Me

I guess I am all over the place with this blog and maybe I should just narrow it down to one thing, something popular to read? I don't know. I really only started this to capture my thoughts and write.

I was taking a look at my facebook wall and saw that James Patterson had posted a contest. A writing contest. I have put it off and thought how no one would read  a short story from me, or I am just not good enough, but I caught myself today and said... out loud too... no one will ever know if I am good enough, to include myself, if I never try. So, I am going to go over to the website and read over the terms and sit down for once and start using my imagination!

I don't know how many books I started to write and then gave up. I don't know how many times I picked up my camera and because it wasn't the camera I wanted or the camera that I believed would only increase my potential, I just gave up. It's not about the tools, it's not all about the belief, it's about the person. Do you just talk yourself out of things that you know you could do, but because you just don't have enough faith in yourself and your ability, you just give up?

I am making myself a promise today. I won't give up... I will give my life over to the All Mighty and I will follow his lead. Sometimes you just need to rest, you need to recuperate, you need to unplug from the world you're in and you just need him to carry you. That's what the old poem was about right... footprints... while you struggle and you stress and you just feel like you can't go on, then you see only one set of footprints, that's not you walking alone, but it is that he's carrying you over the sand and he holds you high so that you don't have to go at life alone or manage the stress alone. I am going to pray for my forks in the road. I am going to ask for his help and his guidance. I am going to ask for him to carry me for a while, because I have pushed him out thinking I could do it all by myself and I am seeing that I cannot.

Being young... being naive, not understanding why things happen, growing up.

Being the child of a military man wasn't easy for me. Moving all of the time making friends in new places, making more enemies than friends. Certain things in my life created me, the strong me, the scared me, the weak me. I keep my secrets bottled up, I don't talk about them and I keep them safely secured so that no one will ever know and then they can't judge me. Finding out that when you're only a child bad things happened, so bad that your parents don't want to tell you about it, so to this day you still don't know. Being a teenager and bad things follow you, but do they follow you because you asked for it, because you let them happen? Becoming an adult and you marry, and you feel safe, but then again bad things happen to you and now you don't know what SAFE really is? Divorced and with kids and you want to be young again and be free again, but you love your kids and you want to protect them, but you struggle between the free and the tied down and somewhere you do what you can to have both and to live both ways and you make mistakes and you pay the consequences for those mistakes. You struggle with money, but there's always a roof over your head and there's always food on the table and there's always a job and daycare is paid, but there's not always a phone and not always electricity, but there's always a way to pay for the babysitter so you can have a night out with friends. Then something happens and someone comes into your life and for some reason you GROW UP and you don't need to drink, you don't need to party and you don't need to WORRY any more. You marry again.

I was told by my ex mother in law that she wouldn't read my palm because she was afraid of what she saw. She shared her fear with my then sister in law, who then shared it with me. My ex mother in law was afraid because I had a spilt life line and that could only mean one thing. I would live two different lives. Who knew whether I would die and be reborn, which some believe can be true, I don't know what I believed back then. But after my divorce from her son, and my second marriage, I started to think this was what she meant. Then a little more than a year after marrying my second husband I found out the true meaning to her fears. My life took a whole new direction. I no longer had ties to her family. I no longer had a reason to call my ex husband every month or for him to send a check to me any time his new wife felt like it. My girls who were the reason for that old life, now created my new life, and they were gone. It took every inch of me, it took every ounce of me, and I gathered it all up and once again I tried to carry it all on my own. I feared him, I hated him and I loathed anyone who tried to tell me that he was my savior in a time that I truly needed him. He was GOD.

As any parent who has lost a child asks... how? why? why me? what did I do wrong? not how can I go on, but how can I NOT go on?

He wasn't an enemy of mine. He wasn't anything to me any more. But he never left my side. When I wanted to hear my girls voices he managed to send me a tape of them laughing. Just out of the blue I get a video tape from a young girl and her family who used to watch the girls for us. The video was of the girls laughing at their house, playing with their kids and the young girl who babysat for us was behind the camera catching it all. When I missed the girls and wanted to be with them, he brought me their scent. It wasn't the smell you would think of when you're holding your children or child. It wasn't the baby powder that you used on their skin or the lotion you smothered on them so they wouldn't be dry and scaly. It was the smoke I had last smelled on their bodies after the firemen laid them in the grass in the yard. It was the charred smell I had stuck in my nose for weeks after we had them cremated. It was the burning embers of the house while I was trying to get to my girls in the upstairs bedroom and the flames I inhaled while sitting in front of the school next door watching my life as I knew it end before my eyes. The first time he brought them to me I panicked and ran around my entire house trying to find the fire and extinguish it. I cried when the smell was gone and I had realized it wasn't real and it wasn't my mind playing tricks on me. My girls had been there and now they were gone and I spent all that time fearing the worst when I should have been cherishing every last minute they had to give.

I'm not angry any more, I have my faith and it is strong and I do pray and I do thank him every day for the gifts in my life and instead of praying to my girls asking them to give him a message, I now pray to him and ask that he give them a message from me. I lived, I continue to love, and I now have two new gifts that the girls played every part in making come true. I don't get my visits any more, but I look in my boys eyes and I can see their sisters hearts and I know that even with my new life they are still every part of me. My boys will never really know their sisters, but they know that they have them and that they are loved just like they are still around. The boys know their names and they've seen the pictures and they know my heart aches for them now and again. My boys are an addition to my life and make my new life worth living and they remind me that there is an "ever after" and it's only going to be as happy as I make it for everyone. I give my life to him as a dedication to my girls and the thought that I will one day see them again. They are waiting on the other side for me. For me and their brothers and their daddy Jason they make a place for us.

I give my life to GOD, direct me, shape me, and allow me to represent him. I am in service to him and he has my alliance with him. My every day is possible through him.

I will be what he needs me to be and I will go where he leads me and for now, he leads me to you. My friends who need him, my family who grieve and want to understand him, may you all find in him what I have found, my salvation is him.

For those of you who know not of the insanity of life, I pray that you never have to go through what I did to get here, but that you find the divinity of life by getting to know the power that holds you up when you just want to lie down. Don't give up, don't put it aside, take charge and hold on for the ride.

Much love and sacrifice.
Me

January 2013

We made it. It's now 2013 and the belief of the end of all time has passed. If you really understood the Mayans they were predicting the end of the world as we knew it and the beginning of a new one. I want to interpret that the way I see it...

May it be great, good or bad, we have to live in it. So, let's be positive and look for a great existence and do what we can as humans and strive for the best and teach each other to be our best.

A young woman told me the other day that I should really keep up with my blog, that I should share more about my experiences and let the world know how I heal and then maybe someone who needs the help can learn from me. So, here goes....

I met a young woman and she reminds me soo much of me. She has had a hard life and as hard as it is she's still trying to figure things out.  I didn't do drugs or have parents who didn't care where I was at all hours. If anything I felt my parents were too much into my business and that they were intrusive. I was always mad and trying to "get away". Looking for a way to piss them off any way I could. Rebellion... the word most youngsters should really understand. So this young woman, she fills my head with all her life stories and I think to myself, she has to  be joking. Because of her confidence in me I won't reveal her secrets. They are between us. Then I looked back on my life and I came to realize that I had someone in my life to help direct me. To give me advice about being a single mother. Someone who took  me under her wing and helped me to understand that I can be angry, and I can be tired and I can still be a mother to my girls. Then my girls died. I was alone again. Or so I thought. I had found a new friend. She helped me understand my pain. She walked with me when I needed someone to lean on. Someone to cry with and I needed her in my life. These two women, although older than I was, touched me and taught me. They gave me direction and gave me hope. We learned together our own little problems and shared in each other's pain.

My first friend in Colorado.. I was so young. I had two baby girls and I still wanted to party and be young and forget that I had responsibilities. I didn't want to forget my girls, I just didn't want to have to play mom 100 percent of the time. I wanted to have fun and I wanted to love and be loved. I wanted a mans touch. I found it. Everywhere other than where I needed to be. I learned from my friend that my life could be much different than it was. She taught me that the love I was looking for could only be found in my girls. She taught me that they should come first and that everything else would fall into place. She taught me that I could still have fun with out going out to party all night. When I did as she said I learned that I could still be an adult and still have fun and still have my girls and take care of them. She taught me to laugh at my problems and gain the strength I needed to battle my issues and win. She was my Terminator and I was her pupil. Then I remarried and he took me away from our little town and showed me more adventures that lie ahead. Little did I know that I would be leaving my life behind when I followed him.

A little more than a year went by and we had our struggles. My girls had a father who took care of them. They learned to trust him and he learned to understand them. Then one tragic night we lost them. My life turned upside down and inside out. I had convinced myself that I could not let my girls see me crawl in a hole and never come out. Although that is exactly how I felt. I didn't have friends. I had just moved to the last home my girls knew. We had just moved into our rental home not 1 month before and now they are gone. What had I done? Why was I being punished? What did I say that caused my baby girls to no longer be mine?

In comes my friend in Effingham, IL. I had just started back to work after losing my girls and everyone had come to their funeral. The chatting had died down and the whispers decreased. Then there was this woman, crying in the bathroom. I had hardly known who she was. She worked in a different department but sat right on the other side of my cubical. I knew her name. It was hard to forget. People would call me looking for her and vice versa. I knocked on that bathroom door and asked if there was anything I could do to help. Little did I know that she would be the next chapter in my life to teach me something new. I took from our friendship a new love. GOD. Where I was so ready to throw in the towel and hate him forever. Give up on my faith. She taught me to hold on, even tighter now, to my faith. She helped me to see him in a new light. She gave me a new shoulder to lean on. We sat in movies and I ended up in her lap more than I can count! Those scary movies she loved to see. Then again Jason had to go where the Army needed him. Actually, I made us move. I told Jason that either he asked for the Compassionate Reassignment to his home state of North Carolina so that his parents could help him, or we would be no more. So, we moved.

I have had many more friends in every state I have been in and in the many, many years that I have lived. Those friends have all taught me lessons and I have learned so much and they have carved a part of themselves into my life. I Thank GOD for all of them. For I have become the woman I am with their help and their love. So I tell you this story, because thinking back made me realize that I have come full circle. It is now my turn to help a young woman who  needs my life lessons to support her on her journey.

It's my turn to give the faith and the strength and the love that my friends have given me. I don't have to be a Godmother, I don't want to be a saint, I only want her to follow the life path that is set in front of her and to not have to relive tragedy but to understand faith and success. I want her to understand that we create our own destiny. We have to strive for the best in our lives. We surround ourselves with people we want in our future to shape our lives the way we envision it. This young woman needs the direction and the encouragement that my friends so lovingly gave me in my time of need. The right thing for me to do is pass on their generosity.

She fears I will leave again, and I will. But as I have done in my past I will continue to keep in touch and do my best to be her friend. She will see as I did that she won't need me as much as she thinks she does now, because she will take what she's learned from me and she will one day pass it on to someone who will need her too.

So now I take this opportunity to tell my two very best friends that I love them and I haven't said it, but THANK YOU. For everything you have done for me and continue to do for me. Blessed are they that love unconditionally.