I need your help. Your opinion, more specifically.
I’ve been blathering for months about the upcoming renegotiations of my separation agreement. Part of that is how much child support and extras The Ex will pay. Part of it is about visitation. As it stands now, he pays about twice as much as I expect he’ll continue to, and he sees Zoë on both days of the weekend, between the hours of 10 and 3.
He wants to change the visitation. He proposed an evening visit during the week and one overnight visit a month, in addition to the weekend daytimes he already has. I said I didn’t agree and that we should meet with a third party to mediate the agreement negotiations. He agreed. I’m just waiting for him to set up the appointment.
I have other ideas in mind for how visits should be.
I think that visits should be about him wanting to spend time with her, not just during the best hours of the whole week, when she’s in the best spirits, he doesn’t really have to act as a parent and is minimally responsible for tasks such as feeding, clothing and bathing her. Right now, he gets her at her best, he feeds her some gelato and they do something fun for the afternoon and then he goes on his way – so that he can fit in his friends and partying.
When we split up over two years ago, I told him that he could have overnight visits with her when he could go an entire night sober (and be sane while doing it).
Since that time, during fights he’s threatened to go to court for joint custody – it hasn’t happened. Even when things have been better than fine, he’s said he’ll move out to his own place and have a room for Zoë, for sleepovers – he’s still at his mom’s, sleeping on the floor. When I said she was staying with my friends while I went to Chicago, he freaked out for about an hour – a week later, he decided to go camping that weekend instead of trying to talk me into letting him take care of her. At his most open, he’s admitted that the way things are with visits works for him – he doesn’t have to do more, spend more on her, have a place for her, spend a weekend sober.
He’s an alcoholic who drinks daily. He smokes pot pretty much daily. He’s said that he wouldn’t do those things while she stayed with him, and I’m supposed to just take his word for it, yet when he’s been here past his usual visit hours he’s still smoked and drank. He’s never been solely responsible for her at night time, except for the two times he’s watched her here while I’ve gone out for the evening – he drank and/or smoked, then.
I have a pretty good case against overnight visits at his place: his history of disinterest in them and lack of parenting, the lack of space or sleeping area, and his addictions and his mom’s enabling of them.
But.
I’ve been on-duty for her entire life.
She doesn’t know that he’s the parent. She knows he’s the dood she can push around and get stuff from.
I’m a little resentful that these chunks of awesome that I should get to partake in are his visit times and he doesn’t have to deal with any of the hard stuff that being a parent means you should deal with.
I’m tired of saying to friends that we can’t participate in things on the weekends because the thing starts during his time.
He needs to grow the fuck up.
I have a new idea, being as I said two years ago and several times since, “You can have overnight visits when you can go an entire night sober and be able to handle it” and he hasn’t. (In fact, I’ve even said at some points when berating his lack of responsibility in her life, that he could have lied to me about doing it, but he’s still chosen not to.)
This idea is basically for me to say to him grow up now, or fuck off.
I propose the following:
- He must, by mid-October, have a safe and secure place for her to sleep. Ie. A bed. Of her own. At his place.
- He must take her each and every weekend from Friday night to Sunday afternoon.
- He must refrain from drinking and smoking pot for the 12 hours before and during her visit with him.
- He must educate himself about her food allergies and nutritional requirements in order to make appropriate decisions about what to feed her.
- His mother is not responsible for Zoë’s care, even to the extent that he has a drink out with friends (because he is solely responsible for Zoë {and his sobriety} during her visits).
The fine print:
- If I hear of him drinking or getting high – because Zoë tells me everything, literally, without me having to ask, and he’s a horrible liar who is aging disgracefully (aka I can see the booze in his face, the day after) – he waives his rights to visitation;
- If she is fed improperly – meaning foods she’s allergic to – same deal;
- If he makes the grandiose ‘mistake’ of drinking and/or smoking and his mom does not inform me of it and return Zoë to me as soon as it happens, his mom loses her visitation rights as well;
until:
- He enters into a drug and alcohol program; and
- attends and completes courses relating to parenting, alcoholism’s effects on children, and nutrition in relation to food allergies; and
- he attends a session with me and an unbiased third-party who advises that they’d feel comfortable with Zoë being in his care, again.
The clincher:
If this is too much to ask of him, if it’s too much time or rules, or he gets his back up about being called an alcoholic in front of a stranger and refuses this agreement out of pride, he waves the right to regular, twice-per-weekend visits.
He gets stuck with the same deal that all of the people she has playdates with have: When we’re available and it’s convenient/wanted.
It could go either way.
He could tell me to fuck myself and I could bring in pages of documentation about all of the times he’s already broken the agreement we have about him not drinking around her. And I could refuse for things to continue as they are, we end up back in court, and he could lose the visits, anyway.
He could agree and fuck it up at some point – I’d predict sooner, rather than later.
He could agree and then not end up getting her a bed and try to pull a fast one on me – which is why I’d ask for a receipt as proof, as well as a picture of the room where it’s set up.
He could agree and it could go completely fine, and she could have an actual father and I could have some actual time off and the world could be a beautiful, non-exhausting place where we could co-exist as the adults we’re supposed to be, co-raising the happy child we should be.
What say you?
Somewhere along the line, most of you seem to have become convinced that I’m a good mother.
I’m pretty sure that you all see what I don’t and vice versa since our biggest critic are usually ourselves and ever since John Locke sat around thinking too much (and likely hitting the mead a little heavily), those of us that haven’t been beat to death by life think that people are generally good.
So, it’s a bit of a dichotomy we’re facing here, complete with two very different points of view and therefore no tangible basis to form an opinion.
Here’s some reasons I think motherhood and I aren’t exactly soul sisters:
- On a very good day, Zoë still watches at least two hours of movies. You don’t wanna know what a bad day’s like.
- Most dinners are made up of cut-up vegetables, some sort of grain (which might be rice cakes) and some protein, but very rarely involves cooking anymore.
- When she’s hurt and in my face, if she was hurt while doing something that I told her not to do, I admonish her and hand out an I Told You So before a hug. If there even is a hug.
- I probably spend more time telling her to stop climbing on me or touching me than I do making an effort to cuddle with her or hand out extra affection.
- I’ve made my Starbucks love more of a priority than buying organic fruits and vegetables.
- Oh, and I suck at washing fruits and vegetables.
- I yell.
- When she’s pissing me off, I tell her that I want her to leave me alone because I’m getting angry with her for _______.
- When I smoked, I smoked in front of her, while hanging out the window of our apartment, when I was pregnant, while pushing the stroller…just never directly in the apartment.
- I’ve stopped her from seeing family members because I didn’t agree with their morals.
- I don’t have the patience or motivation (or want, really) to sit down and play with her.
I could keep going, really. I’m sure I could think of about 100 things that I think make me a piss-poor mom. Choices I’ve made, things I’ve let fall by the wayside, harsh words and body language.
I’ve hinted and even outright said a lot of these things, but for some reason, I’m not lacking for compliments of my mothering.
I don’t get it.
But, I don’t think I’m a bad mom, either. Her health and physical welfare is always more important to me than my own. The fact that I recognize what I do wrong (in my eyes) and try to change it speaks a lot louder of parenting – to me – than simply accepting that it’s ‘good enough’. I’ve fucked up in a lot of ways, but I’m constantly assessing my current level of fucking up.
Enter junk food. I think this is where part of you got the interpretation that I was a good mom.
Zoë has food allergies, so her diet is fairly healthy. If she was allergic to nuts instead of wheat and dairy, it might be a different story, but the simple fact is that wheat and dairy allergies beget a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and unprocessed foods.
Because the yummy {read: unhealthy} stuff is off limits due to its ingredients.
That doesn’t make me a good mom – it just means I’m terrified of feeding her the wrong thing and her suffering for it. And me suffering because she’s suffering.
So, she doesn’t get junk food very often and I generally only get it myself when we’re dining out or I order something late at night. We never get to have a meal at most diners or family restaurants because of their menus being laden with burgers and breaded things.
When we do eat out, her meals are almost always made up of the same things: eggs (without milk or butter), unmarinated chicken or shrimp or steak (cooked on a cleaned grill, without seasonings), a side of fruit, a side of veggies (without butter), a baked or roasted potato (without butter or other seasonings, and definitely never mashed with garlic, which we both love). To change things up, we sometimes get shawarma or sushi.
I am the asshole that cooks hate, with 50,000 customizations. I honestly wonder if any of the dishes we get have been spit in.
So, yeah, pretty healthy eatin’ going on around here.
I felt like that had to change, so I took us to Fatburger yesterday. I stood at the counter and I asked, completely point-blank, “Do you have access to your food’s ingredients? I need to know if your turkey burger’s patties have any wheat in them.”
The guy behind the counter said they didn’t. I said “Really?! Because she’s allergic to wheat and dairy, so I need to know that they’re not in there, for sure.” He confirmed it after looking in the back at the package (I’m assuming): the sole ingredient listed was turkey.
{Yes, I know it’s a pretty weird concept that a burger patty might be made of only the animal it’s named for, but hey, maybe that’s how they roll. I thought.}
And I did a mental jump for joy. Junk Food! I even texted her dad, to let him know the happy news.
Zoë loved her burger. She ate the lettuce and tomato that came with it. She asked for another ‘booger’ for lunch today. Seems like it was pretty win-win. Except for a few things.
One, dinner was so close to bedtime, there was no allowance for me to witness any sort of reaction in her. If she’d been up later, I would have noticed that the bags under her eyes became a darkish purple colour – which is how she woke up. Early.
By 11am, she’d had no less than eight tantrums. Three time outs. Had scratched herself, hit me a few times, and spontaneously tripped, kicked or hit something, bruising herself.
By noon, the beginning of a tantrum led to me having to restrain her for 20 minutes. Why? Because she’d started hitting me, and then when I put her in her room for hitting me, she started banging her head on the wall. I was seriously concerned that she was going to knock herself out, or at least give herself an concussion.
By 5:30, I wanted out, man.
I was losing my shit (inside my head) because she couldn’t hold her shit together for long enough to put on her fricking underwear. She went back in her room for another 10 minutes, until she calmed down. Thankfully she wasn’t violent that time.
I made dinner – scrambled eggs, pasta with tomato sauce and slices of avocado – and then we went for a walk to get smoothies and some fresh air. By 7:30, she was asking to be put to bed.
She was asking to go to bed.
By eight o’clock, I stopped craving a cigarette, a half-dozen drinks and to ream out the staff at Fatburger.
See, the rest of the food she’d eaten were tried, tested, true: fresh fruits and veggies, gluten-free cereal with soymilk, brown rice pasta with 100% tomato sauce, eggs scrambled only with gluten-free seasonings. The only odd-man out was the turkey burger, and by 5:30 I was sure of it.
Why? Because I did something that maybe their employee should have considered, before he told me that their patties were complete devoid of wheat: I check their online allergens guide.
Yup. They have a link, right there on their site! That tells you every item on their menu and which, if any, of the top eight allergens are in them. In a nice little chart. With writing underneath, cautioning that seasonings might contain gluten, and other such interesting, usually-reserved-for-fine-print information.
It took me two minutes, and I could have checked before walking into the restaurant, and I could have saved the two of us from a day of hell. Or, their employee could have informed me if there was wheat in the burger. Like I’d asked so clearly.
I don’t know how it’s acceptable for an employee to either not know the ingredients of the food he’s serving, or not have access to that information. I would think it would be law, and if it weren’t, that at least it would be company policy for Fatburger, given that their website contains the information.
Not many food manufacturers will do that – provide an allergen listing for every item on their menu on their website for any one to check out, anytime. It’s especially hard to come by when you’re talking about fast-food. Not many will even provide you with nutritional information unless you request it politely within a gold fricking flocked letter, sealed with centuries-old wax, containing the deed to your property and the rights to your first born.
Fatburger, you’ve made me lose my appetite for burgers. Especially yours.
