What doesn't kill us....

I used to have such a good attitude on life.  I really used to believe all of the crap that people told me about how if you do the right thing law of reciprication and all that.  I've tried to do it by myself.  I know I'm not the only one that these things happens to but I don't get it.   My entire adult life has been a struggle.  Maybe I'm getting paid back for the way that I treated my mom when I was lets say 12-22.  Maybe all the times I spat back at her, the day I left when I was 15, the day I was dropped off at the airport because I was in love with an older man when I was 19.  Maybe if I had listened, well I'm sure if I had listened, things would be better or different. 

If I had waited for love for someone who wanted me, if I had waited for someone to take care of me because they wanted to and not because I made them, I wouldn't be alone right now.  My daughter's dad could not care less.  He has three biological children, Paris 18, Kaylee 14, and Madalyn 12.  He has never lived with these children, well Paris for a few years when he was a small boy and then a teenager, but he was quickly shipped off to be raised by his sister.  Kaylee and Madalyn his two daughters do not even know him, yet two years ago he adopted a young son and is now housing foster children.  He is not a good man.  He is not the man that I would want my daughter to look up to for love and security but it doesn't matter because he is not there.  He has never paid me any kind of support as I'm sure he hasn't to any of the other women that he claimed to love and promised forever.  He does not call my daughter for her birthday nor just to see how she is doing.  Last summer she came to visit him and after weeks of babysitting his adopted child eight to ten hours a day she asked to come home.  I arranged for her to stay with my cousin for about a week until I could make the trip to come and get her, he never spoke to my cousin never called to ask if Maddy was ok.  This has really affected her.  She is already cold and hard to men. 

I don't bring men in and out of my children's lives.  I generally have long relationships and wait for long period of times in between.  After I divorced my husband I was with a man for almost two years, I was alone for about a year and then with the last boyfriend I had for over two years.  We broke up in December 2008, it is now February 2010 and I am just now starting to let someone else in.  I think I choose well in the moment, but looking back you see all the red flags but caught up in the emotion of "I love you" and "finally someone is saying it to me...they must mean it" you dismiss the flags and say to yourself that you are being too picky, that no one is perfect. 

I chose to dismiss all the flags with my ex-husband.  I chose to overlook that he and his family outsts the wife of his dead brother and his child because she at some point had to move on.  I chose to dismiss that they really whole heartedly believed that my youngest son was not of their blood because he was "too white".   Now I am in a horrible custody battle and on many, many occations have had my children kept from me, hidden from me, not been able to talk to them for months at a time, accussed of burning them over their body with cigarettes, accused of horrible, radical, not true things all in the name of what is good for them; according to him.  My children have not been allowed to just be kids.  Even kids from a broken home should not know the things that my kids know.  My ex-husband and his new wife think that it is funny to mock me and to speak badly of me, even when it is not true.  All for the sake of child support and winning the game.  I really truly just want what is right and good for them.  My oldest son Jonathan is going to be 10 this year.  As I go into the newest wave of this battle I feel like on many levels that I have already lost him.  He is combative and hurt and pushes me away.  But once he is with me and I can hold him against me he melts the way that a son does when he is in his mother's arms.  My ex-husband doesn't understand the importance of this.

I messed up.  I lost my job because of my own fault and doing.  I didn't mean to, it just happened.  I wish I could take it back and do things the right way.  With every ounce of my being I wish I could go back 6 months and make everything right.  Things got out of control.  I am now unemployed, in the middle of a horrible custody battle.  No unemployment benifits, no child support, no TANF, no way to make this work it seems.  But I know that I have to get through.  My babies count on me.  I cannot just roll over and sleep nor can I stop moving forward.  I have to make it work somehow.  So this time as I figure out how to make two trips totalling over 1200 miles round trip in a car that I cannot even pay the payment on, I hope that it is true....I hope it makes me stronger.