I already felt like I was buckling. Like the big steel bridge that everyone takes for granted as always being there was starting to sway and the supports were folding inward, and if one more single thing, even as light as a butterfly, rested upon it, the whole structure would cave in, taking everything on and around it under the murky depths of the water it was meant to span. And then a meteor fell from the sky and landed smack dab in the middle.

My son. Again.

I think I may be having a nervous breakdown. I can’t stop crying. I don’t want to do anything..not play my hidden object games, a favorite escape usually..not shower..not eat..not anything. I can’t imagine how I will survive this again. I think the only thing more painful as a parent than leaving the courthouse without your baby would be burying them. It’s indescribable. And I will probably have to do it again. I am screaming and punching doors but it doesn’t release the pressure and this buzzing inside me just gets louder and louder and there is no way out.

Hell. Again.

I’m searching for hope I can find my way back again. And I’m terrified that he never will.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

If only she wore a warning.

I haven’t been too busy to blog. In fact, there must be a half dozen drafts that I just couldn’t publish. I don’t feel safe here anymore. I’ve had my words here twisted and shoved down my throat and I’m tired of exposing my soul to people if it means I’m going to be punished for it later.

I’m not a bad person. I try to be the best person I can be, and of course sometimes I make mistakes but I try to learn from them and do better next time. I try to deserve the wonderful people in my life, and sometimes I just screw it all up. But I don’t try to elevate myself by stepping on others. I don’t attack people without strong cause. I am as transparent and honest as possible. I don’t take things that belong to others, tangible or no. These values are important to me, and I do my best to pass them on to my children.

What I am saying is that I am not the kind of person who invites personal attacks. And yet I have been the lucky recipient of multiple attacks. I forgave the original transgression. It really didn’t matter when you consider the whole situation except that word had been given, and both before and after, lies were freely doled out to attempt to manipulate everyone involved…and even some not involved. But, whatever.

What I can’t forgive, or at least haven’t yet, are the nasty, nasty things that were written to me when I was being as nice as humanly possible under the circumstances. About how I needed to stop whining about my cervical cancer scare because it was no big deal. About how my “thieving, drug addicted, juvenile delinquent son” and how he’s probably better off without his dead daddy. About how I lay on the couch and let everyone else take care of my children. About how I am just a fat, lazy bitch.

Most of it was lies or half truths manipulated to justify the lies. But coming from someone I gave my friendship heart to….someone I felt a kinship with that I know now was just a big sham….someone I expected to be lifelong friends with….someone I laughed with and cried with and thought valued me as much as I did her, but I was nothing to her, from the very start….well, it’s hard to just shrug that off.

I’m so very hurt. Still. From a young age, I learned that boys probably would hurt you, but your girlfriends will always be there. There are exceptions to that, on both ends, and the catty backstabbing from girlfriends made me wary of establishing friendships with women as I grew. She seemed to have gone through the same things and felt the same way. I never expected a viscous attack from her, even after I knew she was a deceiver.

I don’t know how to come here and write about me, my children, my family, my friends, when I have had those words forged into weapons. I could be tough and say “fuck her….I don’t care what she says about me or my family”. But I wouldn’t mean it. The things she said stung me. I still think of the string of horrible emails I received in April Every. Single. Time. I open up this app to blog, and until right now, it’s been painful enough that I just close the app.

So, I guess she won that battle. But it’s a hollow victory, because she didn’t win by speaking the truth, or by being stronger than I am, or by being a better person than I am. She won by slinging mud, and that’s a victory she can have, because I won’t stoop to that level to “win”.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

- Posted using BlogPress

I’m also really enjoying being able to ‘clock out’ and not having to do paperwork at home. I think what burnt me out most at the last position I held was the fact that my success was not dependent on my own efforts, but on the efforts and motivation of the clients. Sometimes you bend over backwards to help clients and get not one single bit of progress, and other times you THINK you made progress, and then you see your former client in the previous days’ arrests or in the paper or something. After three and a half years of that, I just crashed and burned, which is pretty common in social services. Regardless, I feel good to be back in a position where I AM being effective again, and I love that the big boss is totally supportive of me continuing my education.

Speaking of education, I’m really enjoying my US History class. I know, it seems like that should be followed by some sarcastic qualifier, but I’m a little fascinated with history now. A really amazing instructor can do that. (Teachers, take this to heart-your passion to sharing your knowledge matters. A lot. Your perspective and technique can make subjects long ago relegated to the “crap, I have to take THAT?” pile exciting again.) Mr. Yarnell breathes life into the stale, one dimensional idea of historical figures that previous instructors have beaten into my head. He tells stories that I had never heard before, and maybe soon I’ll post about them, because everyone I see day to day is tired of me rattling off about Colonial this and American Revolution that and the establishment of the Constitution. Heh.

I’m doing well in the class, too, and I know this sounds really self-serving, but I didn’t expect anything different. I’m a straight A student. Except for that ONE jackass who started his A’s at 91 instead of 90. Gah. But anyway. I’m thankful I was blessed with a mind that easily absorbs information and has no trouble with abstract concepts….but I do have to admit that the older I get, the less effective my ‘never crack a book’ skillz are. I do, indeed, have to study now, and I have to have a pretty quiet environment with little distraction to do schoolwork in. Still, a 97 A is something to be proud of, and I am.

The only thing is…I don’t have much free time. I don’t play on Twitter and Facebook as much anymore. I don’t even text or talk to or see my friends much, except for Greg and Chrissy and Trishia. (Since Brian’s truck is down at the moment with a wheel bearing that needs fixing, Greg is picking him up in the mornings and I am picking him up from their house after work and bringing him home.) I don’t see how I can develop and market the business idea I had been working on, so that just will have to wait until I have time, or can implement a routine that helps me eke out every last minute I can do something productive with. It’s still a new schedule for me, and since I’m taking summer classes, as soon as I am used to it, it will change.

But, really? I’m starting to think my family will be just fine, and that the job change is the best thing that could have happened for me. Things really do happen for a reason, and my reasons are starting to materialize. I’m so thankful.

But the years of never knowing what to expect..or, rather, knowing what to expect, but having the either faithful or stupid hope that things would be better than I expected..created a familiarity with anxiety and fear that I wish I had never known.  I was never hit, or threatened, or verbally abused, or kept under tight control, or cheated on, or anything truly awful like that.  But sometimes I feel like I survived a war, anyway.  Sometimes I wonder if I don’t have some mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder, because when I look back, all I see is a vast period of mere survival.  There was no thriving..there was no personal growth..there was little room for intimacy in my marriage, and I don’t mean sex, although that suffered as well, I mean *trust*.  There were no family traditions or routines or vacations or outings or sleepovers or…anything.  At least not much that I can remember.  All I remember is despair.  All I remember is insecurity and mistrust and feeling like my life and family were completely out of control.  All I remember is putting one foot in front of the other, loving my babies, and all the while knowing I was not providing everything they needed.

When I got separated while I was pregnant with Faith, I made great strides to put that insecurity and chaos of the first years of my marriage behind me.  I found FlyLady.net, and I followed that system like it was my religion.  I was pregnant, working full time, raising an 18 month old and an 8yo, running my home, and grieving the loss of my marriage and the dream I had for my family, all on my own.  And I did it better than I did when I had help.  My house was always clean, aside from the toys the kids would pick up each night before bed, and we always had a home cooked meal.  I managed my life and my family with routines that made me forget all about the tension that day-to-day living had before.  I never had to think about a thing…we all knew what to expect and what to do because we just made habits of the things we had to do.

Then I gave birth to Faith, her father and I got un-separated, and within a month, friends of ours needed someplace to go, so we had a family of four plus a dog move in.  That was one of the worst years of my life.  Our friends are good people, but with the household going from two kids and myself to four adults, six kids, including a newborn, and a dog, and them being more accustomed to clutter and a less organized home…..it was very hard to maintain the system I had honed.  I felt like I was the only one who gave a shit about the house staying clean and uncluttered, and really, I was probably right.  I was let go from my job six weeks after returning to work, for missing work because the baby was sick, so by Christmas, I practically lived in my bedroom.  And while you would think that my room would be the one clean oasis in the house of junk, the opposite was true.  I was in such a depression, that it was a wreck, too.  It was all I could do to make sure the kids were clothed and fed and loved.  I did laundry, but rarely folded it and put it away.  I gave up on cooking because the kitchen was always such a mess that I would have a baby panic attack just walking in it.  Even after our friends moved out, I was so far gone that I didn’t know how to pull myself out.  I became a social recluse; unwilling to go out because I was ashamed of myself, and unwilling to have anyone over because I was ashamed of my home.

An adorable, but humiliating, example of what I lived like in 'The Dark Ages'

But all of that is over now.

I know the limitations of my disease, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and I know what exacerbates it and what eases the panic that feels like a million buzzing bees are inside me, getting louder and louder as they swarm and swell in order to break out of my skin and consume me and everything I care about.  And being in a chaotic environment literally damages my spirit.  I need order..I need routine..I need security..I need to know what to expect, and I need those expectations met most of the time.  I don’t handle surprises well, or plans that keep changing, or travel, just because of the sheer amount of the unknown, and how little control I have over flights and airports and planes.

It seems to be the lack of control that sets me off the worst.

It’s not that I am controlling because I just feel like being a prima donna and expect the world to kiss my ass.  It’s that for a long time, if I wasn’t in complete control over every aspect of our family, something would always go horribly wrong.  I couldn’t trust Brian with much of anything for those years.  If I left him with the kids so I could work, he wasn’t as attentive as he needed to be, or he took them places they weren’t safe.  If I depended on him to provide financially, he would often quit jobs or switch jobs or spend all his money on pot or whatever teh fun thing seemed to be for the moment for him..end result being me scrambling in a panic to pay our already late bills by begging for help or later, baring my ass on the internet because I just didn’t have anything else to fall back on without spending 75% of my earnings on child care or leaving the kids in a situation I didn’t feel was safe.  It all boiled down to the fact that I couldn’t trust him for shit.  I couldn’t trust him to provide, to be honest, to keep the kids safe or clean or fed…I couldn’t trust him to make our family his top priority, so I ran around like a maniac trying to clean up the piles of shit his unreliability created for me.

And now, I have to trust him.

I have to have faith, (Anyone seeing why I chose that name for my youngest yet? It’s SO hard for me to trust anyone but myself.  Her name reminds me that sometimes I have to let go, and have faith.), that he will be able to make our family his priority..over the friends that I battled for him so many years..the faces have changed but the situation remains the same, over the partying that is admittedly more fun than raising a family, over everything that was more important than us for all those years.  It’s the hardest thing I’ve done in a long time….just letting myself be vulnerable….just handing trust over to someone who has not proven to be trustworthy….giving over complete control over whether this family survives or not.  I’m afraid.  I’m an anxious mess.  I am second guessing myself every single day over whether I am doing the right thing, but now I’m in school, and dropping out now would mean it would be next to impossible to ever go back again, thanks to financial aid suspension and academic suspension, both of which I am on and only attending school on account of an approved appeal.  So, when the fear and anxiety and OMG THE SHEER FUCKING TERROR that everything will go to shit faster than I can clean up the mess start taking over, I am having a glass of wine or a klonopin (which are amazing for anxiety attacks!), and reminding myself that the strongest thing I can do right now, is just have faith.

Just trust.

Even though sometimes I’ve been wrong to trust.  Right now, I have to trust, and just do my part, and believe he will do his.

I am surrendering to the forces of good in my life, and having faith they will protect my family from the forces of evil.