All the dollars & All the sense

Let me take you on a little personal journey…..

So many days I’m faced with negative. See here’s the thing. My mom died 5 years ago. I wanted to (not suicidal by ALL means and if you know me that would be the one thing that will never be an option for me) give up on life moving forward. Then my ex-husband wanted to leave me days before my 30th birthday and Christmas I spent pretty well alone. Then my son got type 1 diabetes, and I got an autoimmune illness (which though I still face today, most times you would never notice it unless you spend your every day with me) and I thought life was over for me. I couldn’t walk or drive or move some days without falling down out of bed unable to walk and hurting so much I couldn’t image life another way.

Then I changed my diet because I refused to accept no for an answer and I refused to let life pass me by. Then I travelled as a pipeline wife to PA and taking me and my boys 1200 miles from home and my ex-husband finally decided he wanted to leave me. He spent the holidays with another girl, someone younger someone who I didn’t know but he did, for years and it was absolutely devastating. I was left to my own devices with no family, with the answer of you are going to have to find your own way home.

Then I moved back home to my parents house. This is where I find my most negative thoughts relating to myself. First it was I’m 30 and moving back home and if you are from the south and raised in the south you know how humbling THAT experience is, coming back home tail tucked between your legs. Then it was….I’m living at home and I can’t afford my own house. Then I got my mind right and myself goal focused and realized why I’m doing what I’m doing. Most days though, I still find myself fighting that urge to get away and its not for anything bad other than fighting my own inner urge for personal satisfaction of adulting on my own. See, living at home to me….goes 2 ways. People either say aww that’s so sweet you are helping your family too, or….OH you still live at home?!?!?! And then let the judgment begin!

I assure you I judge myself enough most days. More than enough most days, and knowing that I am trying to bring myself to a better place, and patience is required. That, is hard. I am the worst with patience or anything that even remotely means waiting any amount of time. It is the most taxing thing I can express to you in a way that makes me feel like I’m licking sandpaper every damn day and hoping that eventually I will toughen up and that my tongue won’t bleed anymore, but I keep doing it anyway. I SUCK at patience.

I want all the normal things everyone else in the world wants, but in my own way. I want a family, I want a home I want the career that some dream of but rarely ever obtain and for damn sure as a woman! But the difference is, I know what I’m fighting for. I know why I get up every day. Do I love that I live at home. No. I live at home with my step dad, helping him. My mom passed away 5 years ago. Could I move out and get my own apartment, sure. But then my kids wouldn’t get the pleasure of being at my parents house, my step dad seeing them everyday and them having the memories they do where we are. Do I get to have personal space. No, not totally. It’s not MY house. I miss having a living room where I can turn the TV on and I can just relax and watch tv all day and veg out if I want and its MY space. Where I can nap, or clean or decorate if I want to.

But I’m fighting for something bigger. My marriage ended in divorce because it HAD to happen. It had to go bad so I could see the good in life. The good in myself. I had to lose my mom to be a better woman, and learn to be stronger than I ever had been so I knew that when I was by myself in PA that 1) my mom didn’t threat to come do horrible things to my ex, because….well that’s just my mom really and she has her moments! (doesn’t every southern mama though?!?!) and 2) that through meeting a my best friend sister from another mother in PA, and being able to keep it together for my kids, I was able to find myself back home safe and sound.

But I am fighting for a life many dream of, few obtain and I have to look past keeping up with the rest of the world and beat to my own drum. Someone will love me again for who I am, and regardless of what is going on in life, will accept me for all the many things I have overcome.

Unexpected problems and unexpected failures in your plans are just an opportunity to find the power to find the good, fight for the life you deserve. An opportunity to find the good. It’s a reminder you are alive.

I’m thankful for all the things that so far that have come along in life. All the things that have felt like a setback, it has given me the opportunity to do what my phone tells me on my lock screen (with Tom Hardy no doubt *droooool*) Re-set, re-adjust, re-start, re-focus and re-engage as many times as I need to, just remembering to never quit. That is the one thing that I am desperately trying to teach my boys, that I will never give up on them, even if I end up stepping backwards so many times, I will still put forth as much effort as I need to, to reach the level that I deserve.

I am thankful, for being absolutely more confident today than I ever have been in terms of life in general. I have met amazing people, seen my body transform got married, lost a spouse to divorce, lost a parent before 30 who was my best friend, I have a life long disease that will never go away. But ya know what? I will never quit. I am worth more.

As I sit here trying to listen to something influencing because I am one of those people who listens to ET the hip hop preacher every day…..I am running through IG thinking SOMETHING is gonna stand out to me and there is the post, its about choosing love not just because you are lonely which prompts my thoughts on why for EVERYONE relationships and post relationships are sooo hard when you are hurting.

Its not because you have to leave them behind when things don’t work out, but its this concept that no matter how great your friends are you won’t ever have that connection you have with them. Your friends can curb your loneliness, but only for a while. Its your soul that craves comfort. Its your inner self that craves comfort. Something no friend can truly give, when you have had that from a life partner.

 Whether it’s the comfort of money (so you don’t have to worry about bills or working and spending all of your time away from, your dreams/kids/etc) or it’s the comfort of just expressing your day because you know that they will understand you in ways that it would take so long to express to someone and that person probably won’t understand the same way your life partner will when you have had successes and failures with. Or comfort in the ways of just plain not feeling like you are alone in the way of accounting for your life every day.

 I get it. I do. My soul on many days craves the comforts of which I speak. Comfort in ways that only my best friend/former spouse can only offer me (for now), because I had that connection with him. I truly felt connected to him in ways words can’t begin to express and do justice. Ways that I could just look at him and I knew my world would be fine, regardless of where we were or what was happening. We could be broke, no job or income and as long as we were braving it together, we were the king and queen of making things happen and always were tougher together. 

Having friends around, doesn’t always mean you can’t be lonely. You can be surrounded by people, and still feel lonely inside.

 I love having friends, and they are amazing but at the end of the day, you want the comfort of the way things WERE when they were good. When life wasn’t as hard as it is today, and healing wasn’t something to even imagine. When you didn’t feel like repeating yourself about how painful it is to have your heart pulled out and then thrown down to be shattered into a million pieces you now have to pick up yourself and put together in ways you cant even begin to fathom. 

Growth was the process you did together, not separately going on different life paths. Where you didn’t feel like all of your life goals had instantly been corrupted and your whole future is now shaded by this grief you can’t see an end to. Where the place you made a home, both physically, and emotionally (in your heart) didn’t feel so far from the the place you are now. It’s that want to call your person and share your successes in ways you always have, or call them when you are in agony over all the ways that life doesn’t seem to be working in your favor.

 I recently have had several talks with people and realizing how many times our friends don’t support us in our ventures back to our exes when we feel this glimmer of hope because as much as we KNOW we should do better, sometimes we can’t see the forest through the trees. We see the sacrifices that were made to get us to the point at which we are in life now and we believe that if we go back, maybe just maybe we can feel that happiness once again, even if it means we have to sacrifice all that we are, and all that we will become just to prove our love to someone because feeling a little bit of joy and a lifetime of sacrifices….are worth it over being lonely and having to accept pain, healing and becoming the people God would have us become (and has in mind for us.)

 I get it, I truly do. I feel that pain more often that I care to express to anyone. More than most will ever know, and pain that is so deep rooted in my personality because I internalize what I did wrong, and make it all about me. I assume fault, because its easier to accept and assume all the blame when there are things to fix, hoping you can fix them and it will make everything all better again. But……..it won’t. You can’t fix what is broken alone. You can fix you, but a partnership is just that. It’s two people who choose this life, together forever, until one of you doesn’t anymore. That is a hard pill to swallow. We aren’t in control of someone else. We can’t make them love us. We can’t bring back the past, no matter how hard you cry, plead or lower your standards and tell them you will allow them to do things you never would accept just to keep them in your life. Yep, I was that girl too. (take your time to separate, go relationship someone else before you decide to divorce me...yes sometimes accepting a morally and emotionally damning future is easier to swallow, then your future you envisioned for so long, going up in flames. 

 I don’t want to be someone’s option. I don’t want to be anyone’s second best. I don’t want you to come back because things didn’t work out for you and now its easier to accept second best, than be alone. I want you to choose me, EVERY freakin day…..because I am the ONLY thing you can imagine. I am not here to be your go to girl, I’m not going to be the one you wait until things get better and come back to relish in the spoils of the future. I believe Marilyn Monroe said it best…..if you can’t handle me at my worst, you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.

Ladies and gentlemen…..that is the truest statement. Don’t choose to go back to a lifetime of mediocre painful, “hope to find that source of joy even for a hot second” kind of situation because I assure you... eventually you will be the one sacrificing to make things work….or they will. And when they do, you will probably still  find yourself unhappy and likely alone. The only difference is, healing today, or healing in a year (or however long) and at that point being scorned or resenting them.