Frozen Life

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 that tone deaf? This same coworker says to me rather regularly that I have to do things for myself and make time to pursue my own interests.

Could someone please explain to me how that could ever happen? As a single working mom, I have to be BOTH a stay-at-home-mom AND a full-time working mom. This isn't about the tired and ridiculous stay-at-home-mom vs working mom debate. I've been both, but this is different. Now I'm both AT THE SAME TIME. I have all the struggles that come with being a full time working mother, coupled with all the work of running an entire household on my own, without a partner there to help with anything. I don't even have family to help. It's literally always been all me.

I don't ever come home to dinner waiting for me. 

No one ever brings me takeout.

It's been ten years since I woke up to breakfast ready.

It's more than that, though. It's seeing pictures online of my Facebook friends on fabulous vacations, celebrating "x number of years married," planning retirements, getting vacation homes, and having the reality slam into me like a ton of bricks that if it wasn't for - insert years of abuse and an evil wolf who used it to tear my family apart here - that would be where I would be in life. Our mortgage would have been half over. We would have built equity by now. We would be planning the next phase of life. Yes, I realize I'm rose-tinting this view and conveniently forgetting that I would still be saddled to an abusive individual but ...

Instead I'm frozen, running myself ragged just to keep the bills paid and all the balls in the air. As life passes me by, I look at all the things I could have had but don't. When the kids grow up, and the little child support I get is gone, I'm not even sure if I'll be able to live where I am anymore, or afford anywhere. What do I do then? That's what I mean by feeling frozen: nothing is progressing as far as a future. I have less than zero time to work on building anything for my later years in life, and the people who tell me to just go to school while I'm working full time and being a full time single mom are delusional - well-meaning, but delusional. I can't physically do that. Maybe ten, fifteen years ago, but not now. I lost everything financially. I left school to be a stay-at-home-mom so many years ago, and I trusted my financial future to someone who destroyed it, only to move on to a bright economic future for themselves. I'm not getting any younger, so my options grow more and more limited with each passing year. 

I feel like I should add a disclaimer here. I'm not unhappy with my life with my kids. They are everything to me and there's nowhere else I would rather be. We have so much fun and I have a lifetime of amazing memories because I consistently put them first, and I wouldn't change one iota of that. But I get to say there's things about this life that are hard, and that's what this post is. It's being real and honest. I get to point at things and say "You know what? It's not fair that I took the abuse and now have no future after the kids grow up." Because it's not at all fair or right. But here I am. 

Even though it was what had to happen, leaving my abusive situation rendered me frozen in so many ways. I'm not sure what will happen in the future, and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with what's left of my life. I do know that it's hard when all your plans for the future are dashed. 




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