my husband that I had not hit the deer; they had hit me. It was literal truth; I’d seen them close to the edge of the road, hit the brakes, and managed to stop before I ran into anyone. Evidently hooves don’t brake quite as well. They didn’t stop at all, with the result that the last two in the little herd, an adult and a juvenile, went bouncing off my front bumper. No harm to the car, and I assume none to them, but really – running into a stationary object the size of a mommy-van? That wasn’t the only odd encounter, either, just the most extreme. You’d think if they were standing and browsing in a field solidly 50 feet from the road that they’d either keep browsing or run the other way when a roaring monster approached, but no – they’re just a likely to explode into motion and across the road, directly into the path of the dragon. As one of my friends put it, deer are not the sharpest spoons in the drawer. It’s not just me, either; the other night my husband came home and commented that he’d come perilously close to having a cervine hood ornament.

I’ve always been fairly careful, and I’m really not all that worried. I’ve learned to watch the brush at the edges of the road for motion at window height, and to slow down if Bambi’s kith and kin are anywhere in sight. I really have no desire to be an instrument of evolution, culling the stupid (or slow) from the gene pool. But I could really use a little cooperation from the browsing contingent. I mean really – running into a van after it’s stopped? I know all their hormones are carbonating seasonally now and overriding what little wit they originally possessed, but they’re prey animals. They’re supposed to know enough to run away from dragons. Aren’t they?

I really don’t have that big a garden. Four feet by four feet, containing two cucumber vines, four tomatoes, a couple of potatoes, thyme, basil and a collection of marigolds and moss roses. I can weed it in ten minutes, and water it with the hose – no sprinkler needed, it just doesn’t take that long.

But small as it is, I have an abundance of those cucumbers and tomatoes. My basil is bushy enough that I could (and probably will) make several good batches of basil. My harvesting basket is full, and so is the mixing bowl, usually used for bread, that I poured the excess into. It’s colorful, too, since half my cherry tomatoes are pear shaped red ones and the other half pear shaped yellow, and both are incredibly prolific. I’ll probably take a quart over to my girlfriend, since she didn’t get a garden in this year and they won’t keep until I next go in to Indy. (Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll have more by then.) Judging by the number of green tomatoes and blossoms, they aren’t slowing down any time soon either.

My son wants to try to make homemade ketchup, and I may attempt it. These are salad and slicing tomatoes, not sauce tomatoes, so I don’t know how it will go. On the other hand, I might as well try it. It’s not like I don’t have the tomatoes to spare.

A good friend, the mother of friends of my son’s, is going through a divorce. It’s badly needed; domestic violence has been an escalating issue. And, being both Listener par excellence and legally trained, I’m squarely in the middle of it in a way I’ve never before been. It’s not that I haven’t seen such divorces professionally, but this time I’m seeing the details, listening as she tries to figure out how to reorganize and simplify her life, as she tries to figure out what really is important and what’s just a petty detail that won’t matter in the long run. I’m seeing first hand, not just hearing, about how this is affecting her children, because as she’s talking to me quietly in her kitchen, my son is playing with hers in their living room. I’m seeing the increased volatility of the child with Aspberger’s, and the closed withdrawn watchfulness of her neurotypical son. No matter how many presentations I’ve heard, no matter how much I’ve read, nothing has had the visceral impact of seeing the changes in people I’ve known for nearly five years.

In talking to her attorney, I realized how long I’ve seen this coming. She started telling me how her husband – a long-distance trucker – would try to tell her that she had no need to go out, no reason to be anywhere but at home waiting for him when he happened to blow through or call, that her only business should be taking care of the house and kids, and that her friends were a stupid distraction. I discussed it with my own wonderful husband, and we gave her a key so that she would have a place to go if she needed it regardless of whether or not we were home. That was almost 4 years ago. She didn’t think anything of it other than that he was being a jerk. I saw the beginnings of a pattern, and hoped profoundly that I was wrong.

Unfortunately I wasn’t, and now I understand how it creeps up on people. It’s gradual, that attempt by one partner to control the other, and always presented as being triggered by the perceived misbehavior of the abused spouse. It might even sound reasonable at first. But “I’m afraid other men will find you attractive” becomes “you’re having an affair”, with the “proof” being that there are men’s phone numbers in the personal Rolodex. Yeah, there are. The fathers of your kids’ friends. Or their Little League coaches. Or the furnace repairman, or the roofing contractor you liked after your roof took storm damage. And the accusations turn into fights, then shoving, then kicks and slaps and threats to bring a gun and shoot you. It wasn’t until she got knocked down in the kitchen that she realized where it was going. I’d seen it coming for a year and a half by then.

Even in the abstract, this has always made me angry, but now I’m seeing the terror this man is causing, and it makes me sick. My friend is one of the strongest women I know, and I’ve seen her shaking, in tears, so frightened she couldn’t figure out a course of action, certain that her husband would find her no matter where in this vast continent she fled, as if he were omnipotent and had all of James Bond’s gadgetry to boot. I’ve been the friend she confided in, and am now the one she asks if something she’s considering is reasonable, or if she should do something now or wait. She can’t handle more than one day at a time. Keeping track of the long view is my job, for the moment. I will be with her in court when she goes to get the restraining order made permanent next week, probably as her primary witness, certainly as her moral support and spine. I’m not her attorney, thank heaven; I’m her friend. I’m finding that’s a whole different job.