The Beginning

A copy of my first post…

I’m Not White Trash On the Inside…

Ok, maybe I am white trash, but I really don’t feel like it. For instance driving home from a play last night, I didn’t think about the crappy run down trailer I was coming home to. I could imagine I was driving back to a nice home where my youngest children were tucked into bed already, and my oldest daughter had cooked dinner and washed the dishes and vacuumed… Yeah. Right. Well, that’s not reality. Reality is I live in a 2 bedroom 1979 trailer with my husband, 4 daughters 3 cats and a dog. That isn’t even the worst of it…

We don’t even own the land it’s on. It’s in a trailer park. The yard needs to be mowed, there are currently 6 caged rabbits and a goose in a pen we’re taking care of for my mother in law who decided to take off to stay a couple of months with her rich daughter. There’s a ton of clutter and garbage because my kids won’t dump the trash in the community compactor when I tell them to, and my husband refuses to take the big stuff to the town dump.

Inside is even worse… well.. not worse as in garbage in piles, but close. Six people go through a lot of laundry, and if I don’t do 1-2 loads a day, it starts to overflow the hampers. Even when I think I have it somewhat under control, the girls finally clean their room and a pile of their laundry nearly as tall as my youngest kid ends up in the hallway. The kitchen is small but has a HUGE farm table that my mom and step dad built. I got it when my Mom passed away. It seats 8 people, and it big enough for all 8 chairs to be pushed under it at once. It takes up a ridiculous amount of room, but I love my table. The kitchen floor however is pretty bad. There are a few small holes in it from a bad re-flooring job about 8 years ago, and the particle board floor is just gone, leaving a huge hole in front of the stove which I had to patch with some scrap wood. I got sick of seeing the patchwork floor, so I got a 5×7 rug and put over that half of the kitchen floor.. but that rug is all stained now. Depressing. The living room carpet is …well I can barely call it a carpet. It’s so bad, there are whole sections that are just flattened and I know will have to be scraped off the flooring. The furniture used to be nice and brand new, and I was so proud of it and the new curtains and rugs I’d bought..  but with a house full of people who just don’t care about things the same way I do,.. it’s all ruined. The couch and recliner are horrible stained. A very large friend of my husband’s comes over every week to play games and has completely flattened the sofa cushions. I even got floor pillows to put on top of the couch cushions and now they’re flat. The recliner has a broken arm. It’s huge as is the couch and take up so much space. But more than that, there’s just clutter everywhere. Not mine really.. I mean all I have in there are my vases of silk flowers, candle holders and a coffee table book people won’t leave on the coffee table and a magazine I like to look at. One of those Southern magazines with pictures of homes I’d like to come home to. I don’t even want to talk about the bathroom and the bedrooms… but there’s clutter – board games, miniatures to battle games, books, toys, shoes, DVDs, papers, etc…

So that is my environment. Is it my fault? I’m sure many would say yes. I don’t know. I guess somehow it is. It’s my fault I can’t get my kids to dump the garbage or do a load of laundry now and then or wash an entire load of dishes…it’s my fault I can’t get my husband to mow the lawn more than once a summer or take ANYTHING to the dump, or pick up after himself or do his own laundry now and then or wash my clothes or wash dishes, or FIX anything like holes in the floor or a broken toilet (don’t ask).  He’ll tell you, he works 45-60 hours a week and doesn’t feel like doing housework or yardwork or fixing anything so the house doesn’t fall down around us…  But see, I work 40 hours a week myself, from 6:45pm-3:15am 5 nights a week. I picked the shift because it allows me to be up and awake and not working when my kids get home from school or if they need a ride home from after school activities. I’m able to make dinner and have it ready before I have to get to work. Now, I do work from home online. But let me tell you, it’s not easy. In fact, Wed night I had to leave work early because the family was having a meltdown. It was the night before the first day of school and my husband’s inventory at work.  He had to go to bed early to be to work by 5am, and my oldest daughter had injured her foot and couldn’t help the younger ones get ready for bed, and everyone was freaking because they couldn’t find this or that. My husband certainly would never leave work to come home because of the girls simply needing a parent to do the parent stuff.  Yet, this is the kind of thing I’m expected to do.  I go to my room and close the door and log on from my laptop. I have to clock in on my company’s website and log into the staffchatroom and get my assigned locations to work for the shift. It’s a job, just as real as my husband’s. Yet, my kids will open the door without knocking and come jump on my bed and ask me all sorts of questions. Can they do this or go there or call so and so… They come ask me these things and walk right past their father who is 99% of the time sitting on the floor in front of his own laptop and the television browsing his favorite game sites and forums. He’s home, and not working, and not really doing anything important, but they go past him, barge into my room and bug me while I’m trying to concentrate on the chat in 1-4 rooms in the game, plus watch the staff room for questions or comments making sure I’m paying attention. We’ve already ahd one person recently fired, and she’d been at this job since 1998. I don ‘t want to give them an excuse to make me the next one. But it’s really hard to work with distractions – but the family just doesn’t see it as a job.

I get off work at 3:15am, and on school days, I stay up and get the girls off to school. I make lunches for my husband and for any kid who plans on taking one that day. I wash a load of dishes, restart the laundry, and try to straighten up from the utter mess that accumulates from the kids and hubby just being here.  Today was one of my days off. I baked two loaves of bread with my two older girls. I had to deal with the landlord telling me everything that was wrong with my life (well the front yard part of it anyway), and check my two younger girls for lice because the mother of two of their friends said she found it on her kids after they played with some new kids in the neighborhood (who have already moved out now). I also sat in my room and cried and felt sorry for myself. I do that a lot actually.

So anyway, I live like white trash due to circumstance that basically overwhelm me and outnumber me… but inside, I am an intelligent, creative, witty, emotional, passionate, woman who is supposed to be living in a 5 bedroom home with a big front porch where I can sit and listen to the rain, and a big back deck with a pool, with a husband who has ambition and knows how to be responsible and attentive. So, why am I still here? Well… that’s what this journey is all about. Figuring out what the answer to that really is, and then deciding if that answer is good enough. You only live once…  would you want to do it as white trash?  Me neither.