Torn

This isn’t a rant or a pity mope but an honest-to-God what the hell would you do? post. OK, it’s a little rantacular.

There are brilliant multitaskers and fantastic time managers, and I’m neither. Therefore, the particular demands I’m under now are either conditioning for a yet more-difficult trial to come or I’m being fucked with. I think it’s the latter.

I have a job, a child and a husband who works 100 hours a week. And laundry and a body badly in need of exercise and a blog I neglect because I can’t face the emotions released by what I might write. What I’m in desperate need of – besides a script for amphetamines with unlimited refills and a personal trainer – are the clarity to see where the boundaries should be and the backbone to make everyone respect them.

Luckily, I’m enjoying the job, the job I really, really need. There are some nice perks to this job, but it’s a job nonetheless, with a company undergoing change. (Translation: You all can be replaced, especially you, recent hire.) Four days a week I’m functionally a single parent.

I think I have the weeks well-covered. It’s not pretty but it works – the kid gets off to school, the work gets done, and while I’m not happy with the real dinner vs. takeout ratio, I don’t think it’s a lost cause. It’s the weekends where I come completely undone.

By the time Saturday arrives, my daughter hasn’t seen her father for any more than 5 minutes since Wednesday, and she misses him. She’s whiny. My house, which also hasn’t received the full attention it needs, is whiny as well. We have breakfast at the restaurant, which isn’t as “yuppies go for their goat cheese and basil scrambled eggs” as it sounds because Chuck’s busy and can’t always sit down with us. We then do a day’s worth of errands. And you know how kids love their errands!

We should be spending the afternoon at the playground, or she should be riding her bike with her daddy while I go walking and for coffee with a friend, or I should do the grocery shopping by myself while he drives her to ballet. I’ve got more Saturday fantasies than is healthy. I make a big deal about our routine of listening to “Car Talk” and then the Met’s radio broadcasts. (”Noooo! We can listen to Barenaked Ladies any time! It’s time for those funny guys from Boston who talk about starters and oxygen sensors!”)

Saturdays wouldn’t be bad if I could spend Sundays cleaning, organizing and cooking a few things for the week ahead. I don’t subscribe to the full menu of wifely duties, but I do think, after the week my husband’s had, I should cook a decent dinner for my family on Sunday night.

The problem is, is what the problem always is. IT’S THE GODDAMN RESTAURANT. To be said in all caps, all the time, like SHINGLES! It’s always the problem, THE RESTAURANT. (Not the SHINGLES! Which I suppose is a problem, just not a My Problem.)

Sundays are busy. Their payroll is so tight they don’t have the help they need on a busy day. And I have, ahem, the day free.

I’ve spent almost every Sunday there since the place has been open, running food, seating tables, expediting meals, taking drink orders, processing credit cards, making coffee, pouring coffee and picking up chewed lumps of pancake from under high chairs. All while Tink sits at the food counter coloring, only interrupting me if she has to go to the bathroom. Half the time one of the Mexican bus girls takes her.

When I make change I give the waiters their tips, which they leave with. My husband and his business partner leave with nothing. I leave with a child who missed her nap.

So, what would you do? Would you have put your foot down? Would you sacrifice the smooth running of your coming week to help the cause? Remember, this is a business that doesn’t pay your husband and won’t any time soon. Would you stand firm and say, “No”? “No, I have a family to take care of and only one day a week to do it. We’ve got enough to deal with; I need this one day to impose some order and peace to my life”?

Or would you let guilt take over as you wonder what they’ll do if they get busy? Would you bow to pressure to pitch in with the attitude that maybe some day this business will be successful and these Sundays are an investment in future profits that will someday be your family’s?

Would you do it even if, before the restaurant opened, there was a nightmare of a showdown that ranks among the very worst days of your entire life when you were told that you will have no role in the business and that someone would rather pull the plug on the whole thing than let you be involved? But who now accepts your free weekly labor (and let’s not forget your 4-year-old daughter’s time, too) because he’s up a creek?

To say “I’m torn” is ludicrous. I’m torn, in every one of my obligations and in every emotion I have about them.

This past weekend was even worse than usual. (HOW COULD IT GET ANY WORSE? you ask? Oh, please. Nobody knows the fuckitude I’ve seen.) Saturday night the restaurant was giving a percentage of its sales to Haiti earthquake relief, and Sunday there was a mother-loving church service being held in a 15,000-seat arena three blocks from the restaurant. (Honestly, a church service in the same venue where the Wiggles and monster trucks have appeared, though not at the same time? Sometimes I completely get why atheists sneer.)

Tink and I got the restaurant around 6 on Saturday just as things were getting hairy. I didn’t have her Sunday bag of crayons, Hello Kitty coloring books and Spiderman dudes, and there really isn’t anywhere else to put her so I can keep an eye on her no matter where I am, so she sat at the bar with an old guy who comes in for dinner three nights a week, drinks a bottle of wine and then takes a cab to the upstate’s premier titty bar.

I worked well past Tink’s bedtime and once again, we had nothing to show for it. Actually, Tink left with $4. Mr. Phil asked her if she had a piggy bank and then gave her some money. I demurred politely but wanted to come right out and ask him, “Won’t you need those singles where you’re going tonight?”

She and Chuck ate Taco Bell after he got home. You know. Quality time.

She was a little, uh, off her game Sunday. As I was showering, crying and composing this post in my head, she came in the bathroom and told me we had to put her jammies in the wash. I asked her why. No reason. They just need to go in the wash.

Fuck.

She’s had more accidents than I’d like lately, and who’s to say why. Could be developmental, a stage, nothing to worry about or her reaction to an irregular family life. I’m frankly too tired to make more out of it than I should, which I guess is a blessing in disguise. But an accident on Sunday morning as I’m getting ready to go there when I should be here … it was more than I could take.

I yelled and then cried some more and scared her, of course. And then when I saw the two damp, wadded tissues on top of the underwear on the chair of her room, I laughed. It was her first deliberate attempt to pull one over on me. I think she did all she could and then realized she was going to have to fess up. It was a good first try.

Did that happen for a reason? Was it comic relief? A bit of much-needed perspective? Is this phase of my life two pee-soaked tissues, something sucky and inconvenient, but which, too, shall pass?

Would you be outraged that demands on your time by necessity means demands on your preschool daughter’s time? Because in a further slap in the face, I can’t ask anyone to watch Tink on Sunday – that’s the day everyone spends with their family.

Or should I see this as a cool adventure as Tink sometimes does? Should I take a special pride in the fact that she’ll have memories and experiences that make my white-bread childhood pale in comparison, even if it means those memories will involve making chit chat with elderly perverts?

Or, since my husband’s hands are tied and he can’t say it, should I be the one to say, “Enough”? Enough. My family comes first.

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