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.