by Band Back Together | Oct 31, 2010 | A Letter I Can't Send, Coping With Divorce, Divorce |
Dear Girls:
I’m so sorry your mom and dad are splitting up. It’s a hard time in your life and will kick off other hard times to follow. I’m sorry for that. I know at four and five you don’t really understand what’s going on. You just know that for some reason Daddy is sleeping at our house and for the most part, you’re not. I’m glad Daddy is trying as hard as he is to stay connected to you. I know he misses tucking you in at night, but I also know it’s making the nights he does get to tuck you in that much more precious. And I know Mommy is doing her best to keep things together.
But enough about them…this is about you and the lessons I learned when I wasn’t much older than you.
#1 – This is not your fault. I know Mommy and Daddy have told you this already, but listen to your MaeMae because I know. Your job in life is to learn and grow and play and be kids. Grown-ups have other things to do and sometimes this means you get hurt in the process. I’m sorry. There’s really no way around that. But I know they’re trying to do the best they can to be better people and right now that means they need to not be together. There was nothing I could have done to keep my Mommy and Daddy from divorcing. There was nothing Daddy could have done to keep Grumpy and BeBe from divorcing.
#2 – Even though it’s not your fault and you did absolutely nothing wrong…it still hurts. And you’re going to get mad and get sad and miss Daddy and have a whole bunch of other feelings. It’s okay. Tell Mommy and Daddy about it. Tell me and Grumpy. Tell Nana and Papa. We’ll listen. We’ll hug you. And we’ll love you no matter what you’re feeling.
#3 – This is especially for you N. It’s not your job to help Mommy. It’s not your job to help her figure out what to do. It’s not your job to worry. You’re 5 years old. Your job is Kindergarten. Your job is practicing tying your shoes and figuring out how you want your face painted on Pep Rally day. Enjoy being 5. It’s a fun age. You still get to take naps at school. Trust me, when you get to be 25 like you so want to do and you have kids and a job and a husband and bills and taxes and all of the stuff grownups have….you’ll wish you were 5 again. So please stop trying to be a grown-up and go play with your sister and have fun.
#4 – K, you just keep being you. With your smiles and giggles and scribbles. I know Mommy really wants you to practice your letters, but scribbles are important too. And I know that your smiles and giggles and hugs make everybody you know feel better. But it’s okay to be sad, too. We love you no matter what. And don’t stop playing games with your Grumpy. He loves every minute of it.
And most importantly of all. No matter what happens between Mommy and Daddy. When they tell you they love you, they mean it. When they tell you it’s not your fault, they mean it. And please know, they’ve always done the best they could with the tools they had.
by Band Back Together | Oct 26, 2010 | Adult Bullying, Anger, Bullying, Childhood Bullying, Coping With Bullying, Emotional Boundaries, Guilt, How To Heal From Being Bullied, How To Help With Low Self-Esteem, Loneliness, Self Loathing, Self-Esteem, Shame, Stalking, Teen Bullying, Teen Rumors, Cliques, Gossip and Hazing Resources, Teen Sexuality |
We were the best of friends through high school – “The Three Musketeers”. We were going to be best friends for life. Sometime during senior year, they started changing. Drinking. Smoking. Having sex with anyone who looked their way.
That wasn’t for me. I chose not to party with them. They teased me about it, joking that I was the “good” one.
Not long after graduation, there was a situation where I chose my family over them. It all blew up, and the bullying and stalking began.
They prank-called me. They pitted our mutual friends against me with ridiculous lies. They showed up to my workplace and said they were going to kill me. They sat behind me in college classes and loudly whispered to others about how horrible I was. How I was an ugly, sad person. How they had just “pretended” to be my friend for all those years. They told all my secrets to anyone who would listen.
This continued for almost two years.
After the death threats at my workplace, I let them know that I would take out a restraining order if they ever contacted me again.
I blocked them on Facebook. I graduated from that college and went to another one in a different town. I changed my phone number.
Though I haven’t heard from them for years, I still feel sick when I think about them. They caused me incredible stress, self-doubt, and loneliness.
I don’t talk about it much, because I don’t want to give them the pleasure of knowing that they got under my skin. I left out many details of the story, and details about who I am, just in case they find this.
I’m now a happily married woman with a great career, an amazing husband, and a great group of true friends.
But I feel like I’ll always be looking over my shoulder, waiting for their next move.
by Band Back Together | Oct 20, 2010 | Anger, Anxiety, Family, Feelings, Guilt, How To Help A Friend With Infertility, Infertility, Jealousy, Loneliness, Sadness, Stress, Trauma |
“baker baker baking a cake
make me a day
make me whole again
and i wonder what’s in a day
what’s in your cake this time”
Infertility has forever changed the fundamentals of my being. Almost two years have passed since I suffered through the last of my IVF cycles. Physically, my body seems to have recovered from that violation. Emotionally, I am damaged beyond repair. I mourn the loss of that whole, hopeful person I once was. Even though he’d never admit it, I’ve also crushed my husband’s dreams of normalcy. I can’t help but wonder how many maybe babies there were that we never knew, that never stood a chance. I’m heartbroken for my friends who are still fighting the uphill battle towards motherhood and those who are suffocating under the crushing weight of loss.
Maybe today I’ll file away some of my bitterness and anger. So much of it I carry around in secret. After all, I have my beautiful, perfect little girl here in my arms. What about my friends who don’t? Don’t they better deserve to wear their heartache like a badge of honor?
Aren’t I supposed to just get over it and just be happy? I want to, but I know I never will.
by Band Back Together | Oct 19, 2010 | Emotional Abuse, Single Parenting |
People who know me refer to me as a single parent. I don’t really like that distinction because while I AM single and I AM a parent, the stigma attached to “single parent” is not a good one.
My Gigi is 5. She and I left her dad almost exactly five years ago when she was seven months old. He was mean and emotionally abusive. He seems to have changed a bit – or at least he loves his little girl more than he ever loved me.
He is involved. He sees her one evening a week, every other weekend and every other week he gets another shorter evening. It tears my heart out every single time she goes. Sometimes she cries and sometimes she runs away. Sometimes I tell her if she does either of those things she won’t be able to play with her friends in the neighborhood the next day because those things “hurt her daddy’s feelings.”
I’m sick of him and his feelings. My little girl wants to stay HOME. My house. Not his.
The other day a friend was talking about public schools in our area. She mentioned a school that is not particularly good and said, “well you know, all those poor kids have single moms and their test scores are horrendous.” Now, are there test scores horrendous because they have a single mom? Or what? The demographics of the school are not desirable due to the number of one parent homes.
Hmmmm…I’m a one-parent home. Does that mean my child will not be as smart? Or not do well on tests? Or will be a behavior issue or somehow not succeed because she lives in a single parent home? I choose not to believe that. You see, my daughter is MUCH better off with living in a single parent home. Her Mama may be messy and scatterbrained but she does not cry every day anymore or do things like look at her little girl and make the promise every single day that no one will ever hurt her.
I am a single parent. I did not choose this path, but I live this path. Would I like to have someone around to help pay the bills, cook the meals, clean up the kitchen and do a load of laundry? Yes. But I also would want to be in love with this person. And have that person love me back.
Another friend on Facebook had a status that said, “K is happy she doesn’t have to be a single parent anymore. Hubby will be home in three hours.”
You are not a single parent. You have a husband. Who works and makes money. He may be traveling for work or away from home but you are not a single parent. You don’t understand how much coordination it takes to figure out when and who will go to school conferences. Or what your child will be for Halloween or give her the choice of just having two Halloween costumes. You do not have to put a screaming, fighting, kicking child to bed when she has been up too late so she can have quality time with daddy. You don’t have to worry about your little girl looking at you and saying, “Mama, I love you the best. So much more than my daddy.”
I choose to not let the stigma of being a “single parent” define me. I try to wear the badge proudly and let my daughter know that we can do it ourselves. We are strong…Mama and Gigi against the world. I am raising her to be a strong woman who knows that her Mama can fix the sink or mount the shower head without the help of a man.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a man hater. I would love for Prince Charming to come in and sweep me off my feet. But at this point it would be a distraction from my most important job. My daughter. I can’t imagine having to share her with anyone else. I miss her when she’s gone. We have been apart so much I should be used to it. But sometimes I still cry because I miss her when she is gone for a weekend.
I am a single parent and I’m not ashamed.
by Band Back Together | Oct 18, 2010 | Breast Cancer, Cancer and Neoplasia, Grandparent Loss, Grief, Hospice, Loss, Sadness, Stroke |
Cancer sucks. My grandma, barely sixty years old, died from breast cancer when I was four. Even though I was so young, I still remember watching her suffer. I remember watching my mother and her sister suffer, too. Even though I was young, I still remember thinking if there was really a God, why would he put my grandma through all of this?
She never hurt a soul…and I loved her.
Cancer claimed my mother-in-law, too. I loved her as though she were my blood. Maybe even more than that because she never said a harsh word to me, or as far as I know, about me.
She had lung cancer and yes, she smoked. “I shot myself in the foot,” she said to me when she was diagnosed. She fought like the feisty Scottish lady that she was. She was diagnosed around Thanksgiving and lost her battle that following June.
Just about six months. DAMN! It was so quick! I know it didn’t seem so quick to her.
She went through chemotherapy and all of the horrible shit that went along with it. She did everything she was supposed to do. She did everything right. And then they found cancer in her brain. The woman never took a fucking pill in her life and here she was having fucking brain surgery! She made it through the surgery. My sister-in-law and I went into the recovery room and damn it if that lady wasn’t sitting up and talking right after having her skull busted open.
While she was in rehab, she had a stroke. It was a kind I had never heard of. It was progressive so it started out slowly. She knew what was going on.
Chef and I went to visit her in the hospital and at that point she said she had had enough. She said to us, “if they find any more cancer, I don’t want to be treated.” If she had known that she only had six months to live, she would have said, “Screw chemo,” and gone to visit her grandchildren in Wisconsin.
I know that because she was an open book. She had no secrets. What you saw was what you got.
The next day she could not speak.
We were the last of her children to carry on a conversation with her. When the doctors finally determined that she had had a stroke and that it was progressive, my sister-in-law decided to bring her back home. The doctors said she had less than a week to live, so she would come home to be surrounded by her children, grandchildren and her beautiful antiques.
My husband and his sisters took care of her for that week. Because my children were so young, I stayed home and came for the weekend. My two year old daughter stood by my mother-in-law’s bed and spoke to her. She called her “gammy.” My mother-in-law would grunt occasionally. Sure enough on day seven – just a week after we had our last conversation with her – my mother-in-law lost her battle.
I ask the question once again, forty years later… if there was really a God, why would he put my mother-in-law through all of this?
She never hurt a soul…and I loved her.
by Band Back Together | Oct 17, 2010 | Coping With Divorce, Divorce, Sadness |
My sister and brother-in-law are getting divorced.
You know on video games when one piece explodes and all the other pieces around it are shaken? I feel like one of the other pieces. Shaken. And, sad.
I feel overwhelmed by my sadness. I stood up for this marriage at its beginning. And, now I’m watching it crumble. I go to bed in the middle of the afternoon, unable to sleep, unable to read, unable to move. My husband says nice things to me like, “Get some rest,” and “Are you okay?” and it makes me cry. Then Rosey Grier’s song “It’s Alright to Cry” starts running through my head – and that’s just annoying. (Don’t get me wrong, Rosey. I think you have an awesome name for a guy. I think it’s awesome that you were a huge football player who knit and taught the boys of my generation that it was okay to cry. But, your hokey song is messing up my breakdown – not awesome.)
I empathize far too well with their 6- and 9-year-old girls. I want to make sure my sister doesn’t fall for my older niece’s act that she’s so mature and she understands (an act I myself perfected at the age of 12). I don’t want my sister to make her her confidant or tell her more than her young heart and head can handle (I don’t think she is doing that. I just really, really don’t want her to accidentally do that). I’m glad my sister is taking them to a counselor.
I just really wish I didn’t feel like a 12-year-old girl right now. Talk about someone who needed counseling. Could I really have 24-year-old emotions with which I’m dealing? Probably. The best counseling I ever got over my parents’ divorce was one session with a lady who told my mom I needed to go to a Christian summer camp for a month. I guess she thought Je-sus (please read that in your best evangelical voice) could solve all my problems.
(And, don’t get me wrong, I think He’s a great guy who has blessed my life immensely and saved me a place in heaven. But, I don’t think He was the guy to let me sit down and vent about how much my parents f*%#ed up their marriage and my childhood.)
So. That’s that. Pray for my sister and brother-in-law friend and their kids. Don’t worry about me. I’m a grown-up who can take care of my own emotional well-being now.* I really shouldn’t take someone else’s crisis and make it about me. But, when I blog, I’m selfish that way.
And, sad.
*I was smart enough to marry my best friend. He’s strong when I’m weak. Also, thanks to this crisis, we’ve both looked each other in the eye and sworn we’re in it for good. We’ll always talk, always be honest and always do whatever work it takes to keep our marriage together. At least I have confidence in my “forever” when so many other “forevers” are ending all too soon…
