Ever since I had my wisdom teeth surgically removed in August of '09, I have had limited feeling in my left jaw from nerve damage. They broke my upper left molar in the back as well, not surprising since it had a bad cavity. So I had a root canal done, but the county took my MedicAid away before I could get it filled.
Since then I've been wondering about the complications from it, but I take olive leaf regularly which is a natural antibiotic, and it helps. If I forget for a couple days, however, I have a bad headache on that side and a generally sick feeling in my face. No real pain though. The tooth that bothers me is one on the bottom that I felt a bad twinge in one day and assumed it was cracked.
Since getting pregnant, my teeth have started to really bother me. Not surprising since my immune system is way low. So my mom sent me for x-rays to find out what was going on.
The good news? My lower tooth is fine. Not even a cavity. It won't need to be pulled, which is great because I would have missed that one. The bad news? My nerve damage goes further than I thought, well into my upper jaw as well as the lower one, and the upper back molar is structurally unsound and abscessed. I just can't feel it. The closest place I can feel the pain is in that lower tooth, which is why I thought it was the problem.
So I will be having it pulled soon, and hopefully that will help out with a lot of my physical and mental yuck feeling lately.
In two weeks I will be having an ultrasound to determine my due date. I am really excited about that. :D
I decided that if I actually get the EIC this year, which is not a guarantee, I am buying a car with it. Taking public transportation is a lot cheaper than driving, so I will probably continue doing so, but I need to be able to leave the house at will and not have to ask my mom for her car. I drastically limit where I go because she needs her car too, and my second youngest brother just got his license so he uses it now. I need to not be dependent on other people. I will get my own insurance this time, and Mark will not be using my car. He needs to get his own vehicle; he has destroyed too many of mine. I'm not going to mention it until it becomes an issue, but that's my decision.
He got the paperwork sent in for his camera card, and hopefully that will go through and his license and job will be forthcoming. When that happens, we are going to divide the bills. I think that is the best way to eliminate arguments over money for now. He will have to handle the rent and phone, and I will handle the groceries and electric. The groceries cost more than rent, but hopefully the food stamps will come through and help out temporarily. After that I will be on WIC for the pregnancy. The propane we will split; that's $350 a fillup and I don't know yet how often we will need fillups. And any expenses that come up for the kids we will talk about as they arise. Whatever money he has left after taking care of his portion, I don't want and I don't want to hear about. All he accomplished by putting me in charge of the finances was to make it impossible for me to ever fully trust him again. I won't take any more responsibility for his spending, and I won't hear the bullshit argument "Well none of your money is missing, so obviously I couldn't have been doing anything."
This is all assuming we even remain under the same roof.
I looked into legal separation, but PA doesn't recognize it. You're either married or divorced. Grrr. I don't want to be financially responsible for Mark any more, in any way. But I also don't want to negotiate custody. I'm not comfortable giving Mark any guaranteed unsupervised custody at this point, and I don't really want to explain why to a court. We'll see. He's getting absolutely ridiculous toward Andy these days, and it pisses me off so bad. That's one of the things I didn't appreciate from my Mom. She told me that she thinks Mark is better with the kids than I am. That doesn't even deserve a response. She's just so clueless about him, and still has unreasonable expectations of children.
Personally, I think it's because Andy is now the age Mark was when his oldest brother was born, at which point no doubt his mom redoubled her unreasonable expectations of him and began to really parentify him. The stuff he says to Andy seems so manipulative and whiny and selfish to me, and he thinks he is just trying to make him more responsible. He has no concept of what it means to TRAIN a child. And no interest in learning. Every time I say something, he immediately acts like it's all rooted in my dislike of his mom and therefore biased and ridiculous. As Andy put it, "Papa's so loud and scoldy these days!"
I may lose patience even sooner, but as of right now, I am determined that if Mark has not started and stuck with some very serious therapy by the time the new baby comes, I cannot let him live with us any more. I will not bring another child into this dysfunctional mess that keeps getting worse all the time. I would like to believe his new belligerent and overbearing attitude is a necessary step in progressing towards eventual healing, but I can't be sure. Until he's getting himself some help, it's obvious he's just living in denial. And the more clear the picture becomes, the more he tries to bully the rest of us into pretending it's not how it looks.
When he was telling me how crappy my social skills are, and complaining about how I make him look bad to other people by telling them the truth about our life, his response to me saying that I had made efforts to improve my skills was this:
"You have this idea that people get better through a process of talking out their problems and learning and practicing. That's not how it works. Things get better because you pretend they ARE better. That's how you fix it. Just fake it until one day it's not a problem any more."
Wow. Just wow. No wonder he's in this situation today.
