Well, hello again.

So, sorry, that was a bit of a break, wasn't it? It was the result of a conspiracy of too many thoughts running through my head, too many logistical details making it difficult to post, and a difficulty putting words together that expressed myself adequately.

Where to start? I guess I should start with, nothing's wrong. The pregnancy is going well. We picked a name *I think.* The first name came quickly, but a second name was a pain. See, we have to pick names that not only go together, but that create a somewhat normal flow from surname to surname. My last name is about as English as you can get and my husband's is about as Latin as you can get. So our kid's name has to go first-name, middle-name, English-name, Latin-name. And it all has to be pronouncable (yes, I say that that's a word) in English and in Portuguese and is has to sound nice in both languages and it has to flow in both languages. Anyways, we seem to have met all those criteria and I think it's all good. More details on that little girl on Sunday for The Weekly Slug.

As for what's been going on otherwise, I'll just pick up with Grace and her father, my ex-husband. Easter sucked, as it always does. Grace always spends it with her father. As far as I ever knew, her father could care less about the holiday. But Grace's stepmother loves it. So for the most part, it's out of the question for Grace not to spend Easter with her father and stepmother. That led me to a couple realizations. First, I'm really sick of sharing my daughter's time. She's my daughter and I think it's normal for a parent to want to spend the holidays with their kid. Divorce screws all that up. I'm just supposed to accept that and get over it and just be happy. So is Grace and so is her father (who, remember, I don't think really cares that much about seeing his kid anyways; more on that a bit later). I guess this is why some couples figure it's better to stay together than split up. Whatever. It sucks. It really, really sucks. And I'm just tired of it. It won't ever get better with Grace, I'll just be sharing her with other people for the rest of my life. It's just part of the sucking suckiness that is the world I lived in long ago with my ex-husband. Sucks.

Then there's the other half of this. I've written before about how sick I am of Grace's father not calling and communicating about wanting to see Grace, and then expecting everyone to just drop everything when he does get around to placing a call. And I've had more than one person tell me it's my responsibility to make sure Grace sees her father no matter how much of a slacker he is. So instead of me waiting for him to confirm a visit and assuming it's off and waiting until Grace desperately calls him and asks if he's going to spend time with her and he calls acting like that was his intention all along, I should be taking care of everything and walking him through the process, and play like I'm still his helpful mate. Hm. I've finally put two and two together as to why this bothers me so much.

Grace's father is not so bad. He's kept the same job for the last ten years. He's never been arrested. He doesn't gripe about paying child support. He isn't mean or abusive to Grace, nor is anyone else he's exposing Grace to, to the best of my knowledge. This doesn't mean I think everything he does is terrific, it just means he could be way worse. However, there's one very useful skill he's developed over his lifetime that is very clever, and one I'm not so keen on. He knows how to not lift more fingers than he has to and make other people do his work for him. And for some reason, many people, myself included, feel like it's no big deal to pick up the slack where he leaves off. I'll give an example to illustrate the point.

Last week while Grace was staying with him at his house, he called me at 10p. Everyone was up -- him, his wife, two toddlers, Grace, two dogs, the tv, you name it. I was surprised. Except for Grace, they all had to go to daycare and work the next day. The next night when Grace returned home, Grace told me that her plan for the day had been to sleep in and when she woke up after everyone else had left the house, she was supposed to call her grandmother to come pick her up and spend the day at her grandmother's house. But that's not what happened. Instead what happened was that the parents woke up late without time to get the toddlers up and ready, or time to drive them to school and make it in to work themselves. So Grace's father called his mother and asked her to come over, get the kids ready, and take them to daycare so he and his wife could leave for work right away. The inconvenience to Grace was that her grandmother said she wouldn't make two trips to the house, so Grace would need to get up and be ready to go for the day when she got there.

It might have been a one time occurrence, I agree. Maybe. But I've known the guy for almost 20 years. This is pretty much how he operates. He screws up, and then he calls on other people to help him out. Once in awhile would be ok, but all the time gets tiring. In my experience, he doesn't really reciprocate the favors.

So I was married to this guy for over 8 years. Did I put up with this? Hell, yes. Way too much. I learned to figure out how to get him to do what I needed him to do. And I never assumed he would do more. The week we separated, I had an a-ha moment of just how much I carried him due to his own negligence to keep track of stuff. The deadline for his financial aid form was due for his grad school tuition that week. I knew it, because I kept track of all that stuff. I always showed it to him, but he didn't keep track of it himself at all. I thought about calling him and reminding him, walking him through the process, coddling him as I had done for so many years. And then suddenly I realized, no, I don't need to do this anymore. He's a grown-up, over 30 years old. He can take care of his own grad school tuition. After all, I'm definitely not going to be here forever. I don't know what the result was, but I felt foolish at that moment realizing how much I had taken care of and looked out for. The guy didn't know much of what was going on at school with his daughter, didn't know about the maintenance on the only car we owned, didn't know anything about our finances. The only thing he did know was how to get cash out of an ATM so that his spending wouldn't leave a paper trail.

Back to Grace. Recently Grace's father has been less than able to keep up with his visitation schedule. In the last couple months, for the first time, Grace decided just not to worry about calling him and arranging visitation. Sure enough, we heard not a word from him until the evening of the first night he was supposed to spend with her. I don't know what he told her, but he assured her that he would be there to pick her up that Friday for the weekend. And that he did -- 3 hours late. The next weeknight that he was scheduled to spend with her, again, we didn't hear from him until late the night before. He talked to her first and gave her some explanation as to why he wouldn't see her. She said fine and handed the phone to me. I talked about Easter weekend and Grace's spring break with him and that was that. By the time spring break was over and the event of the "calling grandma over to pick up the slack" occurred, I realized what has been bothering me for so long. It's everyone around this guy, including his daughter, accommodating his behavior and acting as if it's acceptable. The everyone else is their own choice. But my daughter? No.

That's the core of it. I want my daughter to not accept that she has to give and give and give in a relationship, doing what the other person can't (or won't) do. Part of the reason she still sees him at all is because other adults in his life have carried him - his mother, his wife. But I think it has to stop when it comes to your kids. The bottom line is, I don't want my daughter to learn that a relationship is supposed to be one person giving and striving and yearning and desiring while the other person just treats the whole thing like easy come, easy go. It's dysfunctional, at best.

Imagine if this scenario was your kid in a relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Your kid places all the calls, waits around for hours until the significant other bothers to show up, accepts every explanation imaginable for being late or standing her up, always expects that plans can be made at the spur of the moment...

Would you be happy? I wouldn't. I'd tell my kid to get out of the relationship because this person was completely walking all over them, taking advantage of their affections, and giving nothing in return.

But yet Grace's father is teaching her that it's ok for her to be treated this way. Yeah, I put up with it, and I learned my lesson the hard way. But you know what? I think that my gained experience should count for something in how I parent my daughter.

So I finally answered (a big part of) the question of why I dislike Grace's stepmother and why I wish she would go away. Because she's an enabler. She makes it possible for Grace's father to be in Grace's life, and for him to implicitly teach Grace that she should put up with his negligence and pick up the slack. And there's a good chance that if Grace puts up with his behavior, he won't be the last person she does it for.

Sorry to come back on such a sour note, but it had to be gotten off my chest.

**************

AN ADDENDUM

One more thought I had after rereading this. I ended this post sounding like I blame this whole thing on Grace's stepmother. Oh, no. No, that would get Grace's father off the hook far too easily. He's the one who's the big screw up, the one who's being a jerk in his relationship with his daughter. I'm just sick of other people around him (his mother, his wife) putting up with it and continuing the cycle of women who learn to tolerate this kind of behavior from a man. For my daughter's sake, I'd just as soon these women would wise up or move to a place away from influence over my daughter.