I have my space again

I have never been so happy to see someone go in my life.  Having him here was a challenge, truly.  I was seriously at the end of my rope by the time Sunday rolled around, and he really really wanted to stay until Monday but I insisted that he had overstayed his welcome and someone was going to see him and report him for being here too long and mess up my subsidies and what not.  Completely fictional, as I’ve hidden his visit from no one and everyone who is anyone knows about him staying for the holidays already, but if that’s what it takes to get him out of my house without incident then so be it.  He’s gone, and I’m a happy girl for it.  Right now I have so many things in my head that need to get out and it’s difficult to compartmentalize and type them out in any sort of order, so I apologize in advance if this becomes rather long and rambley and incoherent.  I don’t want the sheer volume of things I have to bitch about to keep me from writing at all, so I’ll just let it go and see where that takes me.

First and foremost.  The man stinks.  I don’t mean just your regular stinky-man stank, oh no, this is much, much worse.  He reeks.  Something is seriously rotten and wrong, and it’s not like we’re on good enough terms that I can just suggest a shower and some mouthwash.  The first morning that I went to wake them up, I opened up the door to the bedroom (he and the boys all slept in the boys’ bedroom, and I hibernated/vacationed in the other bedroom) and thought the smell would floor me.  However, he’d traveled the day before and it was early (ish) morning and I assumed morning breath and need for shower and all that stuff.  I suggested all boys should have a shower so we could start our day, and they all did, and that seemed to dissipate the odor for a while.  Then, as mentioned, I mostly hibernated in the other bedroom with the door closed and left him out here in the main apartment to play with the boys.  I spent most of the day out with them on Christmas proper, but otherwise I mostly knitted and read and played on my new toys.  Every time I emerged from my safety cocoon, I was met with an assault on my poor sensitive senses the likes of which I have not experienced since our house was invaded by a skunk family.  It was bad.  He just stinks, like bad breath and rotten ass.  Of course, I think he’s full of shit and acts like an ass so maybe that explains it, but it isn’t just me.  My daughter came over later the day he left, and she remarked that my apartment rather smelled like a rotten mouth and she hoped that it would get better since the source had presumably gone.

Ew.  How gross.  And my poor, sensitive, five year old asked me one morning why daddy’s mouth smelled yuck and I told him, “That’s why we brush our teeth every night darling!”  I later heard him telling Daddy from my safety net in the bedroom, “Daddy, if you don’t want your mouth to smell yuck then you have to brush your teeth EVERY DAY!”  The kid tried.  I don’t know that it was his breath though, can breath permeate everything like that?  I mean, the odor was certainly reminiscent of bad breath, but it was more of a body odor than a mouth odor.  Ugh, I can’t analyze it any more, I need to just forget about it.  I can’t imagine that he’s dating currently with this… issue.  Or, I can’t imagine that he’s getting any repeat dates, let’s put it that way.

We only had one spat, and that was the day before he left.  It was taking everything within me at that point to not explode in the face of his self-righteousness, but I was able to mostly contain myself and hold it all in for a later therapy appointment.  However, when he started arguing with me about the state of my car and how it had been, it was more than I could bear and I lost it.  At some point, something happened to the spring cylinder things on the back lift gate of my Jeep Cherokee, and it just happened to be a point between when I was in the boot last and when he was in it first.  So what happened was him coming to ask me how to make the lift gate stay up, and me telling him that it should stay up automatically (it always had until then, why would I think anything differently?) It ended with him making fun of my piece of shit car, which just went right to the very core of me considering the recent acquisition of his $11k Honda because anything less would be an affront to his character.  Not to mention me still being pissed that a $1300 car is good enough for me, and his kids, and he expects us to drive back and forth from Ohio to Chicago repeatedly, but he cannot make his way around Chicago in something less because it might leave his precious ass at the side of the road and then what would he do?  What infuriates me, really, is that he cannot bring himself to see (or acknowledge) the double standard he’s got going on here.  What’s good for him is NOT good for everyone else, because he is a special snowflake, dammit, and if I and the rest of the world would just wake up and notice that then we’d all get along just fine.  Of course a $1300 car is good enough for me because I can make it work but he cannot.  And he cannot understand why this might be a problem at all, it just is!  I gave up to keep the peace because I cannot change his mind or perspective or make him care, and it wasn’t worth it to me any more.  It was, at some point, and I used to “make” him see my point-of-view, but no more.   I don’t care any more.

I was ready to strangle him by the end of day one, as he charged in here and shook his head at the state of my apartment and declared it filthy and unacceptable.  He was full of guilt for not being here, and wanting to prove to me how very useful he could be.  I was feeling intruded upon, and sought to remind him that we’ve been getting along just fine without him for over two years now.  He was doing things like… pulling the drawers out of the bottom of the fridge and exclaiming, “Ew, when was the last time this was cleaned! Have you done it at all since you’ve moved in?  What are those people doing who are coming to help you???”  I was very proud of myself for remaining very zen and letting it go.  I just left him to do his thing and went “on vacation” in the other bedroom.

Now for some positives, because I’m almost to the end of my typing limit for now and I hate to just have a whole page full of bitchiness.  His phone didn’t work here, and as such he wasn’t able to communicate with anyone from Chicago for most of the time he was here.  This meant that he spent most of his time focused on the boys, and they had a blast playing all week.  They broke in all the new games Santa brought, and it was warm enough that they were able to go outside for a bit and work on the five year old learning to ride without training wheels.  It’s fairly obvious that he does at least care a great deal about them and he is a good dad to them (when he’s with them).  I’ll try to keep my focus on that and how happy the boys are at the moment and hopefully that will get me through the times that really suck.  I did determine, as if there were ever any doubt, that I will never again be happy sharing my living space with another adult.  Oh no.  I need to be in charge of the space, I have things the way I want them and I do not appreciate anyone messing with them.