Temper, Temper

Since coming home from the hospital with Seoul, MIL has been keeping to a schedule that allows her to help us and keeps me from beating her in the face with a frying pan. Monday through Thursday, she comes around 8am to take Raelynn to the mountain park in our neighborhood, giving me a few hours of relative quiet, and drops her off around 11am. MIL comes back again around 5pm to cook us dinner and goes home around 8pm when we're putting Raelynn to bed. So it's very different than when Raelynn was a newborn and MIL would come over and uselessly sit about, not cleaning, making more mess, interfering with what I wanted to eat and invading my privacy. She's actually being helpful this time around.

You think I'd be thrilled. Here's someone who leaves me in peace during lunch to eat as I wish, who brings us fresh vegetables and fruits, who helpfully takes my noisy toddler to get some exercise outside, who cooks dinner and cleans it up. I should feel grateful. And mostly I am, honestly.

It's just...
Well, let's just say that my hormones during my pregnancy were nothing compared to post-pregnancy. I feel like an angry bear ready to maul. Why do I want to attack someone who is helping me AND fucking off as she should? Ah, yes. Hormones.

Yesterday, I just wanted to hit my MIL. I don't know why. I don't blame her. She didn't do any one specific thing that made me want to snap her head off her neck. I just felt irritated by her presence in general. And she hadn't even been here that long!

I don't like letting her hold Seoul, which was the same for me when Raelynn was born. But I have to let her hold her sometimes, don't I? And if I'm honest, it's nice to have someone else hold the baby so I can play with Raelynn or even watch something lame on TV without distraction. For me that's been old reruns of Billy the Exterminator. Something about his style tells me that if my dear friend Penny were still alive, the 2 of us would spend many a phone conversation arguing over who would get to fictitiously marry him.

Now that I think about it though, she DID do something to annoy me. When she was holding Seoul, the baby began to cry. MIL looked at me stupidly like she had no idea babies could cry. I just fed the baby and it wasn't her hungry cry. I stared right back at MIL. "You figure it out," I tell her, smiling. But whatever she learned by handling Raelynn as a baby went out of her dusty old brain already because she looked more confused than ever. I took Seoul back and it took me .1 second to figure out the problem: poopie diaper.

She did this several times during the evening. She holds out her hands, wanting to hold the baby. This also irritates the shit out of me. My Chinese sucks but I will totally understand you if you tell me you want to hold the baby in Chinese. Stop holding your arms out like a moron. At least this time, she's totally on the ball about scrubbing her hands with soap and water, thankfully.

Though not as on the ball about washing the dishes properly. Jeremy caught her washing the dishes with cold water while I was busy bathing Seoul. I heard him scolding her in the kitchen. I have told her 5,000 times to use hot water when washing the dishes. So has my husband. We've even checked on her as she washes the dishes to make sure she's washing them properly. But yet we constantly have to remind this woman to use the hot water. She scares me. I pray that when I go back to work, she remembers to sterilize the baby bottles before serving Seoul my breastmilk. 

I cringe as I hand her the baby yet again. By this time, my husband is home. He came home from work and then went jogging. And I resented him for that, because, for one, he gets to exercise (I have to wait 4 more weeks and then I get to go for a check-up to make sure I'm all healed up and ready for it) and for another, he's leaving me alone with his mother who it takes all my strength inside me to be polite to. No wonder I went to sleep at 9:30pm last night...I was drained from having to endure her. And from soothing Seoul to sleep without the aid of a chair. Here's hoping the new chair will save me from that kind of exhaustion this evening. Here's hoping even more so that MIL doesn't break the new chair like she did with the old one.

God. I will so totally break her face if she does.