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.

Stomach Knots

I have too much to do today, the story of every day. I am so nervous about all the impending work that my stomach is in knots. Still it is too cold to get out of bed and I am blogging instead of completing anything worthwhile. Oh well.

It's no surprise I do not want to get out of bed. I am wearing a scarf, two pairs of pajama pants, socks, and a hoodie. (Can you tell me and the cold do not mix?) I am snuggled between two toddlers, one who is soundly sleeping, the other who is asking for cereal. The bigger kids are at school and my husband is snoring. My hugely pregnant boxer, Roxy, is sprawled out across my legs. She is like a living, breathing, electric blanket.

I am excited about future prospects, a rarity these days. I am working on a project with a good friend to begin offering more products through my Etsy store and hopefully expand it into something worth mentioning next year. We are also planning to attend craft shows and festivals next year as well.

I have doula clients for the first seven months pretty much sowed up. That is exciting. Lots of baby time! And Charlie will soon be one year closer to being out of school.  Here's to the future! Let's hope it is luminous in comparison to the recent past.

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.