It's Over

The holidays are officially over at the Cud household. Yesterday the tree came down. I am still pissed off because when I went to decorate the tree I couldn't find any of my Christmas ornaments. I have a bunch of really old, fancy glass ornaments. Not family heirlooms or anything. I bought them all at a resale store, but still, they are really beautiful. I haven't been using them because there was always a cat in the house that would have knocked them off and broken them. To display them I would get those giant margarita glasses and fill them with ornaments and arrange them on the mantle. This year there wasn't a cat to contend with, so I was going to really pimp out the tree. Martha Stewart would have been proud. (I still remember the Christmas show of hers where she decorated the cookies with gold foil instead of the standard frosting and sprinkles. Maybe next year.)

Christmas wasn't the total joy you would expect for a family celebrating the arrival their first child. Sure, the child is 17, not exactly a little bundle of joy, but we had been looking forward to having a really spectacular, pull out all the stops celebration. Then The Girl ended up spending Christmas with her father in Arkansas. Of course, the plane trip down there coincided with the big ice storm that stranded her plane in Cincinnati, so the day she left was a total nightmare. My husband was convinced that once she left she wasn't going to be able to come back.

You see, she isn't really our daughter. We didn't kidnap her or anything, but we don't have any kind of legal custody of her. According to the great state of Missouri a 17 year old can decide she doesn't want to live with her parents and they can't do anything about it. The Girl and her step father didn't get along, and her mother seems to parent more in the style of the Wicked Stepmother than anything else. Her father lives in Arkansas, and she didn't want to move down there, plus he has a soap opera of his own going on, so she ended up moving in with us.

My husband was convinced that once The Girl's mother found out she was going to her dad's house she would find a way to transfer custody to the father. You see, the less great state of Arkansas has this crazy idea that children should live with their parents, at least until they turn 18, so if she was in Arkansas and her father got custody he could force her to stay with him. At least until she turned 18, which is only 3 months away. I thought a) her mother couldn't get custody transferred that quickly, b) her father has his hands full already and doesn't have room or time for more than visits from her, and c) he's smart enough to know that if he pulled anything like that she'd hate his guts and never want to see him again.

Luckily, everything turned out fine and she is back home where she belongs. She had a lot of fun and got to spend time with her dad, but now she's mine, all mine. Wait, I mean ours, all ours. Yeah, ours, right. She spends so much time with my husband I get jealous. I am at work when she gets home from school, and when I get home it's just about bedtime, so I don't get to see her nearly as much as he does. Of course, the flip side is he gets to enjoy her taste in music and TV more than I do. Over the holidays he made her pay for making him listen to Marilyn Manson and watch reruns of Clueless by spending as much time on the couch watching James Bond movies as humanly possible without actually being in a coma.

Then there was the big New Year's Eve fiasco. I had to work that night, but got home around 9. My sister and her family, and some friends, came over and we just sat around mingling, eating and drinking, shooting pool and talking trash. After everybody left our house my husband and The Girl decided to go down the street and crash our neighbor's party. I decided I had enough celebration and just went to bed. If I have to say so myself, that was a pretty smart move. I mean, it was about 2am and the people who had been drinking all night were in prime form.

Let me tell you a little about the neighbors I'm talking about. They are the ones who just got married in July. He just turned 21 and I think she's 19. So my husband walked into a house full of drunken teenagers. He said he knew there was trouble when the first thing he heard when he walked in was glass breaking and people yelling. The woman of the house was out back on the deck, so he went out to talk to her. She was having a freak attack because she couldn't find her cat. Imagine, a cat in a house full of yelling drunks not feeling like napping on the couch. She was convinced someone had let the cat outside, so she was in full freak mode.

He was trying to calm her down about the cat when some drunk punk came storming on the deck wanting to know what all the commotion was about. Apparently, the noise was interfering with his attempt to make sweet love with some other drunk young thing. For some reason he fixated on my husband as the cause of all his misery. He recognized my husband as an outsider since my husband was probably the only person over 30 there. Since my husband was so ancient he obviously didn't belong, so this young stud was going to take out the trash, so to speak. He kept calling my husband names and threatening to kick his ass. The Girl went and got the man of the house, who was able to straighten out the young stud. Lucky for the young stud because even though my husband is getting old and grey, and not in exactly the best shape (Ok, he's got a gut. My man likes him some beer.), he could still kick that punks ass from here to next week.