Learning to bite my lip

Last night I made my daily call to my sons. My oldest Jonathan, bless his soul, tried to avoid telling me that once again my ex and her husband had taken the little ones to Splash Lagoon in Erie Pa. I think he knows how much it bothers me that when I was there we never could afford trips or have a sitter to go on dates or overnights. He had become old enough around the time of the separation to watch his brothers so that she and he could go on trips and such. Something that feels as if it’s just one more thing held against me by her. One more thing that makes me feel I was just an anchor tied to her ankle dragging her down.

I’ve learned I don’t need to know why about the divorce anymore, I’ve more than made enough reasons to constantly hate myself for. I don’t know how to live with this dual life I now find I have to live.  Somehow making my own new path in life, but also having to make space for my kids and the constant reminder I once had nothing but all of them to live for. I get told by married people and happily single people how it’s just so easy to put it in the past and live. I was once an authority on that same outlook when I was blissfully married and surrounded by family and friends. Now living it seems dirty and wrong. I am forced to think of myself first to survive and I just can’t. The guilt of not being there 24/7 for the kids or making myself happy over her or my friends, just hangs on me like a bad smell. I stopped living for me 34 years ago when my daughter was born. To pursue my dreams was in my opinion totally selfish when there was a life depending on you. It appears I am one in a million because 99% of people do just that and somehow find the time for all the rest, that I am just not capable of. It could and very well may be how I’ve allowed most around me to guilt me since I was a preteen.

My sister and brothers would call me spoiled because by the time I was born my parents were financially secure and could afford things for me that they couldn’t as a young couple for the 3 of them. I never begged or whined for toys and shit, they just got me them. How my parents took me on the vacation trips that they chose to not go but would let me know how they couldn’t when they were my age. How my brothers never wanted me around them and their friends, some of which were nearly my age. To this day if my brother Jimmy is at a bar and I walk in, he leaves. Then came Vikki and our daughter. Thinking I was doing the right and honorable thing by marrying her, I was constantly bombarded about how I wasn’t doing this or that right from her and my in-laws and I allowed that took take over my thoughts. After the divorce, I never did anything right in people’s views so I stopped doing anything and didn’t need anyone’s disapproval, I gave it to myself, constantly every day right up to now as I write here. I had several moments of being told by my parents that they were proud of me, but that was it. Nothing from anyone else. No good jobs or keep up the good works. I’ve worked under the stress and strain, of my own doing apparently, that everything I was doing whether good or bad was not up to par. As far as my “friends” my opinions were always wrong and my views were just stupid, or so they made me feel as such. Why do I pine away for them and their support? I really never had it.

I’m not sure how to bring this to a close, I’ve just depressed myself, I know shocking…