My Ex sux. Again.

I just picked up Sister from school after spending my afternoon volunteering at the school book fair, only to have her tell me despondently that she was supposed to be picked up by her dad for his birthday. This was news to me. It's in our custody agreement that Sister can spend her parents' birthdays with the respective parent, but Ex has only done this about half the time in the past. The other half he's chosen instead to go have adult fun with friends, which I certainly don't blame him for doing. It's not something I assumed he would be doing, in other words, since he hadn't mentioned it. I tried mightily to be soothing to Sister and only narrowly avoided her really bursting into tears while all the other volunteering mamas pretended not to be listening in.

I got home to a message on the answering machine and expected it to be my Ex clearing things up. It was my Ex alright, calling only minutes before, but merely to ask me how much he owed me for Sister's insurance premium. No mention of the pick-up mix-up.

So I called his mommy to try and figure things out. He answered, insisted that he had asked me about having her on his birthday. When I reminded him that he had merely mentioned he was having a birthday and wanted to get married, he hedged. But then covered any feelings of responsibility for his error by yelling at me about how difficult it was to communicate with me. I'll have you know that while my hands were shaking and my voice catching with the adrenalin rush that shot through my bloodstream, I remained perfectly calm on the phone--even conciliatory!--and did not yell in front of Sister.

She's gone now, whisked off by her dad and his mom to his birthday party at his parents' house. Bean is sleeping. Husband isn't coming home til late tonight because of a blogging conference. And I'm just here alone, trying to come down off the adrenalin kick. It's times like these when I could use a good, stiff cocktail containing gin, breastfeeding and afternoon hour be damned.