Miss Independent

My friends tell me that I give really good advice. When they say this, they are always very careful to also say that this is true only when whatever I am giving advice on doesn't have anything to do with me. They are absolutely right. (Clearly, because my personal life is a giant heap of ridiculous disaster, most of the time.)

So lately I've been trying to give myself advice as though I am another person. You know, try to see things in my life from an outside perspective. It doesn't usually work very well because I'm pretty stubborn even when it comes to listening to myself but lately, Tyler and I have been fighting so much that I thought I'd give it a shot. Without going into brutal detail about who did what and who said what, here's what I told myself:

You have got to stop being a crazy person. That's all you can control here-- you can't do anything about his craziness, only yours. Your mutual craziness is why you got the hell outta there and you need to just stop engaging him in it. You're divorced, you're nothing to each other besides coparents, time to drop it and move on. You can't leave someone for being a douchebag and then act all surprised when they turn out to be a douchebag. Just limit communication as much as possible until the storm passes, and continue to live your own separate life in a way that makes you happy and fulfilled.

So I actually listened to myself and thank goodness for that, because my stress level has seriously been through the effing roof, you guys.

On the topic of moving on, now that I'm not very busy with school (I'm basically just waiting for graduation), I've decided to focus on my apartment. I had wanted to move closer to school for my residency, but I can't afford to break my lease, so I'm just going to change things up a little. I'll post about it when it's all done, but the point is, I realized that I couldn't get anything done without some tools, and Tyler had of course taken his toolbox with him. So I went out and bought myself a toolkit, because I'm an independent woman now and can fix things myself, damn it.

A pink toolkit.

It's got a bunch of pink tools and some hardware stuff in it. Actually, the hardware is basically a bunch of hooks and nails for hanging pictures. As if hanging pictures is all a woman would ever use tools for. Which is actually precisely why I bought it but let's not go splitting hairs here.

So now I have tools, which is pretty badass. I also got some stepstools to keep around the apartment, because I'm so short that I can't reach anything in most of my cabinets and closets. I'm pretty much set now. (Side note: you know that getting divorced was the right thing to do when you can basically replace your ex's contributions to your life in their entirety by buying a toolkit and a couple stepstools, just sayin'. Oops, that was bitchy, wasn't it. I should go back and read my own advice again.)

Caroline is pretty psyched about the toolkit too. She keeps asking to see 'mommy's tools", so I taught her the names of them all and she does pretty well remembering them. Well, she keeps calling the hammer a "hamburgler" but you know, she'll get there. Another independent woman in the making!

(P.S.- in preparation for my move to Parents.com, I've set up a Facebook fan page for the blog-- if you want to, you can follow it by clicking "like" in the box in the right-hand column over there, or go to http://www.facebook.com/unexpectedly.expecting and do it there. To be honest, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with a fan page but I am sure I will get it figured out. And it's gonna be awesome.)