Nothing a new pair of red pumps can’t fix

If I knew anyone would bother reading this blog, I would have given it a better name.
It’s too late now.  But in retrospect, I think

kimsbiggirlpanties.blogspot.com

would have been the better choice.

Because these past couple days, I sure could have used someone reminding me that I own a pair of big girl panties.

My bad attitude started with a phone call from my daughter’s teacher.  They desperately needed parents for her swimming field trip the next day.  Could I come in?

Well no.  Why?  Because I hate field trips, I hate rostering and I hate bathing suits.  I don’t like that many kids all together, I don’t really like pools and I wanted to go to spin class.

Surprisingly, none of those answers sounded good coming out of my mouth.  So I call the day home I can occasionally send my son to when I need to roster and ask if she could please tell me she had no room for Jonas the next day.  But she couldn’t.  Because she had room.

So I waited until the very last minute to call the teacher back, hoping and praying that she had found someone else.  She had not.

So I resign myself to go on the Kindergarten Swimming Fieldtrip.  Someone tried to tell me after I was being obedient to God’s call to me as a mother.  But I don’t believe obedience counts if you have the kind of shitty attitude I was going in with.

I even let my daughter overhear me on the phone whining.  She’s sitting there, so excited her mommy is coming swimming, and I am busy complaining to a friend about how much I don’t want to go.  Not my proudest moment.

I stewed about it and then went upstairs and tried on my bathing suit.  But recent weight loss had made it, well, indecent.  Unless I wanted the girls making an appearance at the swimming pool, I was going to need a new suit.

Just fyi – there is no kind of self-loathing like bathing suit shopping self-loathing.  I don’t like to admit it, but I hate everything about it.  I advocate being happy in the body God gave you.  But I obviously have a long way to go.  I figure clothes cover a multitude of sags and stretchmarks that bathing suits are not too kind to.  And because since in my head every other mom at the pool will look like Meghan Fox, I figure need to find a really, really good bathing suit. 

I go shopping, so caught up in my own cycle of poor me attitude that I take for granted the fact I don’t have to take the kids with me on this trip because my dh doesn’t leave on his month long Ex until the next morning. 

I drive into the city to the mall to embark on the task of finding a suit I like while fairly certain I would rather gouge my eyes out with hot pokers.  I try everywhere I can think of before Sportcheck because I just KNOW that I will only like the really expensive suit I find there.  But I can’t find anything else.  So I go there.  And I like the expensive suit.

Since at this point this is the only suit that hasn’t made me want to curl into the fetal position and eat ice cream, my dh tells me to just buy it. Because he’s great like that.  And because a self-loathing wife is not that much fun to be around, or receive 6 thousand bbm texts of despair from, I’m sure.

So I feel guilty but I buy it.  Home finally at 9 p.m. I open the hatch of the Malibu and grab the grocery bags and the latch for the hatch breaks.  And the hatch slams down.  And my rear window smashes into tiny little bitty pieces.

I open mouth stare at it for a minute.  Then I go inside and screech at my dh to come.  He stares.  Then he grabs gloves, cleans it up and starts taping the garbage bag on to cover the hole.  And while he does this, he starts whistling.


What. The. Crap.

I am milliseconds away from an epic full on hissy fit and he’s whistling.

I of course assume he hasn’t understood what has just happened.  So I explain, as though he has forgotten, our conversation of several hours previous.  The one where we’d lamented the fact that we always thought that by the time our 10 year anniversary came, we’d be able to do something exciting.  Go on a mini vacation.  Splurge.  Do something together that’s really awesome.  He might be home.  He might not.  The actual date’s never mattered much, but the idea of doing something special with each other around that time always stuck with us.

And now, that anniversary is upon us and low and behold, we have not somehow come into a small fortune in these 10 years and there is no vacation or splurge in our future.  And this makes us a little sad.  So, we planned an evening. We were going to get matching wedding band tattoos that we’d both always wanted, have a really great dinner somewhere, maybe a dinner theater or comedy club or something.  Stay out late together.  Maybe even get a room in a hotel.  Leave the kids with someone overnight and sleep in.  We budgeted some money that we knew we had saved up for this and planned it for the next weekend he’d be home.

Several hours before the window broke, we had been excitedly looking forward to it all.

And I was now looking at that exact amount of money, laying on the road in tiny broken pieces.  And he’s still whistling.

Obviously oblivious to the selfishness and whining speak up loud and clear in my head.

Almost like I DESERVED this date night and it was being taken from me.

Almost like this was the WORST thing that could have happened when dh was leaving.

Almost like NO ONE had EVER had something so crappy happen to shatter their dreams.

And I wonder how my daughter is so dramatic.

So after giving him many dirty looks for his whistling and seeming unwillingness to let me drag him down to my level of immaturity, I get on with my night.

And I spent the rest of the last night with my dh before he leaves,wallowing in a self-pity vortex of patheticness.  And all the nudges God has given to see outside my own friggin bubble, I am ignoring because it is much more satisfying to sulk.


I know it would just take looking at some other facts to make me change my tune.

Like the fact that, unlike other times, there is money there to pay for the repair we need.  We don’t have to beg or borrow.  We have it.  We can cover it.

Or the fact that it happened while dh was home so I didn’t have to deal with the clean up.  Or that it happened at home so I didn’t have to drive home like that.

Or the fact that way worse, more terrible things could have and have happened when he’s been away before.

How about the fact that I deserve nothing. I want things.  Lots of things.  But deserve?  Need?  When I have a healthy family, food in the fridge and a roof over our heads?  Notsomuch. 

Putting a hold on fancy anniversary plans?  O’well  We won’t be any less happily married if we don’t go on a cruise, don’t go to Las Vegas or don’t go to a dinner theater in the city and eat cheesecake.

And I wonder, how long had God been trying to tell me I needed to work on my priorities?  I need to embrace time with my daughter while she still wants me to hang out with her and her friends.  I should see all the things I have to be thankful for instead of making an internal list of things I deserve.  How many gentle reminders and nudges has He given me, this week alone?

 I would put up some verse about overcoming trials, but this is not worthy of a trial designation.  What it is is a call for an attitude adjustment.

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