A brand new year…

Here is a warning…this is long, and much of it is a rehash of my life, and much of it doesn’t make sense. Read at your own risk, but please don’t read too much into it. I’m fine, I’m just like everybody else, often introspective at the beginning of a New Year. Plus, I think I have too much time on my hands that I should be using do some more productive things rather than spending several hours writing what is pretty much the written equivalent of contemplating my navel…

And so it begins…and since 2009 was probably the worst year of my life, I think…I PRAY that 2010 will be better.  It is a year full of promise. What will my life be like this year? How will the changes that I know are coming, change ME? What will be the long lasting reprecussions of decisions that I’m in the process of making? Who will I become? Who do I WANT to become?

These are all questions that have been running around and around in my mind over the past several days.  I know very few things. I’ve come to a point in my life when I no longer just mouth the words "We plan, God laughs", I KNOW how true that is.

It is funny how I thought I already knew that. I thought so much that my life had taken some interesting and sometimes difficult turns in the past. My long years without children that I longed for, but hid well for fear of being seen as "less than perfect". Those same years held many difficult and weird times for Bruce and I that left lasting damage to my self-esteem, but those years also left me more determined than ever to have at least as much as possible the life that I had long wanted. I know that seems like a dichotomy, and since I don’t really want to explain a lot of it, you cannot completely understand, but let it suffice to say that I had an idea of what I wanted my life as an adult to look like and for a long time, I chose to live in ways that were not in keeping with those ideals. Much of that was my own fault, but some of it was a serious lack of self-esteem that really didn’t improve…but somehow, I found the strength to express my needs and found that while Bruce might not have initially embraced those ideas, he came to believe in them in some ways more than I did. And for a time, we were both delirously happy.  Even with ups and downs during those years, I consider the year prior to my first son’s birth and the next 5 years to have been the most perfect in my life to date. I had everything I had always dreamed of. I wonderful husband, perfect (at least in my eyes) children, and a good, solid marriage…finally. My parents were more stable than they had ever been during much of that time and life was good. 

And then the accident happened. At first we didn’t realize how serious it was. Yes, Bruce had been badly hurt, but it was all recoverable, right? And then he kept getting worse, instead of better. And then the first surgery, and then the second one and none of them made him better…each one seemed to make him worse. And then we fought companies and insurance companies and there were lawyers and court hearings and money woes and life was difficult, and depression reared it’s ugly head with Bruce for the first time, at least for the first time seriously enough that I hospitalized him. He stayed for 2 weeks but came out with a good therapist and doing much better and we started looking forward again. And we started looking at him going back to school to learn a new profession. He had a wife and two little boys to support and that was important to him and he had goals and dreams and a direction again. And once again, though not perfect, life was good. I lost my Mom during that time…and while it was hard and unexpected, I coped.

We moved from New Orleans to North La. and he started school. His first year was wonderful. He loved school, I loved being home with the kids. We had committed to homeschooling and both boys were doing well. I made new friends. I kept the best of the old ones (yes, Leisah, I’m talking about you!) and life continued to be good. Ups and downs came and went. Depression was an off and on problem for both of us, but we managed it. Life followed some predictable patterns. There were ups and downs, but for the most part, we kept our eyes on "the prize" which was graduation. I lost my Dad during that time, and it was much harder than losing my mother. First of all, I had always been a "Daddy’s girl", and secondly, it left me an orphan. That was a very difficult time, but once again, I coped and life went on.

And FINALLY, after 8 long years, graduation came…and not just graduation, but graduation with a doctorate and a JOB. A job paying more money than he had ever made. We made another move, found the house of our dreams and he had a wonderful profession. One that he excelled at and that was frequently rewarded, both with money and with recognition for a job well done.  He loved his job, we had one child in college that was doing well and the other being a typical teen, but in relatively healthy ways. Once again, I made friends…and continued to keep the best of the old. I was happy. He was happy, the kids were happy, and life was good. And despite the physical problems, he continued to do fairly well.

Pain continued to be a constant and was starting to become wearing on him. He tried several new treatments. He had another surgery. Helped for a few months and then made it worse again. Then his Mom died. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and it was hard. I loved her and I missed her and I thought I knew what he was going through and figured he would cope, as I had all those years before. He didn’t. Then the family squabbles happened and continued. They stressed him out and made his pain much worse. The pain effected everything. His ability to cope and his physical health. He had a heart attack, and I finally started taking total control of the family. I begin to make all the decisions. I tried to make life easier for him. I tried to make it so that all he had to do was go to work and come home and not worry about anything else. Of course that was impossible. Funny how I can look back now and see how ridiculous that thought was. But I really believed that I was handling it all and that would make it easier on him.  Of course nobody mentioned how he was spiralling downward, both phycially and emotionally…if any of us talke

d about it, we would all have to admit how helpless we were.  How screwed up that whole thing was.  How neither of us, and in some ways neither of our kids were coping with everything. I’m not sure at this point, where he was in the last year or two of his life in his own mind, but I can tell you now where I was, and that was living in the river of de-nile. Denial is a powerful thing.  But I have now learned that we live there when reality is totally impossible for us to process. We build our own little fantasy world where things that should be red flags, are just "bumps in the road".  Where we tell ourselves that we have been here before and it will get better…because that is what has happened before, but somewhere, way down deep, I knew that things were different. HE was different. I was also different. I was tired. I was far less sympathetic. I had spent YEARS trying to make him better, helping him to get the treatment he needed and I was tired of being the emotional center of the family. The ONLY center. He was out of control. I was out of control and I had NO IDEA what to do about it. So I did nothing. And we all know where that led.

I’m not going to rehash the rest. If you haven’t been reading me for long, go back and read earlier entries…start with early May of 2009.

So, here I am.  I’m alone for the first time in my life. Yes, I have my children, but they are just that, my children. I don’t and won’t depend on them. I am financially not in great shape, but I now have the ability to buy a house in the city, which is far better than staying in this small town where I am and will always be "the woman whose husband committed suicide" and while money may at some point be tight, enough of an income to survive on, and if I can play my cards right, I might even be able to invest enough to have enough added income to do okay. And while I’d like to believe that money doesn’t have anything to do with who I am or who I become, I’m not fool enough to not realize that it plays a role. I have security now.  Minimal though it is, just knowing that my financial survival is no longer in question is a huge relief.

So it leaves me with the time and ability to ponder the bigger questions. Who am I? For 16 years I was a child/parent to two very dysfunctional people. For another 2 years I was married to a psychopath. (Let’s don’t EVEN go down that road right now) and for the next 33 or so years, I was part of a wonderful team that had it’s ups and downs, but it was a team. And for the last two years, I was 90% of that team, with a shell of the man I had married. And for the past 8 months, I have been walking around in a fog. A fog that is beginning to clear. But it is still hazy. I don’t know what the future holds. For now, I’m still pretty scared. Especially scared to make plans for the future, because I know just how tenious that future can be. I’m still at that point where I am constantly aware that everything I think I have, everything I think I am, could all disappear tomorrow. But I know I can’t live in that place forever. I’m at a point where I need to move on…at least in some ways…I NEED to have a plan for the future.  Yes, I know that I’m moving, and yes I know that I’m buying a house, and maybe that should be enough for now…but somehow, I seem to have a NEED to figure out who and what I am and where my life is going and what I’m going to become and…and….and….and….yeah. I think I am just looking for something that currently doesn’t exist in me. I think I want to know why bad things have happened to me. I think I want answers to the why and the "okay, now what am I supposed to do with this, learn from this or whatever. And I’m not sure where to find it, and if I find "it" what to do with it.  Does this make any sense at all? Because I’m not sure it does to me, and I think this is part of the problem.  So much stuff that has happened in my life doesn’t make sense to me and I NEED it to, even though this intelligent, spiritual, grown up person knows that life very rarely makes any sense at all. I guess at least for now, I will have to go on living with the whole "We plan, God laughs" thing. Because it sure as HELL doesn’t make any sense to me.