Monday Morning Musings

Starting my third week with no Internet service, thanks to Cable One who lost my initial order that was placed January 29th. The service was supposed to be installed within a few days, but that didn’t happen, so I called back the following Monday. This time I was told that they could not find a record of the previous call, so we repeated the order information.

Again, the order was to be fulfilled in the next few days.

By Thursday, there was still no service, so I called again. The young lady I spoke to found the order information, but service had not been scheduled. Apparently the person I spoke to on Monday did not complete the order, and it would now take almost another week. I am supposed to have service by Wednesday. 

Unfortunately, my choices here are limited, which is why I didn’t just cancel and go with someone else. My options are Direct TV or Dish or HughesNet, all of which my son advised against, so I am relying on the hotspot on my phone to get this post up and to check e-mail, all of which is painfully slow.

Wednesday will not get here soon enough.

To lighten my mood, and start the week off on a better note, I’ll share an excerpt from my humorous memoir, A Dead Tomato Plant and A Paycheck. Still unpublished, but hope spring eternal.

They, whoever ‘they’ are, say that life is a series of passages. We pass into this life and out of this life with significant moments in between. Some people measure the passages according to certain years, starting in childhood. For instance, a baby is no longer considered a baby by the time he or she is two. That’s when they become a toddler. And that’s often when bliss turns into bleh.

There are lots of horror stories about the “terrible twos,” and when our first child approached that tender age, our friends warned me about the little monster our daughter was about to become. There were comments like:

“The screaming. The tantrums… you just can’t imagine.”

“If you need emotional support, we’re here for you.”

“Ah, you poor dear. You’ll survive, but just barely.”

“I’d rather wrestle alligators.”

“I don’t think I could live through it again.”

So, I armed myself with as much patience as I could find lying around and faced the dragon on the run. But Anjanette wasn’t that bad. In fact, she wasn’t bad at all. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that our two-year-old didn’t act like my friends led me to believe she would.

Patting myself on the back for my superior parenting skills, I decided the rest of this child-raising business would be a snap.

By the time Anjanette was nearing three, however, I began to have second thoughts about breezing through this whole parenting gig. That sweet, darling child who had been such a delight just the other day suddenly become a source of unlimited frustration. If I had been bragging that she never ripped up magazines or destroyed houseplants, she would promptly demolish every magazine within reach. She could talk, but I discovered that she could no longer listen. Anything I said like, “Drink your milk. It isn’t going to hurt to try the potty. Go to sleep,” seemed to be above her comprehension.

I could have faced this setback with the courage that I’d mustered for her the previous year, but this monster had crept up on my blind side and caught me unarmed. So, I spent a few months walking around in total confusion until she turned four.

As suddenly and mysteriously as the terrible three’s appeared, they vanished, until our second child turned three. Then it was instant insanity again.

It was the same for our third child, and I lived in mortal fear of what it would be like when the twins turned three. I kept trying to convince myself that since they had been terrible two-year-olds, perhaps they wouldn’t be so bad at three; but I also realized that I spent a lot of time kidding myself about a lot of things. So, I decided the best plan of attack would be to take an extended leave-of-absence from parenthood until the twins turned twenty-five.

My husband thought that was a great idea, but only if he could go with me.