I Love My Dad

I get paid in two minutes. I absolutely cannot wait. I am always in this situation. I feel like I can finally exhale for like ten minutes and then I realize it will be gone, within the hour, on bills.

My life has changed a lot. A WHOLE lot in the last few years in respect to finances. Four years ago we were on top of the world financially. I was pregnant, my husband worked offshore and I taught school. Then my husband found out he was getting laid off from his job. It was the day before Thanksgiving. He sent me  text message and I began to panic. We were already barely holding on. It took every dime we made to pay our credit card bills and car notes. That night I had a miscarriage. Since I had been seeing a midwife in Mississippi my OB/GYN did not believe I was pregnant to begin with.

It was my second miscarriage but definitely the hardest. I didn't want to tell my husband at first. I remember coming back from the hospital and he sent me a text about how much he loved me and our new baby and knew that everything would be okay. I waited a while and then called and told him how I had spent my day with contractions so intense I needed pain medicine and an asshole Obstetrician who questioned if I were even pregnant to begin with. My older two kids stayed with their grandparents and I laid in bed for hours crying. Sometime the next day Charlie got home and climbed into bed and cried with me. It was the next day because it took 12-14 hours for him to get home from the rig.

Well after that my husband had about two more weeks of work and then he was officially fired. It was nice at first, having him home all the time. He was home for Christmas which was awesome because I had SO been dreading the fact that he was supposed to be offshore during that time.

In late January I got pregnant again. I know exactly when and where, it's a pretty hilarious story too, but I have decided to keep some mystery in my life so I will spare you from the TMI event known as Noah's conception.

That June or July, while I was super pregnant, the husband got a new job in New Orleans. We moved there, stayed with some friends for a while, then purchased an RV. We were going to save up everything we made and then hit the road. I went back to teaching that fall, planning on staying in Mobile during the week and returning to the camper during the weekend. The day before school started my two-year-old nearly died of a sepsis infection. Pretty much everything came to a stand still after that. The strain of trying to hold down two households, being 8 months pregnant, and missing the first week of school was weighing heavily on me. I was pretty confident that we were set with my husband's job so I quit mine.

A month later I had a beautiful baby boy and a week after that my husband was unexpectedly laid off once again. That was three years ago. Since then we have both odd jobs on and off. I have tried to get back into teaching with no success. My husband tried to go back offshore, even considered going back to trucking, but nothing has worked out. For one thing he is overweight and his health is pretty bad. He could not get three of the jobs he was qualified for because he did not meet the minimum requirements for the physical. He sunk into a very deep depression, I started to focus more on my writing. We had to file bankruptcy. Somewhere in there we moved to Mississippi and another baby was conceived (I also know when and where that happened, but it was totally unplanned and difficult).

As one would expect it put a definite strain on our relationship. After the baby was born, we moved back home and started to work on getting our lives back on track. That is pretty much where we are right now. I work a LOT but still never have enough money and there is nothing to fall back on. I have been put in situations I never, ever imagined I would land myself in. I definitely learned a lot about judgment and struggle.

Today I ran out of gas in a sketchy neighborhood with my seven year old. I had no money to get more gas so we had to walk a mile to the nearest convenience store to borrow a phone to call my dad. I expected him to be angry with me but he wasn't at all. He was kind and generous and totally understanding. My mom is a different story but I did not see her until later in the afternoon so the wound was a little less fresh when she started salting it. Of course it is only fair. My parents are in their seventies and raising a grandchild. All of a sudden their only child to graduate from college. Or even high school. Is always needing their help. I was supposed to be a success but no matter how hard I work I feel like a failure.

Deep Thoughts and Dawson's Creek

So I have started to spend my not-so-cold but lonely evenings watching Dawson's Creek. Though I try to stay perpetually absorbed in my work as a freelance copywriter, I sometimes find myself with a few spare moments to breathe. Unfortunately, I waste them watching teen dramas like Dawson's Creek and being all-too-introspective for my own good.

So why do I watch Dawson's Creek? There is something about it that reminds me of myself at another time. The emotions, the nondescript Old Navy clothes. It's so 1998. Far closer to the teenage experience I had then some of the shows that are popular today (though don't get me wrong I didn't stumble upon Dawson's Creek until I had already watched all of the modern teen shows through and through).

Back to the question at hand, why is a soon-to-be-30-year-old watching shows about people half her age? ---Oh my god their half my age- I guess the answer to that is that it reminds me of something that I lost and a little bit of something I never had.

For years, I mean YEARS, I had this recurring dream about being in high school and being super stressed. I thought I was the only person who ever had the dream but then I met up with a fellow blogger (ha as though you can call me that) who had the same dream and directed me to her blog about it, "Our Mutual Nightmare."  I also found out that a ton of other soon-to-be 30 somethings (or older) were having the same damn dream.

Around the same time that I made this fantastic discovery, I started to watch these goofy teen dramas in the evening while my husband toiled away at Star Trek Online for hours. It wasn't really something I set out the do, as in The Teen Show Project of 2012, but somehow it became a kind of therapy. A way to deal with the crushing loneliness of being married to someone who could not care less. However, it wasn't until I found myself watching Dawson's Creek of all things that it finally hit home. That I finally found something sappy and late-90's post-grunge angst enough to really tap into the iceberg.

See I never watched Dawson's Creek in high school. I was too cool hanging out with my boyfriend and listening to Marilyn Manson CDs. I was too awesomely occupied with being a mall rat. Believe it or not, I am actually OK with that. It would be a hard toss up to determine if Dawson's Creek or Marilyn Manson fueled Mall Ratism is a more embarrassing past.

Well so back to the point, I've been watching a ton of teen shows, like Dawson's Creek, and now suddenly the dreams are starting to dissipate. Like my mind was leading me to watching crappy prime time soap operas about teenagers. Somehow these shows have helped me to tap into emotions and a strength that I forgot existed.

Simultaneously, I have come to some major self-realizations:

1.  I am not happy

2.  I have foolishly made every decision in my life based on emotion rather than even the slightest bit of logic.

3. Something is happening. Some part of me is transitioning (maybe it is that pending 30th bday) Whatever it is, it's big.

So these strange realization have led me to start blogging again. In college I blogged all friggin day. Back then they were online diaries. I wrote poems and shared songs. I talked a lot about SEX. I was a 19 year old girl who worked as an Assistant Manager at an adult video store and had JUST lost my virginity so everything was blooming around me.

Years passed. Two marriages happened, four kids. College graduation. A recession. A new president.

Somewhere in all that I started to write for other people and stopped writing for myself.

So here I am trying to recover just a little bit of me.