Blacksheep Speaks

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Well, I wish I could report that they caught the guy, but I can’t. They had his car towed, arrested his passengers, but they are still looking for the guy. He took off into the woods, but there are a lot of woods around here, including the ones around my house. They seem to have completely lost this guy’s trail, and this is NOT helping me have confidence in our local police force. I’ve been trying to keep my mind off things by shopping online. We need clothes for the baby, and I need to buy computer memory as well, but I just can’t concentrate. I think I am gonna give up for the night and try and sleep. I’ll get back to you if I ever find out what happened.

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They seem to be having a hard time catching this guy. Further listening to the scanner tells me that this guy is wanted in a recent shooting. So much for MY nerves. Somewhere in the house one of the faucets is dripping, the cats are making noise, and the dogs outside are barking. All of these things are normal, yet tonight, every one of them makes me jump. The fact that our outside dogs bark at ANYTHING, including falling leaves and lightning bugs, is not helping. There are times when being the only one awake in the house is NOT a good thing.

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It’s the middle of the night, the baby is asleep, and there are no teenagers around to whine about needing weight loss advice when they don’t need to lose any. Normally, this is a peaceful time for me. We live all by ourselves on the end of a dirt road, and the road dead ends here, so no traffic. But tonight hasn’t BEEN quiet. Just a short while ago, here I was enjoying the peace when a police siren went off. CLOSE. I run to the window in time to see a car chase in action. And to see both the front car AND the cop car cut ruts through the front yard and head back up the road. I ran back and actually started LISTENING to the police scanner my mother keeps on all the time, and find out that the guy ditched the car near the top of our road and took off on foot into the woods. The guy is armed and dangerous, and running loose near here. So much for MY peace of mind tonight!

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I never considered myself to be all that old. If I am feeling minorly depressed, I might concede that, at forty, I MIGHT be at the very earliest stages of middle age. However, recent events in this overstuffed house have led me to believe that, at least in the eyes of some members of my family, I am venturing far into the lands of senility, with no hope of any return. I stay up all night, literally, with my granddaughter, who past readers may recall that my husband and I have agreed to raise. She is one month old, and it is simply easier to already be awake than to have to make her scream through my first cup of coffee, or risk diapering the wrong end. My husband takes the day shift, and my eighteen year old daughter fills in the gaps. I pay the bills, do the caretaking, and handle what needs to be handled. Okay, to be fair, my eighty year old mother who is also in residence here supplies money and does a lot of cooking. My husband does a lot of caretaking. I do a lot of organizing. The baby my mother leaves entirely to us. The baby’s mother, my nineteen year old autistic daughter, AND her husband also live here.

My nineteen year old does not contribute money or much assistance. She runs her MOUTH like it’s going out of style. She eats OUR food, uses utilities WE pay for, uses OUR internet access. Granted, the computer is more or less hers… her grandmother bought it FOR her when she started college, which she blew off.

I got sick of her lack of respect for her grandmother (and everyone else). Now, this is an interesting one… in the ensuing argument, she informed ME that I, not she, should be the one to move out. Ahem. I then confiscated her computer. Now we find out that this computer (presumably coupled with MY internet access) is THE single most important thing in her life. And she thinks _I_ am the one who needs a passport to the land of sanity. I swear, I did NOT raise her to be this way. However, if anyone out there feels that their life is lacking something and WANTS constant upheaval in their home, I’d be glad to loan them to you for a while. THEM being the nineteen year old and her husband, of course.

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Fleas are terrible this year in this part of the Ozarks. Our poor animals have really suffered between flea treatments. We have found one treatment that REALLY works for our two housecats, though. Problem is, it involves giving them a bath. Only one of them is declawed, by the way. However, Max’s claws are not the issue at the moment. THIS story is about our twelve year old (mostly) fire point Siamese, CC.

I was lucky enough to be too busy to give the baths this time… I was busy on the phone trying to get somebody to give me a car insurance quote. My daughter Mollie, assisted by Wendi, was the one in control this time. Now, CC absolutely adores Mollie. She didn’t even struggle much when Mollie put her in the water. She was even purring when she was being lathered. At the time, we thought that maybe she had made the mental connection between the baths and getting rid of the fleas. FYI, cats also purr when they are plotting something. This was new information to us. Mollie finished the bath without incident, toweled the cat off, and gave her cat treats and praised her for being such a good sport. Then she traded the wet towel for a drier one so the cat wouldn’t get cold, and picked her up. CC looked up, purring adoringly… and peed all over her.

When God said that vengeance was His… THIS cat wasn’t listening.

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Our oldest daughter and her new husband are staying here with us for the moment… him for a couple weeks, her until she can join him on the military base. Because of this, we have bourn witness to “The Newlywed Show”, our own VERY localized sit-com. Personally, if things don’t change, I am giving this marriage about fifteen more minutes. A great example of what I am talking about happened earlier today, when the lovebirds decided to do their laundry. Okay, folks… the big question:

You are folding laundry with your new spouse, and she is doing it differently than the way you were always taught. Do you a) nicely explain that you have a different way, b) ignore it because it really doesn’t matter that much, or c) take a folded pair of shorts, loudly proclaim “You did it wrong!” and whap your dear love upside the head with the shorts?

My new son in law chose option C. And the rest of us? Well, we are getting used to this… we just lean back, put on our vintage sunglasses, try hard not to laugh, and enjoy the show.

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Having an autistic child can be a challenge, particularly when the child is only borderline. My best friend and I both have autistic children. Well, “children” is relative. They are nineteen and twenty years old. Her son cannot talk, and never will. My daughter, much closer to the borderline, can and has passed for normal for years. We chose to treat her problem with love and compassion instead of medication, and it did work. She made it all the way through the high school she attended without a single teacher or counselor ever identifying the problem. Perhaps we would have been better off if they had.

All I ever wanted for my daughter was a normal life, a happy one. But there are limits to what one can endure, even for their children. You see, my daughter is now a mother to a child she cannot care for. My husband and I will be raising this child. My daughter, who got pregnant two days after leaving home for college, married someone other than the baby’s father, and now wants more children. This, in spite of the fact that her father and I would have to raise them. Her new husband, who is in the military and is only beginning to comprehend what he did to himself, is not going to be on hand to raise these children. I have tried to explain birth control to my daughter, but it did no good. It is three WEEKS since the delivery of her child and she already thinks she might be pregnant again. She and her husband can’t even finance a car or find mortgage lenders that will listen to them, yet they seem bent on repopulating the planet with children for us to raise.

Any parent of an autistic child that happens to be reading this…. do yourself a major favor and get adequate documentation that your child IS autistic. Without that, when they turn 18, you might very well find yourself in hot water, simply because you can no longer control what they do legally, yet you WILL be stuck with the results.

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It’s been an interesting week, folks… remember the old curse about living in interesting times? I’m there. My husband was in and out of the hospital again. That was fun. My granddaughter has her days and nights mixed up, and I’m on the night shift. More fun. My daughter is going through what I can only assume is post partum depression… I am assuming, because I never had that, not once in four pregnancies. I prefer to believe it’s that, actually, because I KNOW I did NOT raise a spoiled rotten brat like THAT. Her poor husband is going nuts. In the meantime, my service provider has gone screwy, and on a totally unrelated server, my mail thingie is screwy too. My spam filters appear to be filtering and deleting about half my email, spam or not. What DOES get through? Well, I see a lot of “Phentermine no prescription” email, a lot of free vacations, and a lot of ads to enlarge a body part I don’t actually have. It’s a great week!

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My husband had to go back to the hospital yesterday. Over the years, this has become an unwelcome but familiar routine. This time he was actually throwing up blood. They can’t tell why. Second time this month. My husband is something of a medical enigma. A lot happens to him but the doctors can never seem to determine WHY these things are happening. My husband takes it pretty well. When I talked to him on the phone earlier this evening, his biggest complaint was that he couldn’t find a wifi connection for his laptop. If it were me, I would be worrying about other things.

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More accurately, SHOPPING for baby time. I have spent several days now looking for a baby bed that is NOT manufactured in China. With all the garbage coming out of China these days, I do NOT want to take a chance with my granddaughter. But even when you THINK you have an American made product, a lot of the time the lable will generically use the term “imported components”. Argh. Trying to find the best buy on baby products that are safe has become SO much more complicated than it used to be!

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