Titleless post #1

Yeah…so…once again a trip kicked my butt. I have a really hard time getting back into the swing of things after traveling. I need to work on that. I’m still not there, but at least today we exercised and did school. Or we’re doing school.

In other news: Heroes is creepy. A bit too creepy for me. I’m not big on gore and all that. I like my suspense to be created from the fear of harm not necessarily the fear of gore. Spooks is perfect at the suspense thing, or at least they used to be, because they have such a high turnover of actors on that show that you know no one is safe. 24 on the other hand–is suspenseful, but not in the “oh no is Jack going to die” way–because even when he does die, it’s not permanent. But it’s not heavy-handed with the gore either like Heroes is. So to recap: Spooks–awesome! 24–good Heroes–um…gross?

My “journaling” has been reduced to TV reviews.

Life as you know it

I’ve had some interesting interactions with a person lately. I love her. I respect and admire her in a lot of ways, but in others she is nothing short of maddening. I’m slowly coming to realize that she’s living her life based on some alternate reality. How do you even deal with that? How do you talk to someone whose words contradict her actions? How do you spend time with someone whose actions contradict her words? Sadly, there’s a bit of a predictability there. You can actually learn to anticipate what she will do by expecting the opposite of what she says. So you can learn to co-exist. But, man it just hurts to watch someone working that hard to maintain a parallel universe as a security blanket. It makes me wonder what she’s hiding from?

She’s been like this for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t realize it at first. It seems to get worse as time goes on. I want to help, but anything that doesn’t jive with her reality doesn’t make it past her filter. She really doesn’t hear you when you talk. Unfortunately, her real world is starting to crumble, in large part because of bad decisions on her part. When you make decisions that are based on fiction, they don’t turn out so well in the real world. What will it take? My heart is breaking for her right now, and I feel so helpless to do anything about it.

I hope I can look back on this blog post someday and say that the ending was happy, but sadly it seems that things will get worse before they get better.

Oh well

An internet outage derailed my NaBloPoMo efforts.  Plus I didn’t have cell coverage, so I couldn’t do that either.  But now I have both again. Yea.

Thanksgiving was awesome.  I have the best family ever.  Next year I’m totally bringing a turkey though.  I don’t like dressing, and we only had turkey buried in dressing.  Now I have to go make up for all the work time I missed while the internet was off eating turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ten things I’m thankful for today:

1. God’s love and mercy.
2. My amazing family.
3. My wonderful, loving, creative, crazy kid.
4. Hope.
5. Turkey!!
6. Working from home.
7. Health, particularly that my knee has fully recovered and I can run again!
8. Dreams and excitement for the future.
9. Fledgling faith…with room to grow.
10. All my cool gadgets.

I almost forgot

Can I make it 9 more days without forgetting to blog?

I have nothing really to say.

Where can I find cheap winter clothes?

Fall please

It is currently in the 80s. Can we have some fall, please? It’s my favorite season of the year. I love the crisp air and the gusts of wind swirling leaves down from the trees. I love the color of blue that the sky only achieves in the few months between the heat haze of summer and the overcast gray of winter. I love wearing shorts and a long-sleeved shirt. I love the traditional family Thanksgiving football game where everyone is allowed to play and all the little kids get to score. I love the bonfires by the pond.

Fall is almost officially over; winter is approaching quickly. I still haven’t gotten a real fall yet. I think I need to move. I want to live in Canada again. Or maybe Colorado or Montana.

I’m sitting waiting for the call from my fellow caravan-ers that we’re ready to leave for the parental abode, site of the big Thanksgiving shindigs. And blogging. And re-discovering my deep and abiding, althought somewhat neglected of late, love for the music of Ben Folds. <sigh> Someday, I will be able to play and sing “Landed”. It feels like my own personal anthem with lyrics like:

“[He] liked to push me,
And talk me back down,
‘Til I believed I was the crazy one,
And in a way
I guess I was.
‘Til I opened my eyes and walked out the door…”

Well…I guess the cowtails are ready to go now.

Weird reaction

So…I called the ad litem today and he said some interesting and positive things. But I have a hard time getting my hopes up with him because he’s kind of waffled in the past. He said he’s going to talk to PPCP about terminating. And he said not to worry about this weekend. He also said we can’t let this thing drag on “ad infinitem”, then, just to make sure I had understood his super sophisticated lawyer speak, he translated ad infinitem. (I rolled my eyes for two reasons–I speak 7 languages, I know what ad infinitem means; and thank you for finally tumbling to the fact that there needs to be some sort of finish line for this thing so that’s it’s not just unlimited last chances to one person and unlimited legal fees to the other.) I just wanted to record here my reaction after we hung up. My hands started shaking and I started crying and kind of fell down onto my knees. In retrospect it feels like a big overreaction because, while what he said was hopeful, it wasn’t “It’s over now. The end.” Maybe if it had been, the shaking and falling would have been justified. I am really glad I was here alone (well, with William but he didn’t see me) because…I just feel a bit silly now. But that was my natural reaction. Why??

I do think that it all underlines how much emotional stress this ongoing trial has me under. I keep busy, and I’m not a super openly emotional person as it is. I don’t even really acknowledge my emotions much to myself, much less talk about them. Besides, what am I going to do? Have W. be my therapist on this? But just below the surface there’s a lot of emotional turmoil (read: this whole thing is driving me crazy). I’m now kind of hoping I can be alone when the best good news comes because who knows how I’ll react. I may faint altogether. In which case, maybe it wouldn’t be better to be alone. In truth though, I don’t care if I pee myself with delight. I think nothing will embarrass me that day.

May it be soon.

Let go and let God, part 2

I’m trying to have faith here, but I find that I still have fear. Not of God letting me down, or abandoning me, or anything like that. I’m afraid of messing up. I know that nothing is too hard for God, and that I need to leave this whole custody situation in His hands, but don’t I also have a part to do? When the Israelites were trapped between Egypt’s army and the Red Sea, Moses told them to stand still and see the glory of the Lord. But God then corrected Moses and asked, “Why are you standing still? Go forward.” I feel like I need to move forward here, but I have this nagging suspicion that what I think of as forward may in fact be backwards.

I want to spend Thanksgiving with my family. I’ll be able to do that, thankfully. But most of my family is staying over the weekend and leaving on Sunday or Monday. My job, and William’s homeschool, are two big blessings that allow us the flexibility to usually participate in these extended weekends, or even spur of the moment gatherings. But the wrinkle is that there should be a scheduled visitation this weekend. Which means I would have to leave on Friday. My conundrum is that he hasn’t made it to one of these scheduled visitations in almost a year–and by almost I mean two weeks shy of a year. After how many no-shows do I get to stop planning my life around his scheduled visitations that he never uses? In two years, he’s only made in to 5. Five out of 24. He’s missed almost four times as many as he’s made it to. That’s just so….ArGh! Frustrating! Ok…clarification. I’m not frustrated that he hasn’t come. I’m frustrated that the legal system wants to continue to give him last chances. He’s on his fourth or fifth now. Come on people! Since we left 6 1/2 years ago, he’s visited William less than 10 times. He’s called him less than a dozen times. He’s written him less than 10 times. He’s never emailed. Are there any other ways of contacting him that I’ve missed? 6 1/2 years!

Why can’t they see he’s not interested and let us move on? Why does it keep dragging out? The end is inevitable. He’s never going to be a part of William’s life. He’s totally missed his window of opportunity. Two or three years ago William was interested in who his dad was and where he was. He’s not interested anymore. Now he knows, and he’s not impressed. He still tells people he doesn’t have a dad. This is after meeting his “dad”! He doesn’t think of him as a dad, and frankly, at one visit a year that’s not going to change.

I’m glad that there hasn’t been any contact, but I’m frustrated with the farce. I’m tired of planning our lives around being stood-up. I want to just stay with my family on Sunday!  I want him to have to call and let me know one way or another what he’s going to do, so I can make a plan.  That’s just common courtesy!  But if I do what I want to do, the legal system sees me as the bad guy.  When he does what he wants to do, they let him make excuses and give him another last chance.  It’s so unfair.  I just need to remember that the end is worth the means. Cutting William loose from the baggage of an uninterested father is something that has to be done–HAS to. So we’ll come back early from Thanksgiving. We’ll show up for the visitation. Hopefully we’ll be the only people there. Then we’ll go do something as a family–a real family. No dad, no problem.

Worky worky

Today is the big day.  Hopefully anyway.  Hopefully on this day we will finish the Really Useful Project.

In other news….is NaBloPoMo done yet?

If I were a rich man…

or woman.

I’d be able to rent a car and drive to Ontario and make a side trip into Quebec at the end of the organized function and then come back by a different route. I’d be able to make my plan right now and not wait and see what others are doing. I’d be able to buy new jeans that don’t fall off.

I guess I should be thankful that, while not rich in money, I am rich in friends. The kind of friends who will schlepp you a couple thousand miles so you’re not left out of an organized function, even though their cars are old and small and they’re not rich either.

I am thankful, but…someday…I would like to be the adult that is able to invite someone else along instead of always being the charity case.