You Didn't Imagine It

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...

My daughter said something to me today that simultaneously felt like a punch to the gut while also tearing my heart out. We were speaking about her and her siblings, and she casually said that she and her brother - the two older kids - had very rough lives, nothing like what the two younger ones have. She clarified it by adding "What my brother and I went through the younger ones didn't. And what they get now we didn't get." I've been processing this for a few hours now, and I'm still working on it. First, she's not wrong. She's not. All the abuse I was subjected to, all the fights that happened from the abuse and as a result of my finally starting to fight back against it ... that was during her childhood. And the wolf worming her way into my life pretending to be my friend, assessing just how badly damaged and PTSD-riddled I was as an abused woman, and then using that to achieve maximum damage on my family - that was during her early teenage years. I...

Have you ever had a dream that is so disconcerting that you wake up feeling unsettled and out of sorts? That happened to me this morning, and I just can’t shake it. My dream was almost a nightmare, in that it delved into some old memories that I try hard not to think about anymore. In my dream, I was suddenly outside of my old house, the one that my ex and I put tens of thousands of dollars into … also the one that he intentionally put into foreclosure to go live with the wolf after she tore our family apart. This one action destroyed me financially, robbing me of my half of the money we put in and damning me to a life of renting and never being able to afford another house of my own. Of course, he didn’t care about that because he moved in with the wolf in her McMansion, so what did it matter to him that our home that we put blood, sweat, and tears into was tossed aside as cavalierly as I was? As I was saying, in my dream I was outside my old house, and unable to get in. I was acutely...

Today's post is inspired by my coworkers, and by extension everyone else who just doesn't get my life. It's not malicious by any means on their parts, but I've met very few people who truly grasp what I have to do on a day-to-day basis as a single working mom. I had plenty of cheerleaders when I broke free of the abuse, and lots of promises, but people - other than a select very few - slowly faded away as life settled in. I don't blame them, really.  I'm stuck. My life is in a permanent state of limbo.  Yesterday at work was a hellish day. I lamented that after we finally got to go home, I still had to make dinner, do laundry, etc etc. One of my coworkers looked up and said "I can't wait. My dinner will be waiting when I get home, and tomorrow I'll have takeout brought to me when I get home." I could only scratch my head at this. Perhaps they didn't realize how insensitive this was, coming right after I had said what I did? Were they truly ...

One of the defining pieces of any abusive relationship is control: the control the abuser wields against their chosen target. It's insidious, and often creeps into a relationship slowly, similar to the boiling-a-frog analogy. As I look back, I'm horrified at what I allowed, and how what started out as "small" grew into what it did. Very early in my relationship with my ex, he displayed signs of jealousy and insecurity. He would get violently angry if he even thought someone was looking in my direction, to the point of confrontations almost everywhere we went. Immediately afterward, he would adopt a sad little boy persona, begging for my forgiveness and promising to change. My internal alarms at his behavior were lulled back to sleep by his cries of insecurity due to his childhood trauma. He swore he couldn't live without me, and begged me to never stop loving him. My heart broke for him, a traumatized soul seemingly crying in the corner, desperate to be loved. Thi...