The Struggle

I've been doing a lot of thinking this past weekend. It's one of the questionable perks of my job. I'm busy, busy, busy for the first four hours of the day, then virtually nothing until the last two hours of the day (I have a ten hour work day.) Though, that breaks down to only four hours of "down time" on a boring day, (I REALLY prefer boring work days. It means my client is maintaining status quo. "Interesting" days at work typically require a lot of personal assistance, time and mostly worry.) that's still four hours for my mind to wander, ruminate, speculate and over all annoy me with pesky things like worrying over bills, relationships and the future. Not to mention the past, which is what I spent a lot of time thinking about this weekend. 

I should add a little caveat here. I've been working the same job for over a year and a half now, with the same client. I have a nicely established routine, My hands and body are busy, but my mind can go on it's merry little way, usually without my say so. I only have to have a small portion truly focused on my visual assessment, keeping a literal eye out for any anomalies. The other senses are always passively engaged and know when to knock on the door of my consciousness to give me a heads up to a change of condition. In essence, I have a lot more time for my brain to process events of the past and plan for the future. This isn't always a good thing, as the events of the past three years have been quite harrowing, and I've been floundering for some time about where to go from here. In my less emotionally capable days, this leaves me crying while doing my work. It's fortunate that I don't have many witnesses to my work. I suspect that if it were a more public affair, I would have been terminated from the job and sent to a nice padded room somewhere with a man in a long white coat asking me about my relationship with my father. 

That being said, I suppose this weekend was no different than most other weekends. Have I mentioned my schedule? I work Friday through Monday, 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM. No weekend=no life for me. Ah, well. I'm working, I can support myself. There are many out there who can't say the same.

Though, there were some major differences in HOW I was thinking this weekend. I got off the hamster wheel of self pity and took a long, critical look at exactly WHAT I'd been doing for the past three years and how it's still affecting and effecting me. What it came down to is this; struggle. In early September 2010, my family was evicted from our apartment for lack of payment. My then fiance, now soon to be ex-husband, was faced with a sudden lack of working hours. His primary client that we were relying on to get us through the lean summer months suddenly quit school and took up fathering his child while his own wife went back to work. Good for their family, disastrous for ours. I was working, but not enough. 

Thus my struggle began.

• The truck we'd bought to replace the van lost to impound died the day after the move from our apartment. 

• We moved into a hotel and tried to maintain some sense of normalcy. I kept my kids in school. My fiance continued to work. I stewed in a vat of self made depression. 

• That November, I married once again. 

• In December, my husband and I began to figure out the local public transit system, allowing us more mobility than we'd had in months. 

• That January I moved myself and my kids to Colorado with my first mom due to new information come to light from my daughter, concerning my husband. My daughter began her first sexual relationship while we were in Colorado with a young man she knew to be HIV positive (fortunately with a zero viral load, though I had her tested at least twice), three years older and an absentee father, already. During this time, she also continue to abuse drugs and alcohol; unbeknownst to me. 

• On May 25, 2011 we lost two out of three storage units to auction because we couldn't afford them. 

• In June, my kids and I moved back to California. 

• In July, I would see my first son for the last time, but had no way of knowing it then (not dead, he simply hasn't spoken to me since, and I have no idea why). 

• In August, my husband began to serve jail time for a crime committed, again, unbeknownst to me the previous July. Also in August, my children and I became homeless, beginning our stay in Roseville's own nomadic homeless shelter, The Gathering Inn. 

• CPS began to have a presence in my life during this time. 

• In September, I was able to buy a car using money from the tax return I belatedly filed. 

• My daughter's behavior deteriorated to the point of uncontrollability and in November of 2011, I sent her to live with her father in Virginia. Between November and March of 2012, my daughter gradually disowned me. 

• In December of that year, I was hired by my current employer. 

• In mid-February, my husband was released from jail and we moved into another hotel. 

• In Late February, my youngest son was removed from my custody by CPS and sent to live in emergency foster care. He was arrested for violence at school (for which I was blamed by CPS; they couldn't possibly imagine that it, gee, might be because he was taken away from his mother!), and sent to live with his father in Virginia on March 8, 2012. 

• In mid-March, the junker of a car I bought wheezed it's last breath and died. 

• Later that month, my husband was arrested for a violation of probation, sentence to be determined. 

• In May, when we could no longer afford the hotel, we moved in with "a friend" for three weeks. On Friday at 7:45 PM Memorial Day weekend, that "friend" gave us notice that we were to leave by Sunday. That Sunday, we found an honest to goodness flop house and rented a room. A week later, my husband turned himself in at an agreed upon date to serve his two months for the violation of probation. 

• At the beginning of July, I moved into a tiny studio apartment with it's own bathroom and shower, and miniature sink, refrigerator and stove. 

• Some time during that summer, I figured out the bus system well enough to be able to make it to and from work on Fridays and Mondays, while a coworker gave me rides on Saturdays and Sundays. 

• In mid-August, my husband was released from jail and began work the next week. 

• On Thanksgiving day of that year, A one bedroom apartment, with a full sized sink, full sized refrigerator and full sized stove/oven, in my building became available for rent and we moved into it in mid-December. 

• During the spring, I discovered that my children's father claimed both kids on his income tax return, violating the original agreement in our divorce and eventually causing me to owe the IRS about $200 in taxes. 

• The first Friday of April 2013, two uniformed police officers searched my home and found evidence that would prove to be the nail in the coffin of my marital status. 

My summer from hell began.

• On May 17, 2013, the day we bought another clunker of a car, my husband was arrested, yet again, on the same charges that landed him in jail over a year and a half before, soon to be followed by another violation of probation charge. 

• On July 3, a day after my birthday, I discovered more evidence against my husband, spurring a visit to his therapist to confirm certain information crucial to my family, and confirming that my nearly ten year relationship with my husband was at an end. 

• On October 2, 2013 (his birthday), my husband was sentenced to 4 years and 8 months in state prison. By my calculations, given the time he's already served, he'll be out of custody sometime in early June 2015. I haven't spoken to him since July 3, and have not communicated with him in any manner since mid-August, and aside from going to his court dates, I have not seen him in nearly five months.

In short, I have lost nearly everyone and everything important to me.

This is the first time I've "put to pen" the major details of the last three years. I'm honestly stunned that much time has passed since being evicted from my last apartment. From the last time I remember being truly happy. Even my time spent in Colorado with my first mom was bitter sweet. Prior to September 2011, I was highly invested in the adoption reform movement on Facebook, and through that, many other blogs and websites. If it wasn't for social media, and certain individuals who proved to be a catalyst, I would have never found my son lost to adoption as well as my first parents. I wouldn't have been interviewed by a Time magazine reporter on the effect social media has on people searching for lost family members. I wouldn't have had the indirect effect on other people's lives, giving them the courage to take up their search or even finally connecting with their original family. I was making a difference. I knew it at the time, but looking back, I can say that my impact on other people was probably more profound than I realized at that time. I was never blase about that impact, far from it. But the view looking back puts me in awe of what happened, what I was a part of, what I had a significant hand in. Realistically, I'll probably never know how many lives I touched, what ripples were created from something so profoundly personal as finding lost members of my family. I can only pray that those ripples were and remain positive.

And it was this weekend that I began to put things into perspective. Reading that laundry list, one cannot deny there have been some very significant cataclysms in my life, many of them occurring in just a short time span. There were two specific goals I had during these times; survival and keeping my family (of procreation) in tact. I have succeeded at one and failed miserably at the other. But that's not what this is all about. It's about the realizations during my past work week. From the beginning of these experiences, I tried to keep in contact with those connections I made in the adoption reform movement on Facebook, but even then, I knew that would be a very difficult task. Most of the time, I didn't have a computer. When I did, either at the resource center at TGI (The Gathering Inn) or at a public library, my time was limited. Until recently, the cell phones I had either didn't have internet capability or the programs for the internet were so poor as to be useless to me. 

My point is, though, over the past three years, I've had to focus on the struggle simply to stay alive. I've had to put my best efforts into seeing that at least the basic needs of my children were met. Nothing else mattered. When both my raised children were in Virginia, the struggle shifted to not becoming homeless again. I have been living in the fear of losing everything I've struggled so hard to acquire. I've been mired in the day to day struggle of just making sure I had enough money to pay rent and electricity, and some left over to eat and have enough gas to get to work. I've been keeping my nose to the grind stone, keeping my head down, my shoulders hunched, and pushed my way forward each day, never reflecting on any success I have made. I have taken small joys in my fur and feathered kids, some small entertainment from the piggy backed internet I ride on. Every once in a while, I treat myself to a movie or sushi, but for the most part, I stay at home, reading, watching Netflix, surfing the web on the laptop a friend gave me early in the summer or making silly quips on Facebook via my phone. My life has consisted of coasting along, get up, go to work, come home, maybe eat dinner, many times not, go to bed, start all over again the next day until my days off when I can sleep in. On those days, I've been keeping myself busy with errands to the grocery store, or sometimes the book store and keeping my apartment relatively clean. My needs met, my desires simple, my past a constant haunting continually reinforced by the sheer aloneness of my life. Some days are better than others. Some days, I am beautiful, confident and almost happy. Most days, I just am. Other days, I live in the past and long for that padded room and some nice euphoric drugs to keep me company. Those are my crying days, which I have more of than I really want.

And it was this weekend that I realized how much the struggle had taken over. I knew I wasn't living. I knew that I was merely surviving. I knew that it sucked on a grand scale. I've tried to make steps into living again, but the few times I did, I would scuttle quickly back into my safe hole of misery that I'd created. "They" say that knowing is half the battle. I call shenanigans. Just because you KNOW something, doesn't always mean you have the willpower to do anything about it. And then something...shifted inside me. Anyone who knows me even a little knows that my self esteem isn't exactly stellar, and I tend towards the self destructive side. Many people over the years have made concerted efforts into convincing me that I am worthy of happiness and the good things in life. I haven't repaid them very well, remaining firmly entrenched in just the opposite ideas. But recently, I've started to haunt Facebook again, mostly with my phone since the browser on my computer categorically refuses to load the site. I've participated in mostly banter, with a toe or two dipped into the self pity pool. But I've also been following the adoption reform movement again. I haven't dived head long into those waters, but enough to whet my appetite. That spawned the new blog and more thinking. I'm finally beginning to embrace the idea of being worthy. I'd thought about calling a friend to ask his opinion of my writing on my first blog, trying to determine if I really am a good writer. Then I spent some time one night after work going back and reading what I'd written. And I was blown away. I may not be Pulitzer Prize winning, but I finally embraced the knowledge that I actually am a talented writer. That acknowledgment lead to other acknowledgments. I am a good mother, regardless of what Placer County, or my daughter, may believe. I am a good nurse. I am a good driver, even. I'm not always a good housekeeper (as I sit here looking around at my rather messy apartment), but my ego really isn't invested in that. I can be when I want to, though, recently, I've been almost maniacal about it. I am a good person who deserves good things. I am a beautiful woman who deserves more than what I've been settling for in my previous romantic relationships. I can do more with my life than what I have been. There's no need for me to be static, to be stagnant. I don't need to wallow in self pity and self recrimination. 

Yes, life is a struggle. But that doesn't mean that is all it has to be. I was happy once, deliriously happy. I'll admit to shying away from the idea of another relationship that could possibly swamp me under that way again, but the wreckage of my most current marriage is still being critically examined by the forensic expert in my head. I don't like being alone, and I really miss certain side benefits of having a significant other, but I'm not ready for another relationship, period. But I AM ready to start moving forward in life. I don't have to live the struggle. I have to overcome it by living life the best way I know how and by learning even better ways.