Respect is a funny thing. You can't ask for it, or what you get isn't real, isn't genuine. Where does that leave you when you have EARNED it but still don't get it?

It leaves me feeling trapped, with no way out but simply walking.

Today has been the longest day ever, and I'm really ready for a nap.

Work is insane, the rain won't stop falling, I'm cold, my head hurts, and I really just want to cuddle up in a big soft blanket and close my eyes. Is that too much to ask?

Im in a deep dark murky place tonight.

Spent the weekend at the beach with Miss Bobbie. It was good to relax, to get away from work, kids, and everything else. I miss her!

The jettee... We climbed across the rocks and went from the shore all the way out to the end of this. It was a long climb, and a little unnerving at times, but it was fun, and we got some cool pictured of pelicans that were hanging out at the ocean end of it.


B

Miss Corinne


Brooke with Miss Alaina


crazy deer

I hate goodbyes...

Not sure whose idea it was to take pictures at this point in the day - after we had all been bawling our eyes out for God knows how long. I am really going to miss her damn it.

I really wish they would stop growing up so quickly

First day of school... 3rd and 5th grades this year - unbelievable!

I'm really not sure why I bothered to get out of bed this morning.

I decided how I feel about it. I'm not going. I want to see her, to know her, to spend time with her, but I dont want to be a part of that. Im not buying a ticket, not asking for time off work right now. Maybe I'll find a way to go see her in a couple months.

I fell off the turnip truck

My Dad's shoe size is 14EEE.
My Mom had jet black hair before it turned to salt and pepper.
I have green eyes.
My grandmother was a circus performer before she met my grandfather. 
I'm supposed to fly to Cleveland to put her in a home in a couple weeks. 
I'm not sure how I feel about that.

she gets a little crazy when you tickle her

Day 2 swimming... 45 minutes swimming laps. Good stuff.

stroke, stroke, stroke

Started swimming again today at lunch.  45 minutes trudging against the current in the lazy river, and my legs feel like they are made of rubber.  I feel good. :)

"We have to be more conservative than that."

Dude, that's the worst thing you ever could have said to me. There is no quicker way to make me go berserk or to drive me away.

I don't want to be conservative. I want to live, feel, be.

.

I really miss you.

Only the second nightmare I've ever had and remembered....

The first was when I was 5 or 6 and purple slime monsters flooded my grandparents house with purple slime, and I was perched on top of the wood stove scared out of my mind while the monsters swam around the room.

Last night, the second...

There was a big storm, and there was flooding everywhere. (What's the deal with me and floods?) There were 10 foot tall waves in my back yard, and many grizzly bears looking in the windows of the house quite viciously. It was scary and awful, and it went on forever, and people were almost killed in one scenario after another.

Fast forward to morning... water gone, drained away, houses just fine like nothing ever happened (the floods never came in the night before - they were just outside somehow)... There were dead or almost dead large animals everywhere - deer, mountain lions, antelope, etc., and there were people everywhere cleaning up their remains.

Brooke (my oldest daughter) ran out to the sidewalk, looked at me with a smile on her face, started to say something, and was whisked away in an instant, as if she had been hit by a speeding train. One of the grizzlies from the night before had grabbed her head in his jaws as he ran by, and ran down the street, into another house. It was gruesome and awful and heart wrenching. I can still see it clearly - the terrified look on her face, looking into my eyes as he ran, her head sort of distorted and mangled, and her body just hanging there.

The family down the street (in the house where the bear went) was disturbed and disturbing... They reminded me of something out of deliverance, or maybe that nasty slasher movie I sat through part of a few years ago where those kids truck broke down in the middle of nowhere in Australia and that guy tortured and killed them. (That was an AWFUL movie) Anyway, the bear that took Brooke was one of their minions, somehow. They kidnapped children, and did strange things. I asked them to give Brooke back and they laughed, and told me they planned to sell her around New Years, so maybe I could buy her then. The people that had been everywhere cleaning up the carcasses before forced their way inside these people's house, and demanded Brooke. The adults in the house wouldn't speak. We went from room to room searching, but couldn't find her. There were small, strange, dirty children everywhere, and finally one little girl asked me if we were looking for her new sister. She told us that she was in "the other bathroom" upstairs. We hadn't found stairs. More frantic searching, and we found a staircase behing a closet by the front door. I ran up the stairs, and entered a hallway with 4 strange small doors. They were wider than standard doors, but about 4 feet tall. The first one I tried was the bathroom, and there was Brooke, unconscious in a bathtub full of bags of ice. She was wrapped in plastic except for her head. I pulled her into my arms, and her whole body was cold, so so cold.

I remember looking down at her ice cold toes, in shock, and then I woke up, 2 hours early. I couldn't shake that picture, that feeling, holding my childs ice cold body, wondering if she was alive, if she would make it. What a great way to start a day.

I hate dreams.

I am so incredibly tired.

Can I just have a complete and total emotional breakdown now and get it over with? Being strong is really just way too hard. I want to go off the deep end.

Bastard.

Becoming Jane

Watched it last night... I generally believe the mark of a good movie is that it will either make me laugh out loud, or it will bring tears to my eyes, or both. Never before have I found part way through a movie that I am moved to the point where I don't want to watch anymore, and just want to go curl into the fetal position in some dark corner to cry. Never before have I watched a movie beginning to end, and been so affected by it that I had to escape, that I had to get out into the fresh air so that I could sob for another 30 minutes in the dark, in the rain, when the movie was done. Ugh. I'm supposed to be focusing on the positive in life, damn it.

...

i am broken.

my hairs have been cut

I can't go to extremes

I can't go to extremes with you. You keep me on an even keel and i don't like it - I need to feel.

Happy easter!

Happy easter!

sleeping in the swimming pool

All I meant to say the other night was that I have a tendency to avoid my emotions these days, and that makes blogging difficult.

GEEZ

I have the weirdest flippin dreams sometimes. I woke from one this morning, thoroughly confused. I was dating a guy. He sometimes had Dave's face, sometimes John's, and sometimes Scot's. I was there (there I was!) and we were together, and we loved each other, and we had an amazing bond, but he was married to some blonde floozy. She knew we were together, and she knew we loved each other, and she was fine with that, but she demanded anyway that he perform his "husbandly duties," and for some reason he felt obligated, and wouldn't leave. Right before I woke up, we were in their house which was on a busy, lively, colorful street with no cars. The street reminded me of Bourbon Street in New Orleans at night. The house was one room, with doors off of it for bedrooms. He had many adult brothers and sisters and brother in laws ands sister in laws, and they were all there with their many children, who were asian for some reason. My guy gave me a kiss, and went off to help his wife to bed, which undoubtedly involved some hanky panky. There I was with one of his sister in laws, a sweet and gentle woman, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. I tagged along with her as she put her children to bed. All of the children slept in an upstairs bedroom, and the only thing in that room was a large swimming pool. There were maybe 20 children floating in it sleeping, as that's how they slept, floating in the pool. There was also an old asian man floating in the pool, and I think he was their grandfather. I went back downstairs, confused not about why they slept in the pool, but about why they would put a pool in on the 2nd floor of the house. I sat down, deeply troubled that my love was off with his wife, really upset but not quite knowing what to do. One of his brothers was sitting there with pen and paper in hand. I reached out for them, and he commented that "that didn't take me long" as he apparently knew that I was writing a goodbye letter for his brother as he handed me the pen and paper. As I was writing to him that I couldn't do this, that I needed to step out of the situation so that he and his wife could try to be happy together, Dave came home and woke me up. I hate waking up in the middle of a dream - especially if it's an intense one. It leaves me feeling almost drunk, confused, not quite myself.

I dated a guy not long after Dan left that was married, but separated from his wife and living in a separate house. This was Scot. I was in pain, and he was in the same pain - his wife left him for some guy - and it just worked, aside from the fact that I could tell he still loved her, just as I still loved Dan. Our relationship was incredibly intense. There was so much emotion, so much pain... and our physical realtionship was... Oh my GOD. You know, a relationship between two people with broken hearts can be so difficult, but at the same time, it can make so much sense. He knew exactly what I was going through, and exactly how to respond to me, and I hope his experience was the same. I remember one night, specifically, where I was falling to pieces. I was trying to make dinner, but I couldn't keep myself together. I kept dropping things, breaking things, spilling things, trying not to fall apart. He came up from behind me, put his arms around me, and held me while I shook, while I cried. He made me smile, made me laugh, picked up my pieces. My memory of that night is a good one, a special one, not so much as a sad one. There came a point where his wife broke up with her boyfriend, with the suttle implication that she wanted him to come home. He stood by my side, and he told me there was no way he would go back to her, that he hated her, and he loved me. I could tell it was killing him. In the end, I stepped away. I pushed him away. It was so hard - when he came to me, wanting to hold me, to love me, to push him away, to see the tears streaming down his face, to see the hurt in his eyes, but I pushed him away, told him he needed to go home to his wife. He left, and I went inside and layed in bed crying for hours. Today he and his wife are happy together, as in love as ever, a family for their kids. I think he would have stayed with me if I had let him, but I am so glad I didn't. I do love him, I do miss him, I do wish sometimes that things could be different, but I am so grateful, so happy to see him now with his wife and children, happy to have his family together again. Life tosses weird things at us.

I dated another guy that was a gulf war veteran. This was John. While he was in Iraq, the truck he was riding in blew up. He watched people he cared about die, and he was seriously injured himself. He came home in a wheelchair, and his wife left and took their son with her. Apparently it was just too much for her to handle. Eventually he was able to walk again, but he walked around every day with so much pain, both physically and emotionally. He had an amazing mind - probably the most intelligent person I have EVER met, and he had an amazing heart, and he had been broken in every way. At the time, neither of us had the emotional strength for the kind of relationship that happens when a person in my state and a person in his state come together, so we went our separate ways after a short period of time, but he haunts me still. I want him to know peace so badly.

The sun is shining today, and the sky is blue. I should get out and enjoy it, but I think I am going to start a fire in the woodstove, try to fix the supports in my new and apparently broken couch, and clean up the kitchen. I don't want to get out of my pajamas today.

Ta dah!

I want very much to reclaim my blog, to spill my heart and life and mind onto these pages again.

Honestly, it's too hard right now. I feel pathetic, weak, sad. I've kept myself busy, distracted, because sometimes that's just easier than really feeling, really facing what is in my heart. My life isn't bad. I'm comfortable, bored, somewhat alive. That's not enough for me, but sometimes it's easier. On with the status quo.

I feel like it's all caving in, like I can't hold my heart, my life at bay much longer. I don't know what I'm scared of really. Anything has to be better than pretend. Heartache sucks, but it's better than feeling nothing, better than walking around scared to feel, right? I avoid emotion like the plague these days. If something is hard to face, hard to handle, hard to absorb, to deal with, I pretend it's not there.

Dan and Nicole are married. I haven't even begun to take that in. I would just rather not think about it.

I don't know how to interact with people in a normal and healthy way anymore. I'm not sure I ever did. I'm quite sure I didn't. If I ignore it it will go away, right. I can just stay in this quiet little hole in my heart. Emotional bonds just hurt in the end anyway, right?

My kids are growing up, growing into their own people, their own personalities. I haven't chosen to absorb that.

Debt sucks. I pretend it's not there, and go on about my life until it slaps me in the face. Maybe it will just go away, right? Or maybe not.

I have no education. I just have a lot of luck and some brains, and that combination is producing some nice paychecks. Something's gotta give - I work for a startup, for God's sake. It's easier to pretend I can go on this way for ever, easier not to think about it.

I miss my family. I broke those ties so long ago. I left first chance I got, straight out of highschool, moved hundreds of miles away. I dont have a relationship with them anymore, any of them. I've seen my dad twice in the last year. The second time he spent 3 months hunting me down in order for it to happen. I can't remember the last time I saw my Grandma, my aunts, my uncles. I've always been close with my grandpa, always had a strong bond with him. I haven't seen him once since Dan left. I want to, but I dont know how. It's not that I don't know where he is, how to find him, how to reach him, not that I think he wouldn't be more than happy to see me, but I don't know how to reach out to him, how to close the space between us. He called me once, about 6 months ago. He practically begged me to come see him, to bring the girls. he said we had something in common once. I could hear the pain in his voice, the loneliness. I just don't know how to do it. I don't understand why something so simple takes so much strength, and why I don't have that strength. I can't see this stupid screen right now for the tears running down my face, and I hate that so much. I don't want to do it! There are so many things that eat at me every day. My heart is heavy. My lungs are full of liquid. I actually mean that both figuratively and literally at the moment - My chest is so congested that it hurts to breathe in. I'm walking a stupid fucking highwire, and I'm going to fall at any second. I hate this life. I know I have to face my demons or I'll never find happiness, life, oxygen again, but I just want to pretend they aren't there. Hell, they aren't all demons even, just moments, thoughts, feelings that require more strength than I know how to muster. I am worn down, tired, exhausted really. I don't know how to face any more pain. I don;t know how to step up to the plate and really live my life. I know how to wake up in the morning, to go through the motions of the day, and to lay in bed for sleepless, thoughtless time, desperate to find rest so that I can get up again in the morning and do it all again. It's all I can do, but it's not enough.

Dan is getting married tomorrow.

The baby is due in June.

It's been a few months. Life has changed in so many ways, and really, I just haven't known what to say, what to feel. I walk around like a robot, pretending at life. I don't know what to do with myself. I've thought about talking to a doctor - maybe antidepressants would help? - but in the end I know I wouldnt take them anyway, so I don't reach out.