The Requisite New Years Eve Post

Well 2013 is about to leave us all behind. I cannot say that I am sad to see it go, but compared to some of the previous years, it has not been so bad.

This year I did not have any babies. I did wean my youngest child. I attended more births than any year prior, though I also decided to leave doula work behind for a while so that I can focus on something more stable. Albeit, I am still taking a client a month for the time being.

I am supposed to begin a new job next Monday. This job has insurance and a decent salary. It is in a field of interest to me and for these reasons and more, I hope it is life changing. Best of all, no more working from home. One of the biggest challenges to success as a freelancer is that I do not have the willpower to be my own boss, especially in a house full of kids. There is no privacy, no peace, I cant get a single thought together.

I am no longer afraid to face the road ahead. It is time to move on. I think, for me, thirty was just a bonus year. A transitional phase that I needed to move from my twenties.

So for 2014, I am going to start scribbling in this blog more frequently, as unintelligible and full of whovian gif's as it may end up being.


I am going to eat healthier and exercise more.
I am going to buy sexy panties and appreciate my body, though it has changed
I am going to pay off at least one major debt
I am always going to remember to pack snack money

Just Because

I finally watched Womb [Blu-ray] last night. I generally love artsy French movies with lots of silence and atmosphere. However, I am going to save some of you the trouble and just go ahead and give you the parts worth watching, without the disturbing back story.

I Fit in Nowhere

Mothers who are the primary or only financial provider for their family but also in a relationship fit in nowhere. I was recently lectured on a forum for giving advice to a single mom regarding finances. Even though I have been a single mom I am apparently unequipped to provide any advice on the topic because I am no longer. Funny thing about the lecturer, is she presumed to know way to much about me.

She has no idea that I am a former single mom. She also assumed that this husband staying home thing was my choice. It was not a choice it was something that just happened and here we are. I have to defend the fact that my husband stays at home with the kids and I work all.the.time. It gets old and I feel like I have no recourse. No one gets it.

I am complete agreement with equality between the genders. I like that one of the parents is home with our kids all the time. But my life is hard and I did not choose it. I will probably never be a stay at home mom but I cannot friggin wait to the day that my husband gets a job. That already puts me out of some groups.

I cannot talk to the single moms about it because I do have someone who stays at home with my children, which allows me to have the fantastic opportunity to work every single day, sometimes leaving the house for days at a time. With that being said, I am thankful for what my husband does to help me. I am not however, happy with being completely poor. I do not feel like I have any control of my life and I do not feel like I fit in with any particular subgroup. Of course, truth be told, I imagine my husband feels the same way. Not a lot of stay-at-home-dads, especially in the South.

Survival Mode

For years now I have been in "survival mode". I do not know if there was recently an episode on Dr. Oz about this or what, but lately the word has come up a LOT. Anytime I open up, which I also have been doing a lot. The response is frequently "well, you have been in survival mode".

So, now that I have accepted that this was my life for years, I am hoping to transition from "surviving" to living as I start my thirties. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do so.

Survival mode is a hard thing to shake. After all, we are still sort of barely surviving over here. I cannot afford to take fancy classes or go on yoga retreats. And it seems to me, unfortunately, that people who are not in "survival mode" are wealthy and have a lot of free time, or at the very least have someone else taking care of them. I need lessons on how not to be in survival mode.

I used to live in a very philosophical world. Nothing was concrete. Now I cannot even tell you what my favorite color is. Hopefully the day will come when I can rediscover a little of this, while grasping some sort of balance.

Regrets and Such

"Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just some thing she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. "
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

All of my kids are asleep and I am not in bed with any of them. A rare miracle. And since there isn't much else to do, I am spending it blogging and listening to sappy music.

I had a bit of a meltdown last week. Hence the extremely dark previous post. I am slowly crawling out of the place I have been the last few weeks.

I took Monday and Tuesday off. Today I wrote two articles and cleaned up a LOT. I also applied for jobs outside of the house and I have an interview on the 18th for a substitute teaching position. 

As for my husband's illness I have managed to find some good things in an otherwise terrible situation. One positive is that I now feel he has an excuse to not help me out much with housework or financial matters, which is this strange relief. I do not have to be mad at him for not helping because, well he cannot help right now. 

Also, I have come to realize how very much he does help with the children. Not sure what I would do without that help. Some what of a blessing in disguise. I think I often let that go to the wayside. It is a tough friggin job keeping up with this guys all day. Though he may not do things the way I do/would, he does manage to keep them alive and not lose his mind, so maybe he knows something I do not.

Last but not least, we had two conversations this week that I did not realize how much I needed. We talked about Tristan's birth and his perspective VS. mine. Which is something I needed to get past trauma and hatred for a certain hospital. That is another blog post, but it was certainly something I needed to see from a different point of view.

Then, there was a conversation where he willingly admitted his part in my no longer being a teacher. It was part apology, part confession and none of it was brought on by my prodding. It was genuine. For years now I have had this unspoken hostility about how that all went down, but I hardly admitted it to myself, let alone anyone else. When he admitted his part in it all, I was suddenly able to forgive him and acknowledge my own part in it. 

Clearly I was not ready to be a teacher four years ago. Now I sit around and think about how our life would be thousands of times better if I was a tenure position right now making 40K a year and getting the summers off. But would our life be better or just slightly easier? Would I be truly happy? These are questions I cannot really answer. I know I was not mature enough or ready for the position back then, but I do not know that I have any clearer of an idea what I want to be doing with my life now. 

Part of me has been and will always be a teacher. I have wanted to be a teacher since I was a toddler. I can remember in preschool coming home, setting up a classroom full of stuffed animals and dolls and spending the entire rest of the afternoon taking roll and teaching ABCs. Teachers have always been a word apart to me. I do not think I ever truly felt like I lived up to the pedestal I put teachers on. Even when I was a teacher, I still continued to think of my colleagues as better trained, more deserving. Hell, I do that now with other writers and doulas. 

On the other hand, I feel worried that I only want to be a teacher because I am in love with the idea of it. I am bypassing all the crying and shitty feelings I had at the time. Brushing them off as being immaturity or not being prepared. I worry that somewhere deep inside I think that if I am ever able to become a teacher again it will solve my problems, my life will automatically go back to the way it was when I was a teacher. Though rationally I know I will never be that girl again. We aren't going to be un-bankrupt, unbroken; Our future will never seem so open as it did back then.

It would not be the first time I have done this. I remember when my first marriage was falling apart, how desperately I wanted to move back to the first place we ever lived in. I had this obsessive belief that if we could get back to that place, we would regain the magic and happiness of our first taste of freedom. 

So I do not know the answer. But I am planning on trying substitute work this year and seeing where it heads. Which only partially makes sense. My doula business is blossoming. I should just ride that wave. But there is something inside of me that needs more stability. A piece that simply has been completely out of place since the day I quit teaching. 

My Series of Unfortunate Events

The last few weeks have been pure hell, meaning just slightly worse than the diluted hell I have been living in for years now. I play my part in it, no doubt there. In fact I can sit here and analyze every event, linking it back to me and my failure one way or another. That is what I do at night when I can't sleep, when Sallie Mae calls trying to find her money, when someone gets sick and I can't cover the bill.

And I want someone to tell me it is going to be okay, you will get through this, etc. But I am losing faith in myself. I feel like I just hit something similar to labor transition and I just really, really, really want the epidural but it doesn't fucking exist. I am halfway through a marathon and I want a glass of water, but there is nothing to drink. I swam out too far and now my legs are falling asleep and all that is left to do is drown.

When I was a kid my mom could say "it will be okay" to me and I could believe it. When I was young and first married my husband could say the same words and again I could believe it.

Unfortunately now I am brutally aware of how untrue that statement is, because it seems every time I see a glimpse of daylight, I sink back into the blackness. The truth is IT WILL NEVER, EVER, EVER be OKAY again. I am past the point of return. For weeks, months, and years I have been pushing back every emotion just trying to survive. Life was a checklist of meals and birthday parties, getting through each event as much of a struggle as it was without anybody being too disappointed. But at some point recently all those feelings, stored up for so long have come back and they are tormenting me.

Small things happen here and there to make things more tolerable, but never, ever are things okay.

I could not find my card at Walgreens today. I had a cart full of bottled water and doughnuts, all things I shouldn't be buying because we have a sink and a stove. All items that I feel guilty about buying because I am too poor to deserve bottled water. I eventually found my card, in the backseat of my car where the kids had thrown it while rifting through my purse on the way home from Magnolia Springs yesterday. That was after holding everyone up, taking two trips outside, and dumping the contents of my purse on the counter. It was around that time that I totally lost control. Not the first time in recent weeks by any means, but definitely the first public display of my inability to hold on. The tears started to fall plop, plop on the counter and all control was lost. I'd like to say it was unapologetic crying, but I apologized probably twenty times while the cashier tried to console me with stories of when she was a young mom with four kids and how she made it through and I will too.

Last night I had to write a check for $259 to pay for antibiotics, following my husbands uninsured 5-day hospital stay that I am expected to be in the tens of thousands. There was only $5 in my bank account and I knew it when I wrote the check. I literally had no other choice. He is sitting in the car with a fever, pneumonia, and a leg swollen to double the size of the one next to it. He is sicker now than when I brought him into the hospital, if you can imagine.

When we got home from Walmart, after driving to pick up kids all over the tri-county area, after me guzzling red bulls to drive home from work and pick up my husband, after, after, after. I found my husband's gray chicken had been hit by a car. So I got him inside, he can barely walk. I got the kids inside. And by my headlights I buried a chicken. She laid her first egg the day before. The same day that our dog killed our two fully grown turkeys who we'd had since they hatched. All lives wasted. All very depressing and poignant in the light of all that is wrong.

IHowever, the worst of it is not being poor on a day to day, it is not having any credit, savings, or insurance- nothing to fall back on and protect me from life's speed bumps, which I always seem to hit at 90 miles per hour in pitch black darkness.

And what the snooty woman behind me in Walgreens and most anyone that is not all up in my daily life fails to realize is that I work, all.of.the.time but I am still so poor and so behind on everything in life that I know that it is not going to get any better. I work too extremely demanding jobs. I am never NOT working on something. I have pulled on my boot straps so many times that they have just sort of frayed and fell apart.
   
And what my mom fails to realize, what I really failed to realize until recently. If my husband went to work a full-time job instead of finishing school, we would be in the same position we are in now or worse. I have no sitters, no money, and a crazy schedule. Someone has to be here to watch the kids. More than likely he would make less than me and I would have to give up my jobs to take care of the children.

Really, I honestly do not think there is any solution to any of this. I don't know that I have ever REALLY known what it meant to be hopeless. I have been depressed, I know the feeling all-too-well. But never, ever has hopeless been such a real and deep abyss for me. 

Waiting on Kefir

So this week I have had little to no work. The sad fallacy of freelance employment, you never know when these weeks will come and when they do, if you are a workaholic like myself, you have no idea what to do with yourself.

For the most part I can predict these periods. They often follow the holidays. During November and December everyone is rushing to get their new website up, add to their blog, or promote a new business venture before the new year. Once January rolls around, interest is quickly lost alongside resolutions.

Things will pick up, a few new projects are set to begin next week and I should be back in the thick of things.

In the meantime, I have tried to focus on writing my own stuff for a bit, though it is a lot harder for some reason. I do not want to write things for myself that I have to think about, proofread, or market. Kind of silly, I know.

Additionally, it has come to my attention that blogs need photos. People today do not read. They skim pages for headers and peruse blogs for cool pictures that they can pin. I, unfortunately, do not have a decent enough camera to be taking fab shots of anything, for my blog or otherwise.

So now my life has slowed to a crawl, something I honestly needed after a December of working every day. Yet I was not prepared. This week I have sewed a gown, two pillows, finished a baby quilt, and started making kefir from milk grains. My mom has come by twice, she is helping me to dig my way out of the pile of  laundry that has accumulated. I watched a few French movies and I drank a bottle of wine.

So there you have it. Workaholic-at-home-mom ends up being a genuine stay-at-home-mom for a week, totally loses her mind.

Speaking of which, anyone know what this kefir is supposed to be doing? It is driving me nuts. I have looked at it half-a-dozen times and it still just looks like milk to me. Maybe my house is too cold? Advice is appreciated.