Irked

I am so irritated with everyone, especially myself.

All day long, all I hear in my head are ridiculous cliches. If you want something done, you better do it yourself. Why aren’t the whites whiter? A mother’s work is never done. You’re doing the most important job there is. Really? The early bird gets the worm. Cleanliness begets cleanliness. (Thanks, Martha Stewart, not at our house!) Fail. Fail again. Fail better. There will be time, there will be time. ( No there won’t, I scream after I hear that one. There won’t be time! This is the time!)  One must know how to work and how to love. But how, I wonder, can one get everyone else to just shut the fuck up?

I am tired of the children. I am tired of the house. I am tired of the tight budget borne of a single income. I am tired of the worn out clothes that don’t fit, and the laundry that smells even when it comes out of the washer. I am tired of the small counters and the endless pile of dishes. I am tired of feeling ugly and old and used up. I am tired of my mind feeling broken and interrupted and put upon.

Even the dog. The compulsive eater of a dog. Lurking, furtive, trying to look inconspicuous under the table, his eyes black and shining. He cannot help help himself. Some ancient message in his scandinavian DNA that whispers to him, Eat, eat the oatmeal. Lick the plates of the scrambled eggs. Eat. I hate him, too. As soon as I leave the room, I hear the clinking, the sound of his toenails, lifting his giant silver back, up, up, onto the table.

There is a jolly rancher stuck to the baby car seat. Right in the seat. I ignored it at Easter, when it made its debut, when it was still green. Now it is black, and covered with dog hair. It has fused with the fabric and I can’t pull it off now, even though I tried. When Mr. Mac is put into the seat, his body heat starts to soften the black lozenge, and it leaves sticky black smear on all his pants.

The dishes, again. Our counters are too small. Our sink is too small. We aspire to be a family who cooks, but our kitchen is a small horseshoe of stingy workspace. The sink I want costs $500 and will require cutting a larger hole in the counter, which still would be, too small.  The only answer is a new house, which is yet again, too expensive. And I so do dishes that are too big for our small sink, and I load and reload the dishwasher, all the time stewing about the poor fit of everything.

I am a poor fit for a housewife. I am Lisa Simpson. I need to be graded. ( Remember that Simpsons episode, when Bart repaints the school parking spaces too small and the school has to be shut down. Lisa can’t handle it and has a fit in front of her mother. Grade me! She screams. Grade me! Marge, not sure what to do, hurriedly scribbles an A+ on a piece of paper. Lisa sighs in relief and walks away. Marge is freaked out.

That’s me. I need grades. Compliments. Feedback. Honorable mention. There isn’t much of that in my current line of work.

No one ever says to me:

A+ for going to the grocery store, nice way to handle that tantrum. Good save the way you used the inside of your skirt to wipe up the puke. Nice ball handling with that crap filled diaper you changed, again, in the pouring rain, I think maybe someone even checked you out a little, when you were all bent over like that, ‘cause on top of being a mama,  you’re a cutie!

And there is no one to do it. No honor roll for being a stay at home mother. No bonuses, no raises, no promotions for on the job know-how. Those three phone calls I made to the pediatrician yesterday, politely but firmly requesting that someone call me the fuck back about the open sores on my son’s mouth? No honorable mention for those soft skills, all while piloting one of those goddamn car carts around Wegman’s. Silence.

The only thing that I get in the way of feedback is just another knocked over glass of juice, another fight at the table. I know I sound melodramatic. I know I am melodramatic. And I hate myself for it. A crappy housewife and a drama queen. I get an F.

And here’s the worst part, I have nothing to fall back on. I’ve been at this game since I was 25, and I didn’t manage to get a master’s degree at night. I don’t happen to be a registered nurse, or know how to wait tables. I am dependent on my husband for income, the least feminist thing of all. Not earning a salary so I could stay home with my kids was much cuter when I was in my twenties.

Having kids in your twenties is such a fun ride. You’re young, they’re young. You probably only have two. It blows your mind. You start a garden. Do DIY projects on the house. Life is adorable, and you take lots of pictures. Then you have three kids and you are in your thirties. You can’t find the camera anymore, and if you do, it is never charged. You stop getting invited places, and people stop coming to see you. The upstairs shower never gets tiled. The backer board  just sits there, disapproving, while you cuss and plunge the toilet. Again. What do they do to this toilet? You ask yourself, ignoring the boxes of tiles and the tile cutter ( cortadora baldosa, in Spanish,  cause of course, I can’t ignore them). I am thirty-two, and I am bad at my job.

So when I cry at Wegman’s because I hate everyone SO MUCH, I feel terrible. We are so lucky. Three healthy children. An employed husband. Safe in our home, food purchased for the children to eat.  No war nearby. Why can’t I be satisfied with that?

Why should it bother me so much that the chicken house needs to be shoveled out, that there ants all over the kitchen and bathroom counters?

I need to wash my face. I need to believe that I haven’t lost my looks, my brains, that the adult that I never quite got to know in my twenties will still be there, waiting for me here in my thirties, while I finish the dishes and call the mechanic to apologize for forgetting our appointment, again. Here’s hoping.

 

The definition of Irked is to annoy someone.Have you ever been irked? Of course you have, we all have. Sometimes you are irked because you are disappointed. This disappointment comes from the fact that someone you thought very highly of did something that you never thought that they were capable of. But it isn't only people that can irk someone. It can be animals, products, the government, religious institutions, countries and even your favorite movie house. I remember the time, many years ago, when a certain movie theater was cleaning their glass doors. What made this theater so unusual was the fact that it had a line of these glass door across the entire front of the theater. There must have been at least ten of them. The doors were made of perfectly clear glass with clear glass handles. All the doors were open, or so I thought. Leave it to me, I marched full steam ahead right into the only closed door in the entire row. It was so clean that I hadn't noticed that it was closed. Ouch! My nose hurt for a week after that and my friends were still laughing about this for months afterward. They would meet other people and retell my tale of woe without any mercy. I think that I would have to classify this as a double irk. First, I was irked at the movie theater for not leaving all the doors open or at least putting a sign on the door and second, I was irked at my friends for making me feel like a jerk.

This wasn't as bad as the time the IRS was irking me. It all started with a phone call from someone who represented himself as an IRS agent. He told me that I was short on my taxes and I had to come to the IRS office and give him the cash I owed which he said was about $1,000. Strange, very strange I thought. Since I was only about 20 years old at the time and really didn't care about anything, I told him to drop dead and hung up. The calls continued for years. Threats were exchanged but nothing ever happened. Finally I went into the US Army and I got a call there. Can you imagine that this guy tracked me down? He said he was sending me to jail if I didn't come over with the cash, and only cash, to his office within the week. I was stationed only about 100 miles from there but I had decided that this was some kind of a scheme and refused to go. Boy I was really irked. About a year later the front page headline in the papers was that several IRS agents were arrested for shaking down people. About two weeks after that I got a letter in the mail with an apology from the District Director, he stated that my name was found on a shakedown list of one of the arrested agents.

Did you ever get irked by a car dealer? I have. Several times we had to bring our Ford in for repairs. The car was purchased new and was less than one year old so it was covered by the warrantee. I guess this particular dealer felt he didn't make enough money on warrantee. repairs so he would always leave this car until last. First the front seat broke and it was in for over a week. Next the front end went out and it was in for over a week. Next alternator went and it was in for over a week. Then came the Big IRK, they had to replace a part in the engine and it was in for TWELVE WEEKS and the dealer wouldn't even give me a replacement to drive for the time. I called and called working my way up to the owner who was almost impossible to reach and took about 12 calls to get to. I shouldn't have wasted my time. After several calls to the district representative I finally got my car back repaired, boy was I really irked.

Work has a way of really irking you sometimes. At times even the work irk is too tender to describe how you feel. I remember when I first started working for (I better not name the company). I had what was known as a substitute position. Slavery would have been a better definition. There was no overtime pay. Oh you would work many hours overtime sometimes but you would get straight pay. Sometimes you might work all night but you wouldn't get night differential. When there was work you would be 'clocked on', when it got slow you would be 'clocked off'. If you ever left without being let go, even though you were 'clocked off' and on your own time, you would be fired. You could actually only get two or three hours pay and yet have to stay at least eight hours, and the bosses were very nasty to you. Talk about being irked, this was super irking taken to a whole new level. There was a rule that no one could work more than 12 hours straight. When the busy season came, I did my twelve hours. Clocking out, I began to head home. The boss came running over to me and asked, "Where the h... do you think you are going?" He then clocked me on to a different card. This went on for 72 hours until I fell and hit the floor sound asleep. I was then sent home. If I hadn't needed the money so bad at the time, I would have told all those bosses where to go. As I said this was a whole new art of irking.

The US Army irked me when I enlisted. I remember when I had to report to an address on Whitehall Street in Manhattan for a physical and induction. Now let me tell you, the army never understood about privacy. One of the first things that happened was that I and about 200 other men were ordered to strip which we did. Several doctors entered the auditorium sized room. We were told to stand against the wall. Problem, there was a huge picture window overlooking the street and people were looking up and laughing at us. It was especially embarrassing with the women would point up, to show their friends because we were only on the second floor. After this irksome experience, I thought the worst was over, but I was wrong. Next we were ordered to go stand in the hall. Yes in the hall. While we were out there, female secretaries would walk by giggling. Sometimes they would walk by in pairs and could hardly contain themselves. I never saw so many secretaries. Finally after a different medical examination we were allowed to get dressed. I think this was a course in humiliation. But maybe it was a lesson in "I order you and you do it, no matter how unpleasant". I was irked for weeks after this.

So you see, there are many things that happen to a person as he or she travels through life that can irk you. I guess you just have to roll with the punches.