In that order. Which says something about the depth of my rage.
I came home and immediately began sobbing tonight, alone, in the kitchen. The backwards series of events leading to my continuing emotional breakdown begins with babysitting, as it often does, on another evening when the mom was in the other room, “working”, as is often the case. When I arrived, she’d made dinner, but none to share with me, as the dad always does. Nope. They ate it all. She didn’t even offer me an apple (did she figure I would help myself? Did she figure I ate dinner already, at the office?). I immediately set to work washing their dishes and didn’t eat anything save a stolen cookie when the kids weren’t looking. The rest of the night dragged on with both kids talking down to me, the older one treating me like hired help and/or a small, annoying, uneducated dog, which is what she does when she feels insecure for whatever reason. Nevertheless, I tried to be understanding instead of judgemental, but it was an effort. After sufficiently belittling me, the girl ended up in hysterics over two losing games of SORRY and ran in to her mother, after which her mother came upstairs and waved me away with a flat “You can go.”
I never got to talk to her about the $100 memory card her son ganked from my phone the other day.
And I realized after leaving that they’re all going away in a few days, for several weeks, during which time their poor little teenage Polish au pair will arrive and move in with them, eliminating, in essence, any future need for my services. This was probably the last time I’d be there, and I didn’t even get paid, and I didn’t even get a goodbye, least of all a Thank You for 4 years of co-raising the children.
I went home starving, trying to let the rage flowing through my body evaporate into the urban evening, since it would probably do no good for my skin, my psyche, my spiritual development or my interpersonal skills. At last divulging my memory of the night’s myriad unpleasantness, I got to my apartment only to discover a few living and a few dead baby roaches hanging out in my kitchen. That’s when I burst into tears, mopped fanatically, made a grilled cheese sandwich, disinfected the table — again — and cried more. In that order.
Then the doorbell rang, and thank God it was my wonderful wonderful landlord. The bad news is, the previous tenants had reported seeing a few of the aforementioned insects after dragging home a chair they’d found off the street. The landlord had bombed the place, then cleaned, but neglected to mention it to DD or me, assuming said vermin had been eliminated. The good news is, he promises now to poison them, gas them, hire professional help if necessary, plug all the crevices in the floors, even tear up and retile the entire kitchen.
“My wife hates roaches,” he told me. So do I! So do I! “I gotta get rid of them before they move upstairs,” he growled, highly perturbed, which was exactly the reaction I was looking for. And then he threw out the rug in the shared foyer, and he cleaned the floor, and I suddenly felt much better, even though DD later told me, via a hotel room outside DC, that you can never really completely eliminate roaches; you can just keep killing them. I really hope that isn’t true.
Needless to say, long nights, aforementioned domestic emergencies and an overheating MacBook Pro have kept me from working on video projects, which need to get done ASAP. But it’s summer, praise be to Allah, and next week I will spend a blissful three days on the beach at Block Island with Ry and 20 of his closest friends. Hallelujah.
