Thursday 27 June 2019

Alone

I am feeling very alone today. It's Kevin's birthday and I am really missing him and am mourning the lack of celebrating him today. We have been apart on his birthday and moved the the celebration around but this is the first time there has ever been a court order that prevents us from being together.

Both Jack and I reached out to him on social media without discussing the fact that our hearts are hurting today. Jack publicly and me privately in a dm. I can see that he read it and I have no idea how he feels because hasn't responded but I had to acknowledge that I was thinking about him today. It took me awhile to figure out what to say. To keep it neutral and yet let him know that he was in my heart and on my mind.

It's also Kate's last day of school and she is having lots of big feelings about that. She is also talking about and expressing how much easier life is at home without Randall here. She feels sort of guilty for thinking and saying it but she is right and I let her know that last night when she brought it up. There are no big end of year things for grade 7 so her year is just kind of fizzling out without too much fanfare and then theatre camp starts on Tuesday for two weeks.

All around me on social media kids are finishing high school and families are posting pictures of all their kids accomplishments. I feel like it would be to create and post a photo essay called "My Reality". I could post photos of restraining orders, court documents, social workers and therapy sessions because as the school year ends that is the only thing that I have to share. Randall should be graduating but is no where near finished and Kevin dropped out in 2017.

Watching everyone else be functional in the world makes me feel very alone. I know that in many cases that is just the good part for their fake lives but I don't even have a fake life to pretend with. There is really nothing good happening.


Friday 21 June 2019

Meh

The days just all run together into a stretch of meh -that's a technical term. I started meds last week to treat my fibromyalgia and my depression, neither my pain nor my sadness has decreased in the slightest. I know that these things take time to build up and that thing changes over night but I wish that it did.

We were away over the weekend with family to celebrate a birthday and it was a fun weekend and I managed to pull it together but it used up a whole week of spoons ( if that makes no sense to you you can read about the spoon theory here) and so once we got back on Monday I just wanted to spend the whole week sleeping. That wasn't really. an option so I have just moved through the motions of appearing functional and being presentable to the world. I can fake it well, I have been doing it for years but all I really want to do is get in my bed and alternate between sleeping and binge watching TV on my iPad until life seems a little less awful.

Instead this week I spent an entire day at the mental health hospital for a an assessment for Raymond, bought groceries, walked the dog and gone to therapy for me and for Kate and Raymond. Its almost the weekend and that will come with at least one lazy morning but there is so much to do around here both inside and out that my desire to do nothing won't really be an option.

so yep - meh is the word of the week. Maybe it will be different soon.

Monday 10 June 2019

It's time to ask for help

It's Monday morning.

Who likes Mondays? When my boys where little I loved them because it meant school and although that came with its own set of challenges it was a welcome break after a weekend of being together all the time.

I long for those days when things were hard but predictable. I had a handle on their behaviour and rocked parenting them most days. That feels like a life time ago.

Now do I not only have no control over what is happening in our lives I am also stuck in a loop of depression and despair that I can't seem to break no matter how hard I try.

It has been happening for a long time, the constant sad and negative self talk has been slipping into my days. The tape that plays in my head that tells me I'm worthless, a bad parent, not good enough no longer seems to have a stop button. There is a pause and I might get through a few hours or even a day but before long the pause pops up and it plays again and again.

The constant tape playing coupled with a day last week that quite frankly scared the crap out of me has me waiting at this exact moment for a doctor's appointment so that I can get some anti-depressants because it's time. I can't continue to have days where I think that actually running away from my life or driving my car into something solid at fast speeds is some how an appropriate solution to getting through this.

Last week the tape in my head went from its regular set of statements to one that was suggesting various extreme things none of which were a reasonable plan. I felt so much like just disappearing from the earth would solve all my problems and as I sat silently sobbing feet away from my husband who was watching TV I was scared that the ideas in my head would become my reality.

I went to therapy last week and was honest about how hard it is to function everyday right now and within an hour of leaving I had called the doctor. Not because anyone told me I had to but because I felt like that was the best course of action given the current status of my life.

I have been here before, I have walked this road and 20 years ago when I was clinically depressed and actively suicidal the meds I was on helped and took the extreme edge off of dealing with full time  university, full time work and dealing with my own trauma story which had been largely repressed until I was 21.

I was thinking about that in the car yesterday, I remembered and started to manage my own trauma in the fall of 1998 and in the fall of 2018 my kids disclosed the trauma that they had been surviving in our home for much of their childhoods. 20 years is a long time and so much has changed in my life since then. I had no idea this is what my life would look like then, this was not my plan.

This was the road I planned to be on and yet here I am and so I must find a way to continue to walk because their really are not any other options.



Monday 3 June 2019

I thought it would be Little Women...

When I dreamed about parenting I thought my life would be like Little Women - yes there would be hard times and life might not be easy but as a family we work together and grow through the hard parts together. There would be fond memories of our lives as the children grew and eventually had families of their own. We would sing and crack jokes and they would move into the world knowing that they were loved and wanted by parents who chose to create a family from a group of people who they came to love with their whole hearts.

I did not get Little Women but instead got Flowers in the Attic because we had a child who systematically divided our family and created such pain and trauma for all of us that we will always all be affected by the choices that he made. He pushed down his pain and trauma and then recreated what had happened to him time and time again as he hurt others because it seemed to be the only response that he could make sense of and so he clung to it. There were secrets and lies for so many years and when they finally came to light our world was shattered into so many pieces that there was just no way to gather them all up again.

Now we are beginning to share the secrets with each other as we all try to heal, to pick up as many of the pieces as we can knowing that we will never be the same as we once were. We speak of our trauma and share our pain with everyone but him because the system is trying to keep us safe by keeping him away from us but that only makes things worse. When we can't be in relationship with one another we can't heal and move forward, we can't speak of the pain that his actions have caused and trauma that he created. We can't work towards him making amends and being accountable for the choices that he made and how they have affected so many lives.

We are trapped and so is he as we all await a court to hear our stories and to pass judgement on young man who really is just a product of the brokenness of a system that was meant to protect him. As we wait I will hope and pray that he gets help to process his trauma because if that had happened we would not all be living the life we currently are.

He will always be my child.