Karma Is A Bitch

 

"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 income to lower his child support. (Yay me!) He has now started declining helping with "extra" things like our musician son's band camp ($900). 

With that in mind, I took a leap of faith and enrolled in college. I never finished my degree back in the day, because my children's father had come back into the picture and he wanted me to drop out. So I did, and the rest is heartbreaking history. When I started college classes - while still working full time - I wasn't entirely sure of my direction, but I was leaning toward nursing. I started the prerequisites and kept an impressive GPA.

I became hopeful. I started seeing a future of my very own, one that I built with hard work just like everyone told me would happen. 

Then the rug was absolutely pulled out from under me in a flash. I was done with almost all of the prerequisites and looking ahead to enrolling in the actual nursing major, until I sat down with an advisor who laughed when I told her I needed to keep working. "Oh, you won't be able to work with clinicals" she chuckled as she made this statement. I stammered out that this was a community college, with working adults, and hospitals are open 24/7 - why do the clinicals have to be Mon-Fri during the day? 

"That's just the way it's done."

And just like that, the future I thought I was going to achieve was gone. Kind of like the future I had stolen from me by my ex's mistress. Just like that.

Is this the karma I was supposed to receive? I think it's not working quite right.

As I was still reeling from that revelation, my oldest son told me via text that he was getting a vasectomy. This boy is 21 years old. He went into details about not wanting children - ever - and I begged him to wait. I tried to explain that he is so young, and this is a permanent decision. But his mind was made up.

My heart broke. My heart is still broken - shattered into about a million pieces - for my beautiful blue-eyed boy with the hugest spirit I've ever seen, who is clearly so scarred from the abuse and fighting he saw growing up that he has decided to make sure that he will never have children. Ever. All I can think of is the fact that when he was young, I should have been strong enough to stand up and leave. 

But I didn't. I stayed. Yes, because I was a victim and I was being abused. But I stayed and those children - particularly the older ones - bear the scars of my inability to act.

I'm bouncing around in college without a direction because the only thing I've felt fulfilled doing is being a mom. And my son's decision just told me in no uncertain terms that I failed at that too. Like everything else.

So I guess this *is* the karma I deserve after all. My time was coming all along, but it was my time to feel the weight of the pain that I earned.