You Didn't Imagine It

"We did everything right, and yet it all went wrong anyway." This observation, given by my cousin in the middle of a conversation about how hard life is now, hit me like a ton of bricks. We did do everything right! We got good grades, we finished school, we started families ... But here I am at 50, alone. A single mom - divorced after 15 years so my ex could pursue his new plan for life, one that didn’t include his original family. The house we poured tens of thousands of dollars into? The house that would be worth at least double what we paid for it now and would solve all of my money issues? That’s gone - a casualty of the divorce. So I’m working full-time while being a full-time single parent and renting, with the reality that I’ll never own anything of my own and the terror that I’ll end up fully destitute someday staring me down every night when I try to sleep. But I did everything right. I left college and put all my plans on hold to be a stay-at-home mom. I spent ...

  "Don't worry, karma will take care of it."  "Just be patient - your time is coming." "Working hard will pay off." Hi. I'm the recipient of all of the above advice. I have persevered through over ten years of single momhood, and I've worked so damn hard. I've gone to therapy and really put in the work to heal from many years of abuse: emotional, physical, and sexual. I survived. I overcame. I put my children first when their father spent years treating them as an afterthought because - after all - they weren't the progeny of his mistress.  Now that the kids are all grown up/mostly grown up, I had a serious wake-up call about my future: I needed something to do that is more than "medical office front desk" after they have all moved on to their own lives and futures. And I also needed to find a way to make enough money to live without the very little child support that I do get - the legal bare minimum after he lowered his inco...

I think my life is a Mandela Effect. Hear me out on this. I think it makes sense.  You've heard of Mandela Effects, I assume. The theory is that somehow the timeline has been corrupted and things we all remember are somehow different. For instance, Ed McMahon apparently never gave out checks for Publisher's Clearing House, and the Berenstein Bears/Berenstain Bears spelling controversy. I highly recommend typing Mandela Effect into Tiktok; I'll be here when you're back, and I apologize in advance for the rabbit hole I just sent you down. If you are familiar with my life even the slightest bit, I think you would agree that Mandela has been hanging out in my basement (if I even had one) for quite some time. I spent 15+ years subjected to vicious abuse, only to desperately reach out for help from a trusted medical professional. This "professional" - we will call them The Wolf - proceeded to use every bit of information I gave them regarding my abuse to manipulate ...

  As the seagulls cry, an echo of my children's voices fills my mind and my heart. How many times did we bring them here to the ocean? So many. Too many to count. Over there I can see the shadow of my son's curls, bouncing as he runs in and out of the waves, laughing with abandon. Here I see my daughter drawing names in the sand, remembering the time she wrote our dog's name the summer after our family dog passed. The echo of my oldest son's joyous voice fills the air from my memories as I picture him filling buckets with water to dump on an unsuspecting sibling. And I can still see my youngest's cautious approach to the water, eyeing it warily as he played on the edge.  The years passed while I was busy doing everything else, and today I sit here alone with a book and my notebook to soak in the sun and relax to the sound of the waves. Two of my kids are adults now and the other two are rapidly approaching. Those precious days of family days to the beach, or childre...

Let’s talk about triggers, and manipulation, and guilt. Let’s talk about kneejerk reactions and longstanding safety behaviors. In short, let’s talk about what it’s like to be a survivor of emotional abuse. Let’s talk about me. I have been loudly proclaiming my healing from the trauma I endured for many, many years. And I have healed quite a bit.  But.  In some ways I think I was a bit naïve to think I healed such pervasive abuse fully. And in other ways I think I was fooling myself regarding my ex and his ability to ever be anything other than what he is. To set the stage for you, my ex gets the kids every other weekend. I have them the rest of the time. In the winter, when there’s school and afterschool activities and homework and a myriad of other responsibilities, he never asks for extra time and will often give up his weekends with them, especially if they have an activity somewhere. Once it’s summer, the entire school vacation becomes him trying to take my weekends to “ma...

Imagine being in your late 40's when the realization that you've never really had autonomy over your own life slams into you like a slab of concrete. That's what recently happened to me, and processing this obvious truth while also trying to come to grips with the fact that I never knew before now is not a little thing. It all started with the weather ... Yes, the weather. Stay with me here. Last year I changed jobs to one that gives me a 4 day work week. It was a blessed and much needed change, as a single mom of four kids. And yet this day off has lately turned into something else: I obsessively stalk the weather forecast, and absolutely lose my mind if my day isn't "perfect," or at least as good as the days I'm trapped inside at work.  That was the key: my using the terminology "trapped." As I was trying to tease out why I was getting so worked up over the sun being out, I caught myself using the word trapped quite a bit to describe a large po...