Living with the crazy label

So I guess I didn't scare you off, huh? Good! Welcome back!

You know why most people keep their mental health diagnosis a secret? Stigma. Any time you admit to someone that you’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, you risk being judged and labeled by people who are misinformed and uneducated.

And there will always, ALWAYS, be the assholes who will use it to try and insult and hurt you. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been called “psycho bitch” or had comments about voices in my head and multiple personalities directed at me. 

But here’s the kicker…you know who most of those comments come from? People who have never even met me.

Yet somehow just having that one little piece of information seems to make them think they know everything about me. They assume it means I’m a bad mother. They assume its the reason why I’m single or why my relationships have ended. They assume that every issue anyone has ever had with me is my fault because I’m the crazy one.

Oddly enough, I have my shit together more than most of them do. Some of the people that have tried to use my diagnosis against me have fallen into at least one, sometimes more, of the following categories:

• Full blown alcoholics
• Active drug addicts
• Adulterers
• High school dropouts
• Unemployed
• In abusive relationships
• Are the abusers
• Borderline illiterate (which is really funny when they try to insult me with a text message or post or email that’s filled spelling and grammar errors)

And these people will say stuff like that thinking they can hurt me with it…but do they seriously think that I’m going to give a shit what they think when I don’t even know or remember their name and couldn’t pick them out of a lineup? Do they really think they can hurt me with something that I make fun of myself all the time? I named my blog after it. I have a sticker on my roller derby helmet that says Crazy Bitch and it used to be the ringtone on my phone. Being called crazy is a joke to me, not an insult. Sticks and stones and all that…

Let’s get a few things straight here, okay? Yes, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. So were a lot of people –  successful people, brilliant people, famous people. And like anyone living with any type of illness, whether its diabetes or epilepsy, my illness is managed with medication on a regular basis. I am functioning at a level equal to (and in some cases, ABOVE) many non-bipolar people. 

Oh, and while we’re at it… schizophrenics are the ones that hear voices and its dissociative identity disorder that has more than one personality. I am bipolar. The only voice in my head is my own and I only have one personality, which just happens to be a fabulous one.

Morons.

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Enough is enough

I swear, I have had the worst luck with clients or potential clients lately and I’m seriously about to just scrap it all and start fresh – new business, new target market, new everything.

First there was the client who hired me to convert an HTML site to a WP site plus 10 hours worth of VA work. I got the site done right away and heard nothing from them for like a month. Now usually I don’t do rollover hours. The hours are to be used before the end of the month. But I let it go and carried them over to January. Then in January, those 10 hours that I’d intended to spend on some administrative stuff – sales pages, newsletter, etc. – were spent on constant revisions. The site was DONE. New graphics, theme fully customized, the whole bit. Then came the “Oh I think I want this other theme instead.” Ok, fine. I redid the whole thing with a different theme. Done. “Oh, I think I want a different color scheme.” ARRGGH!!! Redid all of the CSS and the .php files and waited for the rest of the info to be used in the pages. Two header redesigns later, I still don’t have the text I need. Plus I’m having to go in and fix things that they tried to do on their own – turn pages into posts, move categories to subcategories. I wait a week for a response which I finally get on a Friday afternoon. By Tuesday, I’m getting “Where are you?? Is the site done??” emails. Two working days later. Two. Actually, more like one and a half since it was Tuesday morning. Needless to say, there were no VA hours left over to get to the stuff I had originally planned because it was all spent on the bazillion revisions.

Then there are the ones who want an entire WP site done twice as fast for half the price. First its the “I can’t afford it” stuff. I tried to make it easier by splitting it up into two payments, sent out an invoice for the first half. Waited and waited on payment. Nada. They wanted a list of what was being done for this (already reduced) price. Sent it. Then comes the haggling. How much if we don’t do this part? How much for just this that and the other? I never should’ve caved in to begin with. It just opens a door that never gets shut unless you slam it. Hard.

Now from someone else, I’ve got an unpaid invoice that’s never going to get paid because they’re claiming they never got the email in which I sent the first draft so they hired someone else. Now how am I supposed to prove I sent it and is it even really worth it? No matter what I do, they’re going to refuse to pay. Oh and if I want proof that they never got it, I can check out their site to see that they’re using a different one. So I did. And guess what? The tag line on the one they’re using is the EXACT same one I came up with on the draft of the graphic I sent that they “never” received. Coincidence? Doubtful.

Lessons learned. From now on, I am standing firm on my prices and my policies including a deposit before work is even started. Proposals, expenses, timelines will all be laid out in the beginning and any deviations from that will either cause other work to get pushed to the bottom of the priority list or it all gets done and the extra hours are billed.

I can’t do business like this. I can’t put in 20 hours and only get paid for 10 of them. I can’t do $500 worth of work for $200. And I can’t put time into a project that I’m not going to get paid for.

Now I’m sure I’ll be bashed and gossiped about for talking publicly about this because I’m supposed to be worried about my image. But ya know what? If it sends the message that I do not appreciate or deserve to be taken advantage of , good. I know I’m not the only who has had these problems and I have no problem being the one to speak up and say you can’t treat people like this. Hopefully my future clients will appreciate that about me. Those that have a problem with it will certainly be able to find someone else to hire.

If you want quality work and you want me to do what you hired me to do, let’s talk. If you want to hire someone who is willing to negotiate their prices and do some of the work for free…well, I wish you luck. Please, please, please respect the people that provide the services your business needs. We have busy schedules and bills to pay too.

Aaaahhhhhhhh!!! I needed to get that out or else I would’ve lost what’s left of my mind.

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Coming up for air

Holy crap, has it really been that long since I posted??

Well, don’t expect much from me now. I’m tired. Beat. Exhausted.

Work is (good) crazy, lots of opportunities coming my way. Its so crazy, I had to take my binder with me when I went to pick the Princess up from school and I sat there in my car doing some mindmapping to figure out how I’m going to manage it all.

Just in case all of that “The Secret” stuff is true, I want to clarify: Hey, Universe, I’m not complaining! So don’t go taking this away from me, okay?

The kids are…well, the same. Haven’t seen Doodlebug since they got out of the hospital other than a few pictures and a 15 second cell phone video. Planning on seeing her and Sissy this weekend. Not too happy with Sissy and this Shithead she’s dating but, ya know, there’s not much I can do about it that doesn’t involve ending up on that Snapped show on Oxygen.

Bubba is in the hospital…again. I totally empathize with the kid. When I was married to his dad, I felt like checking myself in just to get away from him too. But its all good. Got me a court date NEXT WEEK to take care of this shit once and for all.

Princess…OMG, she amazes me. That child was just so excited about “Inoxoration” Day. I think she’s the only first grader in her school that can tell you the President’s name, his wife’s name, her official title of First Lady, how many states there are and how many senators each state has. She loves this stuff! Maybe she’ll be a poli sci major.

When we got home Tuesday afternoon (God, how I wanted to keep her home with me to watch it live!), CNN was replaying the Inauguration. I had to get online so I told her she could change and watch Spongebob. SHE SAID NO. *jaw drops* She said she wanted to watch President Obama. And when she had to go potty, she waited until a commercial and asked me to tell her when Barack Obama was back on.

That’s my girl!

She doesn’t seem to care much that I got to shake President Carter’s hand when I was her age though. Hmph.

Ok, I’ll catch up later. I’ve got a nifty little blogging schedule set up thanks to a planner I downloaded at Blog Energizer so I’ll be back on track soon.

P.S. Go subscribe to Bad Mommy Blogger. Now! Seriously, its going to kick ass. Launch week starts February 2nd.

P.P.S. See that “Please Vote!” thing over there to the right? Could you take a minute and click on it? It’ll take you to my profile on Startup Nation. Then click that little “Vote” button on my profile. You can vote once per day. Pretty please?

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There won’t be a shower

Today was supposed to be the day for Sissy’s baby shower. I planned it with good intentions and even postponed it for a month when it wasn’t working out the way I had hoped. It’s mainly my fault because I didn’t put as much effort into it as I had planned but with the way my daughter has behaved over the past 9 months I just didn’t have the heart for it.

I was against this pregnancy from the beginning. Hell, I was against her even seeing this baby’s father and although I didn’t go so far as to forbid her from seeing him – we all know how that works…it doesn’t – I did ground her when I caught her lying to me about some things that involved him. Rather than abide by my rules and adhere to the grounding, she chose to run away then lied about it and told everyone I kicked her out. So she went to a foster home where the parents let her do her own thing and apparently “doing her own thing” involved running around with this boy, hence the pregnancy.

I made it clear that coming home was not an option because I do not have the room, the money, or the energy to have a baby in this house. And when I found out that she was not only dating someone else but that this new boyfriend was, in fact, the foster dad’s son and he was living there and they had lied to her caseworker about it, she was removed and put into another home.

I tried to come to terms with the pregnancy and began preparing to accept her and the baby into my home. This is where planning the shower came in. I can’t afford to buy her all of the things that the baby needs so I decided to use what I had – my blog, some marketing, some advertising, some bartering – to help her out.

I have asked her several times to come spend some time over here to help me plan this, to explain to her how blogging works, to show her how fortunate we were that we would be able to do this. But because of this controlling boyfriend who treats her as his property and makes the decisions about where she spends her time, it never happened.

After we got into it about this boyfriend, about her role in this family, about the expectations I have on her if she plans on living under my roof, I decided not to put any effort into the shower. She was under the mistaken impression that this shower was nothing more than “your friends sending you shit.”

The lack of gratitude she has shown makes me ill. We have always been poor yet somehow both of my older kids have developed this attitude of entitlement. Its both disappointing and embarassing. I am absolutely ashamed at both of my kids today and I have informed them that our family Christmas celebration this year will consist of Santa Claus coming to visit Princess and nothing more. I will go through the motions for the little one’s sake and make the best of it but aside from that I have absolutely no holiday spirit thanks to Sissy and Bubba.

So the shower is canceled and so is Christmas. My most sincere apologies go to the sponsors who were generous enough to help. I will return the items to you within the next week. Just email me your addresses since I didn’t keep the packaging with the return addresses on them. I will create a space on my Link Love page just for you as my way of saying “Thanks anyway. I really do appreciate it. And I’m sorry.”

I’ll come back and add links later but for now, I just wanted to get this out. I’m just so deflated right now I don’t even feel like messing with formatting this post.

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Target is so not Mom-friendly

I guess Target figures that since they want to focus on emo teenagers and trendy-but-broke college students, they can afford to lose a few Mom customers. Really? Think about how much money Moms spend at Target compared to how much those teens and students do.

I’ve been completely fed up with Target after trying to get an issue resolved for 4 months and being given nothing but automated responses with no reply address so I kept having to go back to their website and start all over again explaining the problem. I even had a customer service rep hang up on me. Apparently she had some issues with the English language and decided it was too much for her to handle.

It started back in August when I won a Fancy Nancy Doll for Princess on a blog giveaway. At around that same time, I’d earned a $20 gift card so, since her birthday was coming up, I used the gift card to buy the little toy dog that goes with the Fancy Nancy doll.

Two months or so went by and I still hadn’t received the doll and the blogger who hosted the contest said they were out of stock. Then I started getting emails from Target telling me that the dog was delayed and wouldn’t arrive until November. Then I got two more “shipment delayed” notices.

I had been to a local Target store several times and had seen plenty of the dolls and the dog. So I contacted Target and said “Look, just replace my gift card code with a physical gift card and I’ll go get the toy myself.” (We finally got the Fancy Nancy doll a few weeks ago but that was sent from some PR company and not Target.)

The response I got from Target was that shipment had been delayed, supplier was out, etc. and I could cancel my order if I wanted and that they wouldn’t charge me shipping if I chose to keep the order in place. Totally didn’t answer my question. I then got a notice that I needed to update my payment information because the card I’d given was invalid. See, the dog came to like $21 and some change after tax so I used one of those Visa gift cards to pay the balance and apparently the card had expired or maybe I’d used it all up or something. Anyway, I didn’t want the order completed so I just waited it out figuring they would cancel the order and refund me which was what I wanted in the first place.

Sure enough, they canceled it. So after I got that notice, I contacted online customer service and asked about my refund. You won’t believe what they told me. “You are not entitled to a refund because the card information you provided was invalid and no payment was made so there is nothing to be refunded.”

Oh I don’t think so. I want my $20 gift card refunded to me. Just because I didn’t let you charge the piddly little $1.62 to my card doesn’t mean I don’t get my gift card back.

I got sick of having to start over every time and go back to the customer service site and send a new email so I called them. I hate calling customer service – ANY customer service – because so many of them are outsourced to other countries and I don’t like talking to people that I can’t understand. But obviously email was getting me nowhere.

Sure enough, I got some girl that spoke heavily-accented English and I had to have her repeat almost everything she said. I did manage to decipher it enough to realize that she was telling me that I had not used a gift card to pay for the order. I told her to look again because I did. While she had me on hold, I went looking through my records to find the code for the gift card. She came back on the phone and tried to tell me again that the gift code had not been applied.

I pointed out to her that the website clearly says on it that it is just soooo easy to use these gift cards, just plug in the number blah blah blah and that that’s exactly what I did. Then I told her I still have the damn code and when I looked it up online it said that this gift card had already been used and had a zero balance. She asked for the code and after I gave it to her, she said it still had a $20 balance.

ARRGGHH!! Ok, fine, now that we’ve confirmed that there is a $20 balance on the card, SEND ME A PHYSICAL CARD and I will drive to the local Target store and pick the dog up myself. That’s when she mumbled something about getting more information then I heard elevator music and then nothing.

Its been a week since I sent them yet another email complaining about not receiving either the toy OR a refund and being told by the website that my gift card has a zero balance but being told by the agent that it has a $20 balance.

No response. This is bullshit. And apparently I’m not the only one because I just read this blog post from another Mom who got screwed out of a Britax car seat when Target messed up and claimed it was a pricing error and wouldn’t be honored.

Seriously, Target, somebody needs to WAKE UP over there. Have you heard of Wal-Mart’s “11 Moms” program? Wal-Mart is on fire when it comes to the world of Mommy blogging and social media. Between their latest campaigns and your poor customer service, Target, you’re going to find yourself losing a LOT of money to Wal-Mart. And trying to copy them doesn’t change my mind. (I don’t even like Dooce and I haven’t even heard of most of the others.) Hell, even K-Mart is catching on and launching a massive blogging campaign through Social Spark and some high-profile bloggers. The difference between the Wal-Mart or KMart bloggers and these Target moms is that the former are genuine people who interact with their loyal readers which goes a lot farther when it comes to social media.)

When you have to start laying people off and shutting down stores next year, don’t say you weren’t warned. Apparently you’ve already annoyed some Moms as it is.

Now give me my $20 back. I don’t even want a Target gift card anymore, I want a Visa gift card so I can spend it somewhere else.

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