Must-Have’s and Married Moms
07 Feb 2010 Leave a Comment
Last year my Mom got engaged. I don’t recall if I ever really chatted about the circumstances of their engagement, but now seems a bit of an appropriate time to bring it up. See, the thing is: His kids are CRAZY. Seriously, crazy, somewhat deranged, and a little… to be honest with you? Stupid. They’re quite a bit younger than me, I believe at 13 and 15. My Mom’s fiance, Duane, lives out in Cedar/Yellowpoint area, and it’s a bit of a trip out there. At any rate, my Mom told me that she didn’t want to have the stepmom issue to deal with, and she hasnt moved in with her hubby-to-be because one of his kids smokes quite a bit of weed. Since he’s up and taken off, it seems like things over with her have gotten easier. They hadnt set a date until just this month. It seems that his boss’ wife had passed away rather suddenly, and it got him thinking/worrying about my Mom. I’m glad I’m not the only one who worries about her.
Anyways, their wedding date is set for this July, the day after their 3rd year anniversary. Mom tells me they’ll be getting married in a park and having a potluck, and she doesnt know if she’ll even wear white or send out invitations to begin with. “I’m getting married here at this time,” she quoted to me, “you can come and bring some friends if you like”. I love how nonchalant she was about the whole thing, it’s really cute.
I’m really excited for this whole year. Things will hopefully be looking up financially, and my Mom is getting married! Her wedding date happened to fall when a few of us had been planning on coming out to the island. Cowboy, Joebob, and I are camping our way out to the island, around the island, and back. Now with this whole wedding thing, I believe I may branch off from the boys for a few days in advance to hang out with my family and help them all prep.
On the other hand, now that Cowboy is back at work, I’m waiting impatiently for his pay to even back out. I watched another episode today of “Till Debt to Us Part”. I watched it quite a bit before he went to school and picked up some tips about money saving, and budget making. So today after I watched the current episode, I ran over to Gail Vaz-Oxlade’s blog - she’s the host. All sorts of wonderful articles and gadgets to make budgets, set up a debt repayment schedule (it calculates how long it will take to get out of debt), and other snazzy things. I love finding cool things like that; However it scared the crap out of me. I’ve been aware that Cowboy and I aren’t doing very well financially due to a lot of things, mostly of which has been him going back to school. But to see it all compiled together is scarrrryyyy. It’s going to take a lot of giving things up to get us out of the whole that we’ve dug and where we want to be.
I’m beginning to go through my priorities about “stuff”. Things that I could not live without, and things that I would be willing to sacrifice in order to have my “can’t live withouts”. Someone I saw posted on a blog. She talked about how she pays a cleaning lady $45 a week to come in and tidy, and that is worth living without extra stress as well as coming home to a clean home. However that means she is willing to sacrifice fancy shoes and $5 coffee daily, etc. It’s all a matter of what you’re willing to give up for your must haves. I’m all gung-ho for this. The thing is… is Cowboy willing to sacrifice some of those same things with me? Lets say eating out. Is he willing to sacrifice that in order to have more money to put down on a house? It sucks when all you want is pizza/chinese food/amazing steak, but is a house worth more than a piece of pizza? We’re going to sit down this week and have a chat about it. I’m learning that we can’t just start to have important conversations all of a sudden, because if either of us is grumpy or pissy or anything else, it’ll turn out horribly. I made a date for a chat this week with him. Hopefully our discussion goes well.
My Mom is FINALLY coming to visit with me in April. I’m excited to organize our spare room/office/library/extra space for her to sleep in for the week she’ll be staying here. I’m going to be so happy to show her places I’ve told her about, and to meet Jill, my little one-eyed wonder. I have this weird feeling that I’ve been noticing though. It comes up whenever I think of seeing my family and I know it’s not very sensible. But I always have this feeling like I need to show them I’ve done well, that I AM doing well, and I really really want them to be proud of the person I’ve become. I always feel like I have to prove myself to them. It’s silly, I know. My mom told me for the first time this Christmas that she was proud of me, and I damn near cried. I hope when she gets here she is as well.
I’m watching Cowboy and Jill play on the floor with her bone. She’s just gotten too tuckered out and is snuggled right into his side, watching a Val Kilmer movie. I think I’d better get in on some of that snuggle action.
