A Hot Mess

So, my mother-in-law has a house out in the country, built during the Great Depression, covered in asbestos siding, lead paint, and 70 years of insect poisons. (Carpet cleaning? No, she's not uppity like that.) I'm not sure how my husband managed to grow up there and not grow an extra ear or something. Well, about ten or twelve years ago, when she married her second husband, she moved to his house and basically abandoned the old country house. The entire extended family now uses it as a storage building for crap we don't use but aren't willing to part with yet. (Dadgum spoiled Americans.)

My brother-in-law lives in a town about 45 minutes away. And he's about as crazy as a circus clown on crystal meth. He hordes, but he had to move a couple of weeks ago. To a smaller place. They moved what he needed & told my mother-in-law to have someone move the rest of his stuff. So my husband drove down there in our van, all of the seats removed, and packed it full of his brother's junk. The man had a wardrobe big enough for 4 people, and that was just what they left behind! Then the hubs took it all out to the country house and unloaded it all. It took like 6 hours.

Did his mom or brother thank him? Ummm, no.

His brother wasn't happy that he didn't have all his stuff. And my MIL wanted all the stuff brought to her house so she could sort through it. She wants to donate some, but she really wants to put most of it in her guest room so it's there when her son visits. Not because she's being nice, but because having two loonies under one roof is guaranteed to be too much fun. (And by "fun", I mean clinical insanity sprinkled with dangerous threats and loud fights.) His stuff distracts & calms him so they don't actually have to deal with each other.

Did I mention she didn't tell him where to take the stuff before he unloaded it all? The storage house seemed like the logical place.

So she started calling our house three times a day to fuss at him for not bringing the junk to her house. Every day. For 7 days straight. Saturday after he unloaded to Friday morning. In addition to all her random other calls. Because she has to tell me, tell him, and tell our voice mail in case we forget. And if I answer when she's intending to leave a message, she keeps calling back and tells me about random bullcrap (like her latest racist observations) until I stop answering.

He finally relented and told her he'd get what she wanted from the country house on Saturday when he was off work. So Friday, she got tired of waiting and went out there herself.

There's no power or water, so it's reeeeeally hot in that house. She got a few things, then decided it was too hot, she'd just let the hubs get the stuff as planned.... after she did one last thing.

Once she got home, she called me (again, for the 3rd time that day, and it was just 10:30am) to tell me she'd only gotten a few shirts. It was too hot. And she had to use the toilet. In a house with no running water.

So she took a dump and left it in the 110 degree house. Then she called me to tell my husband  (and I'm quoting exactly here), "to take a bucket to flush it. There's a big mess."

Seriously. Have you ever gotten a phone call telling you to go flush someone else's big hot mess for them? That's why she left, I bet. She didn't want to smell it. The heat was secondary.

And, God love him, he did it. He rolled his eyes, filled a bucket, went & flushed her giant poo, and moved much of his brother's junk to her house.

And she still didn't thank him.

Lessons for Men #1

Why women have three wardrobes:

We have clothes that fit. We like them well enough. But they're never good enough. They taunt us with what we are and what we think we should be. We can look at every scrap of fabric in this section and say, "I have NOTHING to wear!" Because, next to this section of the closet is the second wardrobe:

The clothes we used to fit. Before marriage. Before kids. Before knowing that we'll still get a little sumpin-sumpin even if we never get rid of those last few "baby" pounds. (Even if the baby is now ten years old, it's still that kid's fault that we're soft in the middle.) We keep telling ourselves that we'll fit into those clothes again. We'll lose those last few pounds one of these days. We'll be hot again. Soon. But if we get rid of those clothes, we won't keep trying to lose the weight, because if we did, we'd have to buy a new wardrobe. And that would just be too expensive. So, if you want us to keep working on whittling away at that baby weight, don't complain about all those clothes we haven't worn in years.

Then there's that smaller section in the back of the closet. The clothes we loathe with a burning passion. They make us feel like ogres. They might as well be covered in pickled pigs' feet. The section that's smaller than the other two because we like to pretend we don't need it. Because those clothes are the next  size up. Uuugh. And, for some reason known only to God Himself, we balloon at certain times of the month. We feel like we'd be better off attaching a super soaker water gun up to our porky midriff and spraying all that excess water out all over. Perhaps we could assist the fire brigade like that? For real, WHY on earth do we retain water? Some kind of cruel cosmic joke?  Like God & Jesus said back in Genesis, "Let us make man in Our image, and let's make woman in a funhouse mirror image that changes as she walks around, just to keep her humble. Look, she's fat! Look, she's skinny! Now her belly's big! Now her thighs are! Wheee! This is fun! Because you know, as shallow as we're making these guys to be, something's gotta keep the girls from just treating them like annoying drooly puppies. Every 28 days or so, she's just going to get huge and feel like crap. That should do it. Remind her she's not actually a goddess. Can you imagine how she'd turn out if she thought she was as great as she really is? So this should do the trick and keep her from totally being in love with herself."
Well, maybe it didn't go down like that. I don't think God is all that vindictive. But it does seem to work that way, huh?

So, fellas, don't whine that your lady's got too many clothes. She can only wear a third of them, but she needs them all.

Isn't it ironic, doncha think?

My stepson's got Asperger's syndrome, ADHD, CP, and some other mishmashed letters of the alphabet. We got him tested again recently, and insurance covered it. The shrink recommended a certain type of therapy. We took him to the evaluation for it. Insurance covered it. He fully fit the criteria to receive the therapy.

But insurance won't cover it.

Why? It's a mental health issue, and they don't cover mental health. They knew he had an Autism Spectrum Disorder before they paid thousands in testing. But they won't cover the therapy because he's on the autism spectrum.

And what kind of insurance offers this crack-pot coverage? Viva, provided by my husband's place of work. And where does he work? A center for the physically & mentally handicapped.

Yeah. The place that provides mental health therapy doesn't cover mental health therapy for its employees.

I'm feelin' the love. You feelin' it? It's a big ole love fest goin on here.