a whole truckload of crap

That about says it all, ¿no?

I am actually smiling as I write this. I am trying to learn to find HUMOR in the power struggle, in the immature passive-aggressive nature of my broken-down marital relationship and in the fact that my 48 year old housemate doesn't seem to yet get how to live communally...or just does what he does to try to piss me off.

There is a problem with the freezer. For some reason unknown to me, the shelves barely are wide enough to stay on their supports. I don't know if their molecular speed has slowed so much that they have actually shrunk in size or what, but all I can say is that, once in a while, the shelves will fall, all contents out onto the floor, at barely a touch.

When this occurs with me, of course, met with a "Damn it" here or some other exasperated sigh-cursing combo. And I bend my lazy ass over and pick everything back up. Put it away. Fix it. Key operative idea: Clean up after myself.

In the past two weeks, this has occured three different times in the late evening hours (between 10 and midnight sometime) as He has gone to the freezer to raid his cookie supply. The past two instances, I have gone to the freezer the next morning for some frozen waffle reason only to find everything thrown back in atop a shelf that equally has been just tossed in on top of the shelf and its contents below. Great. So I take it all out and put it all back.

This morning, when opening the freezer, the entire contents of that top offending shelf came tumbling out at me, and the contents of the cookie stash opened and greased my entire floor. Angry? Yes, to say the very least. I would have left them there had I not had students in my house this morning. Plus, I have two little monkeys and a cat who LIVE for the two-day rule (sad, but only slightly exaggerated truth). So what did I do? Nothing I am particularly proud of in my gifted 20-20 hindsight, but I put the little oatmeal morsels back into the canister, then took my fist and crushed them all, each and every single one, to smithereens.

And this was all before 7:00 a.m.!

I am tired of fixing what He does wrong. I am tired of him being the Officer on this ship while I am the subordinate who has to clean up after him. So this time I didn't. I am hoping that, tonight, he will come up and go for the cookies again. And have them fall out all over his feet as they did mine this morning. Of course, that will not happen. They will all fall out again tomorrow as I go into the freezer for something, and I will be stuck with the mess, commencing my day with a lovely string of obscenities.

Fast forward to Sunday. I plan to take my children to a corn maze on my one day with the kids this three-day weekend. Out of pure, utterly stupid kindness I invited him to come with. I received an email from him yesterday asking if his brother and his girlfriend can come along with.

I said no, I am sorry, but that this was my activity with the children and that he was invited along as a kindness. That did not mean that he could, in turn, invite whomever he wanted. I countered that they could, instead, do something together either Saturday after softball committments or Monday when both children are out of school for the day.

What did I get back? A response saying that his brother has never done anything to me, that I should pay him the kindness that He pays my family.

Need I remind him of how he angrily fought with my mother and my sister in the middle of the street in Copenhagen, turning heads, putting me into cramps (I was four months pregnant) and sending me fleeing back to the train to Malmo, where he later threw a table at me and I had my passport in hand, ready to leave... (just one single instance of various I can list in which my husband and my family could not be civil)

Why didn't I go then?

Respect, indeed. My mother told me then that he has no respect for any of us...but I defended him to the end. Boy, was I blind?

So I am this time sticking to my guns. It is my day and my rules. I realize that his brother is family; he is just not MY family. If I invite a friend to go somewhere, is it right for her to turn around and invite a bunch of other people, then ask if it's okay if they come with? I wouldn't do that to someone else's invitation, personally, unless directly told to "bring a friend." He can make the rules for his days with the kids, during which I will try my hardest to figure out some good ME things to do this weekend while he has the kids and not sit and try to work my weekend away.

I feel that he is trying to work his way back in. Maybe he senses my invitation as a weakness. I merely extended the invitation (that I am about at the point of rescinding) as a kindness, as I told him I would try to make an effort to, once in a looooong while, do something all together.

Maybe, for me, that's too much too soon.