A Weekend Update

Dear Jessica,

Friday (7/28) Drew’s mom was supposed to come to our house. Drew told me Thursday that she was wanting to come and possibly stay. We only have one bed in our house so she would’ve had to sleep on the couch. Our living room furniture is her old furniture so I'm sure she has slept on the couch we have at some point. Personally I don’t think it’s very comfortable to sleep on. It's fine to sit on, but it's too small to stretch out and have a proper sleep. You’re pretty much forced to stay in a curled up position the entire time you’re asleep. That might be fine for someone who doesn’t toss and turn at night like I do, but I imagine most people do. Its also sort of lumpy. We plan on buying an air mattress in the near future for guests to sleep on. I thought they would cost more but I looked online and found good quality queen size ones for $30-$60.

I woke up Friday morning knowing I needed to clean my house to make it ready for a visitor. I put it off for a few hours. Drew's mom wasn’t supposed to be here until sometime after 4pm. I made myself some breakfast and watched a couple episodes of a show on Netflix and then convinced myself to shower and get dressed so I wouldn’t have to rush after cleaning the house. I pulled open the shower curtain and was greeted by an unpleasant sight. Hair all over the bathtub. Drew hair. He never washed out the bathtub after his bath. I don’t know about you, but finding hair in the shower that isn’t mine grosses me out. Annoyed, I rinsed out the tub and adjusted the water temp to my liking. Then I noticed a bar of soap in the mesh shower caddy hanging from the shower head. My bar of soap. Soap that I was purposely not using because it was Christmas scented and I was saving it for using closer to the holiday. I got it for Christmas last year. It’s this giant bar of soap that smells like Christmas spice and warmth and it had a pretty snowflake design on each side. The point is Drew had used the soap, my soap, as if it was his to use. So unceremoniously. I knew he didn’t appreciate it the way it deserved. I was so mad. (tbh, I probably overreacted, but I'll never admit that to Drew...) He does things like this all the time. He just takes my things without asking (I mean I'm gonna say no even if he does ask... but at LEAST give me the OPTION to say no... not that I never learned to share, but some things are just my things and not our things.) and uses them before I even have the chance to use them the way I wanted to.

I was forced to spend ten minutes scraping pubes (sorry for the image) off my special soap. I had plans for this soap. There was going to be a warm, luxurious bath in which I would use the soap for the first time in the holiday season and soak up all of the Christmas aroma. I know you couldn’t care less about sentimental things, so you probably don’t understand my frustration about this.  It was mine and it was tainted and I felt it in my soul.

I stomped naked into the bedroom, thrust the soap under his nose and barked, “This is NOT yours!” I stormed back into the bathroom, practically steaming from the ears. I placed my precious soap back into its special box where it belonged. I've never taken an angrier shower. While we were at it, I thought, why the hell were there so many damn shampoo bottles in my shower. Two, of course, were mine. One shampoo, one conditioner. The rest were all half empty bottles that Drew never finished off and just kept buying more of. I tossed them out of the shower hoping he would hear them crashing to the floor (sometimes I'm dramatic). As I finished my shower, all the other things that bothered me just kept bubbling up and before I knew it, I was blaming him for global warming and world hunger. I exited the bathroom fully intending to punish him with aggressive side-eye. He wasn’t even there. He had gone out to the convenience store. He had texted me something nasty about how he had done nothing wrong and there was “no reason to scream like a lunatic.” (To which I initially wanted to reply with something along the lines of, “okay, first of all, BITCH,” but no. Gotta create that well crafted response that makes him feel inferior to my debating skills…) Long story short, we bickered over text until he got home. I was cleaning up the bedroom and he sat on the bed with his bag from the convenience store. My phone buzzed again. I was livid. “Why don’t you fucking talk to me instead of texting me all the time?”, I demanded. (He usually tries to argue with me over text instead of speaking to me out loud even though we are in the same house and it drives. me up. the wall.) “You texted me, I was replying!”, he defended himself. I pointed out how we were in the same room now, so it was stupid to text each other anymore.

I was trying to clean the house before Drew’s mom came, but we ended up having a deep relationship argument, so we told her to come Saturday instead. We didn’t mention the argument to her though. We talked (and sometimes shouted) about all our problems. I explained that its not just the soap that he wasn’t supposed to use, it was all sorts of things that just keep building up over time and making me explode in anger. So many things I've repeatedly asked him to do and the only way he actually does it is when I get angry and yell that I've asked him to do it ten times already.

He said he wanted me to stop being mad about “stupid stuff” (ugh) and I told him that if he would do the things I asked him to do in the first place, I wouldn’t be getting mad. “Two sides to every story” and all that. Yeah, you’re only reading my side of the story, but his complaints were literally that I'm an angry person and I yell at him too much, but that’s the result of me getting frustrated that I have to repeat myself for the 600^th time and him never doing what I ask! It IS his fault. but nobody wants to admit when they're wrong. (Cue me admitting I might be a little bit in the wrong) Yeah okay, maybe I should be more patient, but I hate having to have the same arguments over and over and over again! He's an adult and when I ask him to do something I expect him to get the message that he should continue to do that thing forever, for all time without me having to remind him. You know what I mean?

Hopefully, he finally got it through his head. The worst part about it is him making excuses for things. To give you an example, I told him he needs to keep his side of the bed clean because I can never use my closet without having to wade through a mountain of trash. He says “Well I don’t feel good, I'll clean it up later.” But later never comes! And then I tell him, well just don’t put trash on the floor in the first place and you wont have to clean it up (see, isn’t that freakin’ reasonable??). He has a garbage can three feet away, but he’s too lazy to get up and put stuff in the garbage can. And after I've reminded him to clean stuff up over and over again (which I shouldn’t even have to do because hes a fucking adult who should clean up after himself?????????), I get fed up and clean it up myself and he will say “I was going to do that today” and I'm like mhm, sure you were.

Yeah, you get it.

So anyway. We had a huge argument about that and all sorts of other things. And we talked it out. And it felt good to actually talk about stuff rather than bottle it up and ignore it because we’re trying to be nice. I don’t know, I grew up in a house with a lot of screaming from my parents, so I hate having to do that and I just bottle it up. But sometimes you just need to scream a little. (Calmly talking about our issues isn’t in the vocabulary I guess. That sounds bad… we never call each other names or anything like that, it's just arguing about stuff. And it's very rare that we even argue at all.) Then we got to the point where we were talking about our families and even laughing a little. We got all our demons out and we felt better. I even convinced him to paint something. He said he didn’t know how to paint, and I told him he could paint something abstract. No rules or clean lines, just freedom. It was really interesting to watch him create art. I never get to see him do that kind of thing.

Saturday came. I still hadn’t finished cleaning the house. I woke up around 8am and got to work. I did laundry and washed dishes and cleaned counter tops and scrubbed down the bathroom surfaces. I got dressed and swept all the dust and scattered pieces of cat litter from under the couches. Things were finally looking neat and tidy around 2:30 as I finished cleaning the stove. I put on a pot of coffee just so the house would smell nice. French vanilla coffee scented air freshener. Delicious. Drew’s mom arrived just as the coffee began to brew. We all sat in the freshly tidied living room catching up on each others lives and then decided to go out to buy some clothes for me and Drew. Drew stayed behind since he can't go out for very long without being in pain. I assume he got some sleep as he hadn’t slept very well the night before.

We went to Dirt Cheap with the purpose of buying things for Drew because the majority of his shirts either don’t fit or are becoming mostly holes. All of the sizes of shirts in Dirt Cheap seemed smaller than what their labels suggested. It was hard to tell what was what. I grabbed about ten shirts for Drew in varying sizes because of their different brands and imagined that if he didn’t fit them, they would fit me, so it wouldn’t be a waste to buy them. Drew's mom asked if I wanted anything for myself. I hadn’t considered looking for anything because she was always spending all her money on us already and I didn’t want to take advantage of that. She insisted, so I grabbed a dress and some other shirts for myself and all in all, it totaled to about 30 dollars. Incredible. I love Dirt Cheap.

We went to Walmart to find Drew some shorts. We got him three different pairs and picked up a couple more shirts too. I'm glad we did, because the majority of the stuff I bought for him at Dirt Cheap, he either didn’t like or was too small for him. I'm so grateful to his mom though. She bought about 150 dollars worth of clothes for us both. I never get to buy new clothes so it’s nice to have some new stuff. I've been meaning to buy new clothes forever (years probably) but I'm not keen on spending money on non-necessities.

After our shopping spree, we picked up Chick-fil-a for dinner and went back to the house. We ate and talked and sorted through clothes and Drews mom went back home near 8 o'clock.

And well,

I guess that’s been my weekend.

TTFN,

Paige💜