Mom Versus Mom - When Will It End? (Part Second)

   Sometime last week, I had someone really hurt my feelings. Someone I admired, someone who probably honestly just thought they were helping: just giving some friendly advice. What they did was they just talked to me about how much better a stay-at-home mom is then a working mom. Better because a stay-at-home mom is home with the kids more, and so the kids are not neglected like a working mom's kids are; better because they home school, so their kids are more educated then my child, who goes to a public school; better because they are more nurturing, more hands-on, and that I really should be that way as well.
   This did really hurt my feelings, because I am a working mom. I have to be - either that or be homeless. Or, about eight years ago, I could have decided to remain in an abusive relationship that was harming me in every way possible, so that I wouldn't have to be a single mom. Considering my choices, I believe that I have made the best choice possible. But regardless of whether anyone agrees with that or not, all I can do is say: my daughter is not neglected. She is taught morals and ethics -- by me, not the TV, or the babysitter, or the public education system. In short, I do my best.
   Yes, she is in public school, but she is in a pretty decent one, and I talk to her everyday about her day in school, and sometimes, I even volunteer. I do my best, and while I am not against homeschooling, for us, that was never an option in the first place. I believe that academic teaching requires a certain skill set, and frankly, sometimes I still have to add on my fingers. I am lacking that skill set required. Now, I agree that there are some teachers in the education system who unfortunately are lacking that skill set as well, but I keep a close eye on my daughter and the work she does, and what she is learning, and if she still likes school, and everything that I can possibly think of that might signal that she has run afoul of one of these teachers who should not be teaching. But my daughter's education is proceeding nicely. She is a smart girl, and she knows she can talk to me, and I have some high hopes for her future, and my working is not infringing on those hopes. In short, I do my best.
   Sometimes I am not home. Sometimes I am at work, but I check up on her throughout the day. She always knows when I am supposed to be home as well, and I am never late, sometimes to the dismay of my supervisors, who just really wish I could stay late because we are slammed. Sometimes my scheduling requirements means that I get the short-end of the stick when it comes to hours, but I do my best not to complain, because I am capable of creative budgeting and in the end, I am really grateful that I work for someone that understands that I am mom first, employee second, and the job keeps my daughter fed, under a roof, clothed, and insured. I have to be the nurturer and the money-earner all in one, but I am always there when my daughter needs me, because whatever job I work, I am Mom first. In short, I do my best.
    I have argued before that we need to stop judging each other as parents, and stop with the one-way, and one-way only mentality that we have towards parenting, but sometimes it just really feels like we are never going to stop. I could have gotten on here and argued why my way is better, why my daughter is learning independence, critical thinking, and how to interact with the real world, but in all reality, that's as much a crock of bullshit as the saying that my daughter is not as nurtured or as well educated. We all parent according to standards that best meet the needs of our lives, and that is the only way to do this thing called parenting. A mom who wants to stay home should not feel like she is less than a working mom, and a working mom should not feel like she is less than a stay-at-home mom. One does not negate the other. One does not take away the value of the other. Different does not mean wrong, and that is the message that I want to get across here. Different is okay. And even though we may differ in our methods, one thing remains the same - we all just do our best.

Mom Versus Mom: Just Plain Wrong (link to the first blog post that I did on this subject, written 1/23/13)

I Eat Door-To-Door Salespeople For Dinner

   You know what really bugs me? I mean, really, really bugs me? Those people who go door to door peddling whatever they are peddling, whether it's religion, cable service, cookies, or whatever. Do you know why these people really bug the hell out of me? Because whenever you tell them no, you are not interested, they still don't shut the hell up and go away. Then you are forced to either be a jackass and slam the door in their faces, or be a complete asshole, and just tell them straight up, "Go the hell away. I don't want your shit."
   I had this problem today, which really irritated me. I am sitting there, minding my own damn business, I have my beef stew cooking, and I'm so into the game that I am playing (it IS my vacation after all) that I haven't checked it yet. It's fine, right? It's in the crock pot, of course it's fine. But then I hear a knock at the door, and since I have some stuff coming through UPS, I get up and look out the peephole.
  I don't know if any of you wear glasses, but so far as I am concerned, those peepholes are not made for people with glasses. I can never see out of them very well, and since I am blind-as-a-bat without them, taking my glasses off helps nothing. Which means all I can see is that the person is holding something that could be one of those little scanner things that you sign, that the UPS carries, so I opened the door. It was someone trying to sell me internet, and they were holding a little clipboard. Really? Like I am gonna buy your shit? Leave a flyer on the freaking door, so that I can throw the bitch away at my leisure, and lets not waste either of our time. I have games to play here. I have an entire afternoon to waste, because I am on vacation. Don't fill up my wasted time with your door-to-door sales pitch. Wasted time might seem like, well, a waste to you, but I am a single mom. The amount of time I generally get to waste is typically very, very small. I value my wasted time, dammit!!!
   Okay, so it's not all a loss. One time, I had did have some religious people coming around here. I am not entirely sure why I answered the door at that time. Maybe they were holding a clipboard too. For some odd reason, I feel compelled to answer the door when someone is holding a clipboard, and I am gonna work on that issue, but I digress. These people wanted to save people. While I am religious and believe in God, I am not really a huge fan of organized religion, and I certainly am not walking into any strange-ass churches being peddled by door-to-door preachers, or whatever they are. But these people didn't really want to leave - I guess the had a quota to fill. They asked me, finally, in apparent desperation, after I had said no and was starting to shut the door on them, "Don't you know anyone who wants to be saved?" Wait, wait, wait. Anyone? Before I had really even had time to think about what I was doing, I gave them my sister's home address, who also happens to live in the same complex as me, so she was really easily reached. My sister, who has life sized zombies plastered to her wall, and a neat-o skull-and-crossbones with daggers sticking out (my mom gave it to her for her birthday) hung up all right in plain sight of the entry way. She once had a pizza guy want to come in and explore her apartment because he saw all that shit. My sister, who unlike me, really is an atheist. "Here's my sister's address. She needs God." I told them, while trying not to start cackling madly.
   I can't help doing shit like this. There's something wrong with me; I never denied it. But now that I think of this, I am realizing that I have not had door-to-door religious people knock on my door since. I think I owe my sister dinner. 

Bad News, Cashier-Brain, and Books (Yay! Books!!!)

   Currently, I'm on vacation, or staycation, because we are just staying home in our apartment, with no travel plans, nor any other plans, come to think of it. The only hard and fast plan that I did have was to go see Divergent, and to spend the night at my sister's and watch some scary movies, and I've done both (I loved Divergent!). So I have a line of empty days ahead of me and my daughter, who is on spring break.
   And that's a good thing, because I was seriously suffering from a strong case of cashier-brain. I was seeing PLU numbers (price look-up codes) every time I shut my eyes. I was hearing that blasted beeping even when I had left the stores, and my last two vivid nightmares had both been about work. That's too much; that is a sign. Marie needs a break, clearly written across my psyche.
   Of course, come time for me to take my break, everything starts happening. I have had a shit-storm of bad news that I can't really do anything about, which is one of the worst types of bad news there is. Not being able to do anything kinda makes you feel like a glass of ice water in the North Pole: redundant. All I can do, over and over again, is say how sorry I am and that I'll pray, when I would much rather charge in, fix everything, and have us all live happily ever after. But all I can do is sit here and worry.
   And then on top of that, every nuisance task that can manage to rear it's ugly head comes along, such as having to fill out paperwork and provide documentation that your daughter really is your daughter, so that your insurance won't drop her as a dependent on your coverage. I mean, yeah, that's easy enough to prove, but I didn't exactly want to take time from my worry and fret to mess around with my damn insurance, for a matter that I think is a bunch of bullshit at any damn rate. Even if my daughter wasn't my daughter, I still feel that I should be allowed to cover her on my insurance if I want to. But she is my daughter, so the whole mess is just minor aggravation that I'm just shrugging at.
    But this is my vacation, so I am making effort to do things that I like, so last night, I stayed up and read Night Broken, which is book number eight in the Mercy Thompson series, and which also happens to be my most favorite urban fantasy series ever. I love Patricia Briggs, and yes, I did sit down and read the book from start to finish, secure in the knowledge that I am on vacation and would be able to sleep in. Most times when I sit down and read a book from start to finish, I read with the guilty knowledge that I am going to be a cashier-zombie in the morning.
    My daughter's pretty happy as well, because since we are on vacation, I just feel that she should have new material to read, so she's been coming to me with her Kindle, waiving the thing in my face with books already pulled up on the screen and ready to purchase, begging with her puppy-dog eyes, "Momma, please? Please, Momma?" I'm a sucker for this type of request, so she has scored The Fault With Our Stars, and all three of the books in The Maze Runner trilogy, so far. We are not even halfway through our vacation. She knows that when she asks me for a book, getting a yes is almost guaranteed, unless I truly am broke, and then, I guess I am lucky that she's a good kid, and doesn't give me a hard time about getting a no, because I know that I have spoiled her so far as getting knew books are concerned. I don't feel too badly about this, because I also know that I can be very strict about other things, and I do feel that while we really need to provide rules and boundaries for our kids, a small amount of spoiling never hurt anything, especially when you are talking about books.
   I did think I would write a little more than I have, but honestly, right now I am at a bit of a loss for topics. My mind keeps circling around that bad news that I have received -- my damn mind is like a freaking vulture and it's pissing me off, but what can you do when you get pissed at your own mind? And these topics are topics that I don't really feel at leisure to discuss, because frankly, they aren't my business to discuss, and if there is one thing I want to avoid, being the writer who writes about everyone else's business is one of them. I do NOT want people - friends and family - to feel like they can't talk to me about private things because they are worried they will show up in my blog. But at the moment, this does leave me without a topic, and thus you all get treated to this wandering ramble.  Happy staycation to me, and if nothing else, may I be cured from the cursed cashier-brain. 

My Sister's Freaky-Deaky Laundry Room

   My sister and I had another scary movie sleep over the other night and we had it at her apartment; having sleep overs at her apartment is something I am seriously beginning to question. The logic behind having most of our sleep overs at her apartment rather than mine is that I have a one bedroom apartment with limited sleeping space, and her rather roomier apartment has a multitude of extra beds, including a trundle bed that pulls out from under her bed and two couches that convert into mattresses. I have a futon and an air mattress, so her sleeping arrangements are often more comfortable as well. So logically speaking, her apartment is the better one to have sleep overs in when we are doing our scary movie thing, and scaring the crap out of ourselves and each other.
    However, I am not a logical person; I admit this freely, and the problem I have with her apartment is this: her apartment is very clearly haunted, and mine is not. We can all sleep in my apartment on the floors, and be free of ghosts and demons; that is my logic. I wanna live, dammit.
   How did I come to this conclusion about her apartment, you may be asking. This conclusion is from over a year's worth of careful observation. You see, when she first moved into that apartment, I didn't go into her home with preconceived notions, but after the first time I slept over, I had woken often, on my nice, comfy full sized couch bed, with the feeling that something had been standing over me. I don't know why I felt that way, but I did, and I didn't get much sleep. Of course, I did brush this off at first, because the entire reason that I stay over at my sister's apartment is so that we can watch horror films. I was paranoid because of what we had just watched, right?
   Wrong. When I joked about my feelings on facebook, making fun of myself as I often do, a friend who had once lived in the exact same building as my sister told me that family members of hers had seen and sensed things in that building. (singsong-voice --->) FREAKY!!!
   But whatever, you know. Almost every building in this complex probably has some kind of history; these buildings are old, that's why they are cheaper than every other complex in this area. Be that as it may, this complex does not have any kind of a disturbing, paranormal reputation, so I figured we were good. People talk; if there was some really freaky shit going on in one of these buildings, we would know.
   Still, my sister would complain to me about seeing things out of the corner of her eye, but when she would look directly, nothing would be there. She would hear things in the hall at night, but her kids would be in bed, things like that. You know, common shit that you see in every single cliche haunting movie. So I really couldn't decide whether or not we were just spooking each other. Active imaginations can feed off of one another, and we both have very active imaginations that we are feeding constantly with supernatural horror movies. Of course we are seeing shit. If we stopped watching horror movies, we would stop seeing crap out of the corners of our eyes, a problem that I do not have in my own apartment, but still.
    The thing that really pushed me over the edge was when we were leaving to go on our Yellowstone vacation last summer. I had stayed the night at her house the night before we left for that vacation, because we wanted to get an early start, and I figured that this would be easier if we were just all at the same place in the morning. Less travel, you know? My sister had someone who was going to come over during that time to take care of her guinea pig, so she wanted me to set our dirty clothes in the laundry room so that they would be out of the way when the person came over, which I did, no problem. However, when we came back from our trip, I went over to pick up our overnight stuff from her apartment, and I could not open the door. The door knob felt like someone was holding on to it from the other side, and pull as I might, I could not get the door open, and it felt for all the world like someone was pulling on the door from the other side!
    That's all the convincing that I need. I left my stuff; that old haunt wants some dirty overnight clothes, it can have them. I hate laundry; I am sure as hell not gonna die for it. I WILL BUY NEW SHIT. If the ghost/demon/whatever wants some nasty, dirty clothes, who am I to say no? It can have them.
    I still go over there, although I have made stronger attempts to have any sleepovers held at my own apartment. When I do go over there, all the kids sleep together in one room, and I make my sister sleep in whatever room that I am in; we use the buddy system. No one goes anywhere alone! And I make sure that the damn laundry room door is shut. I can't handle looking into that room.
   But if any of us ever start exhibiting signs of possession, that laundry room needs to be investigated first. 

Ronald McDonald, Deportation, and Identity Theft

   The other day, I got a phone call while I was at work. I wasn't there to take that call, and we aren't allowed personal calls at any rate, emergencies only, but my coworker who took the call told me all about it between bouts of laughter. Apparently, someone was trying to collect a debt, and apparently, this fool of a crook was calling himself Ronald McDonald.
   Hello, crooks! We didn't all fall off of the stupid train yesterday. There is no way (please let there be no way!) that any person is ever going to agree to pay off a supposed debt to someone named Ronald McDonald. That has scam written all over it.
   About two years back, I had information stolen. Everything; my entire identity, but while I have stopped one attempt at booking a hotel in London with my debit card, what these people mainly did was try to get me to pay off false debt. The biggest trick they used was to say that I had taken out a payday loan and never paid the loan back.
   I knew that this was false from the first time that the first person contacted me, but I couldn't figure out what was going on, because this woman was insisting that I owed her company $500. When I argued that I had never taken out  a payday loan, she responded with, "Well, you can fight this in court, but you will need two senior lawyers from a prestigious firm to fight this, and it will be very expensive. You will save money if you just Western Union us the amount." No joke, this is what she said, I remember this clearly, because I was just dumbfounded. I started demanding that she send me paperwork, showing what I owed with all the company information listed, and she refused. "We do not have to send you paperwork. The time for that is past, now you must pay."
   That was my first run-in with false debt collectors. When I had taken this call, I was not at home, I was out with my sister. When I got home, the first thing I did was to Google the phone number that she had called from. That's what Google is for, right? Linked to the phone number was a long list of people complaining that this was a bogus number, run by people trying to get you to pay for fake payday loans.
   That was the start of a year full of threatening phone calls. They called a million times a day, at home, at work, my family, all the while claiming that I owed different amounts of money to different payday loan companies. Every time I would Google the number and the company, and I would see page after page of testimonials claiming that these numbers and companies were fake, and pleas not to send them money through Western Union like they always requested.
   These calls were not pleasant however. I had stopped answering the phone, but they would leave messages saying different things; sometimes they were lawyers, sometimes they were policemen, sometimes they were FBI, and they would say things like they were going to drag me kicking and screaming to the courthouse if I did not comply, that they had my house under surveillance, and even more alarming, they would spew off my entire social security number and they would tell me my bank account numbers, all in an attempt into bullying me into sending them some money.
   All this time, I had been looking into what my rights were as a consumer, and trying to find out what actions that I could take against them, and I decided that I needed to gather more information about these people who were constantly calling me. Which meant that the next time they called, I decided I would answer the phone and try to pump them for more names, personal, company, ect.
  Waiting for them to call wasn't long at all, as by this time they were literally calling me about twenty times a day, and before long I had one of them on the phone, a guy this time, using some generic sounding name. Of all things, he claimed he was with the United Nations (of all things!) and that - wait for it - I was going to be deported if I didn't pay the debts that I owed. I was gobsmacked. Deported? Really? To where? I am, and always have been, a citizen of the United States. Where exactly where they going to deport me to? After that wonderful conversation, in which I lost my temper, causing our 'conversation' to devolve into a shouting match, I filled out reports to both the FTC (Fair Trade Commission) and the Attorney General, both of which have online forms specifically for false debt and identity theft.
   The amount of information I got from talking to the scammers didn't really justify the headache, and only gave me a few more false names to add to my report, as well as the new threat of deportation. If you know that the person trying to collect money from you is scamming you, honestly I recommend not talking to them at all. The conversations only get stupid and go around and around in circles.
   I've been battling false debt claims for quite a while now, and have changed most of my personal information, including bank account numbers, phone numbers, and even a change of address (although that was not prompted specifically by these issues). I've even been looking into changing my social security number, because I have been told that this is an option. Fighting this has made me really leery of anything done over the phone - I will not give nor even verify any personal information over the phone or through e-mail, not even my home address. If I happen to take a call from someone pulling this, I demand that they send paperwork through the mail - legally, they have to if you request this. Also, a real debt collector will always say, "This is an attempt to collect a debt. Any information obtained will be used in this attempt." Or some variation thereof. If I don't hear those words, I hang up. Most of them call me at work now, because my work number is the only thing that I haven't changed over the years. Not a lot I can do about that, I've had the same job for going on seven years, and I have no plans to quit.
   Throughout all of these years, no Ronald McDonalds have ever gotten any money from me; not a cent, not even the time when they actually attempted to use my debit card information. I keep an eagle eye on all of my finances, including my credit report. You would think they would give up, but they just seem to keep pegging away. I think they are hoping that they can aggravate me so much that I will just give them some money in the hopes that they will go away and leave me alone. That's optimism at it's finest, there.