...ain't nobody happy.

There's a lot of stuff going on at work.

There was the Great Illness of 2007.

There's OmegaDad being out in the field A Lot.

There's an unending leakage of money.

There's the fact that Mommy spent an hour yesterday cleaning up the living room and the kitchen and the bedroom while dad and dotter were out of the house, only to have the stuff strewn across the living room and other rooms within half an hour of dad and dotter returning home.

There's OmegaDad taking a bitch of a graduate-level course this semester, which eats at all his free time.

Then there's the arthritis flare-up that went into overdrive this weekend, so that I kept waking up whimpering through the night.  The flare-up that doses of aspirin and ibuprofen (my love!) didn't do much of anything to combat.

So when I arrived back home from the office today and found that the strewage had multiplied, rather than consolidated...the arthritis hadn't cooled down...and OmegaDad had made cake as an activity, rather than taking the dotter out into the Lovely Sunlight to Play, then announced that He Had Had No Chance To Study in a put-upon tone...and Momma went into her bathroom only to discover that strewage had intruded there, as well...

Momma went into a Deep Funk.  Momma sat down on the floor of the bathroom in the dark and cried.  And cried.  And cried.  And wisted for a few nights away from home at a hotel, where there would be no strewage, no kiddie videos playing, no husband feeling put-upon for not being able to study, only to realize that we don't have the funds to allow for such a much-yearned-for retreat.

Then, when OmegaDad knocked on the door forty-five minutes later and asked, "Are you all right?" and Momma sobbed, "Nooooo!" and responded with "I'm miserable!", OmegaDad went away...!

Momma curled up on the floor and cried and cried and cried some more.

OmegaDad returned forty-five minutes later, knocked again, and this time came in, and Momma collapsed in his arms in tears, sobbing out an incoherent account of everything that was going wrong.

(It turns out that OmegaDad hadn't heard my "I'm miserable!" response...so my resentment of and misery at being ignored was misplaced.)

And then the dotter, who was curious, heard Mommy crying, which set the dotter off, too.  Ooba-dooba.  The dotter can't stand it when Mommy or Daddy is really upset.  I mean, she melts into a horrified mewling mess.

Unfortunately, Momma was in no mood for OmegaDad to split his attentions...so report me to DHS.  I'm afraid that OmegaDotter in a sorrowful heap leaking tears, rather than attracting sympathy and assistance from me, only elicited a gut-level, immature, childish, "God damn it!  I just want to be hugged and loved on by OmegaDad for a while--is that too much to ask?!?!"

After which little hissy fit, OmegaDad took the dotter off and Talked With Her, the end result of which was:

She and OmegaDad cleaned the living room.

She cleaned her room all by herself.

Momma feels somewhat better.

The arthritis flare-up is still there.  I'm still bone-tired.  We still don't have a magical infusion of cash (which we shouldn't need).  OmegaDad is still going to be out in the field, and is still enrolled in his bitch of a graduate class.

But at least there's no strewage all over the house.

Small steps.

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