Moving August 18, 2009

Dave’s parents helped us buy a used double-wide last month.  It’s a 1991 model that was smoked in since they bought it and they were not worried about cleaning either.  But it was cheap and the problems could be fixed so we bought it.  Our original plan was to move the trailer up onto his parents property where we had picked out a beautiful spot.  It shouldn’t have been a problem at all but the financing didn’t work out and everything changed.  Dave and his dad and brother worked like crazy to get the double-wide taken apart and prepared to move- severing all utility connections, removing the back deck, taking off the siding on the ends, ripping out shrubbery.  The whole shebang.   We got 90% of the carpeting torn out too.  But when we found out the bank was going to be a bunch of asses, our plans came to a screeching halt.  We had to formulate a new plan and quick because my kids and I are all due to start school soon.

So we are leaving the trailer where it is and moving into town (into a trailer park!! ugh) and making the kids change schools again.  It’s absolutely not what we want and we are disappointed by everything but we are making the best of a rotten situation.  The most stressful thing right now is our financial situation.  We have had to buy paint and certain supplies and pay utility deposits and we didn’t have it to spare.  Our car payment was due on the 10th and we haven’t paid it yet because any money we have has been promised to something more urgent.  And the hits keep coming in the financial department.  I have to spend $50 getting different birth certificates for all 4 kids because the state decided that the county certified ones are no longer acceptable and they are necessary to enroll them in this school.  Our first payment on the trailer is due this week and we don’t have it either.  School starts next week and we have absolutely no extra money to buy supplies or anything for the kids- clothes, shoes, backpacks; all of it has to wait a few weeks.  Also, Elaina needs a health evaluation from a doctor before she can start school and we have no health insurance.  To make matters worse,  I have developed a UTI and can’t afford to go to the doctor for a prescription but I don’t know how long I can wait with this situation.

To say I’m stressed is an understatement.  BUT!  We have our own place now!  I don’t have to live with anyone’s family anymore!  Yaaay!   We have been working to make the trailer livable and trying to remove the odor of nearly 20 years of cigarette smoke.  I’ve painted most of the ceilings (which were BROWN!!) and I’ve painted some of the walls which has helped a ton.  I put one coat of paint on the cabinet and drawer fronts and painted behind the stove and fridge (3 coats of primer and 2 of wall paint to cover what was there!!!).  I read online about how to remove odors and I found several recommendations for coffee grounds so I bought some cheap stuff (Caffeinated!  LOL) and some cheap disposable muffin tins and put coffee in the bedrooms and living room and family room and kitchen and it’s been sitting around for nearly a week now.  It’s honestly helped, which surprised me.  There is lingering odor but when we remove the blinds and change all the light bulbs and paint every single wall and ceiling, the odor should be totally gone.  We were given some used laminate flooring that was still in good shape so we put it in the living room and it looks amazing!!  Shockingly amazing.  It’s far from perfect but compared to what was here (nearly 20 year old disgusting sculptured blue carpet) it is awesome.

I decided to move in enough to get by so that I don’t have to keep running up to my in-law’s 2 or 3 times a day.  It’s too expensive w/ the gas guzzler that I drive.  We brought down a ton of boxes (mostly kitchen stuff) and our table and part of our living room furniture.  We brought down most of our beds and the bathroom stuff we use daily.  I can’t use my stove/oven yet because we haven’t had the gas turned on so we are stuck eating meals that I can make using the microwave.  It’s not as hard as you would imagine!  LOL  Tonight we had spanish rice with chicken fingers and cheese/sour cream on top.  I was going to make burritos but then remembered I can’t use my oven.  Duh!  LOL  Not the best meal we’ve ever had, but not too shabby either.  Today we cleaned the kitchen more and unpacked most of my kitchen boxes and that took about 5 hours.  Maxwell helped me a lot and the girls horsed around and made so much noise they got on my last nerve.  I yelled and threatened and sent them outside.  When it got late in the day, I finished up a bit of school paperwork and headed over to their school to turn it in and we got a mini tour of their school and chatted a bit about details and such.  When we left I finally took the van through the car wash (I did it by hand cause it’s so much cheaper!) and then we got a few groceries at Save-A-Lot and headed home.

It’s only Tuesday and I am worn out and sore from nearly a week of non-stop work down here.  The weather chose this last week to warm up for the summer and it has been the hottest temps of the entire summer.  In the 90’s and just oppressively hot.  We don’t have our a/c hooked back up yet so it’s been really tough to get anything done here.  We ended up bringing a window a/c unit from the apartment and it has helped a lot.  Fans help too.  And Dave just got our ceiling fan up and running.  Wahoo!!

So, we’ve spent the last 24 hours in our new place.  It’s a disaster and there are many rooms with no flooring whatsoever and sooo much work left to do but IT’S OURS!!  And we are finally out of someone elses home and are able to regroup and be a real family again.  The stress of everything will increase as my school and the kids school starts back up next week.  But in a couple of weeks life should calm down and the financial stress should ease in the next month or so.  At least I sure hope so!  heh  We are in our own place now!  Wahooo!

Fighting July 25, 2009

We’ve been fighting the battle of the laundry heap today.  Tons to fold and put away, half a ton to wash and fold and put away.  God I hate laundry.  If I ever become wealthy or well off, I will be hiring people to do my laundry!  LOL  We are making good progress thus far.  It’s nice to see empty baskets now instead of ones overflowing with laundry to fold.

My sister and mother will be here next weekend.  I haven’t seen my sister is a year and my mom since the end of December.  I miss having family around.  My family….. Dave’s family is making me crazy so they don’t count.  LOL  We will be soo busy for the time they are here.  Have to go up to Pittsburgh to pick up my mom from the airport one day, back up to Pittsburgh a few days later to spend the day at an amusement park and drop off my sister’s husband at the airport.  Friday, Saturday and Sunday we will be spending the day at a convention all day.  After that I’m not sure what we’ll do but we’ll only have a few days to be together before my family leaves.  I really wish they could stay longer.  I won’t see them again for a year and a week (9 days) is just not enough time.

Things have slowed down on the moving out front.  We’ve bought a doublewide and have it 90% ready to move but the property isn’t ready yet.  We need to have the septic put in and a foundation put in and the water lines need to be run from the public water supply to our property.  I was so hoping it would have been farther along than this by now.  But it all seems to have stalled this week.  My biggest desire was to be semi-ready to move into it by the time my family got here because it’s going to be so tight having them all stay with me in my in-laws home.  Not sure how we’ll work it out w/ sleeping arrangements now.  At least we will stay busy during the days so hopefully we’ll not be bothered too much by the tight living quarters at night.

Not much else going on here.  Some family drama that never seems to go away but it’s not something worth going into.  School is going well still.  I finished with my Sociology class and got an A for a final grade in there.  Now I have to finish my math class and I know I’m getting an A in there as well.  My fall schedule will be so full that I’m kind of worried about how well I’ll do.  Especially since I won’t have work like research or stuff to just read in my Sign Language classes, I will have to practice and practice what I learned in class.  It will be very time consuming compared to what I’ve done so far.  I am taking my required math class, an Intro to Biology class and 3 sign language classes for a total of 18 credits this fall.  It’ll be a long four months!!

Friends July 18, 2009

You know, being friends or having friends or finding friends- all of this is such a miserable subject for me.  It’s SO hard for me to find friends or make friends (or keep them).  I am not shy so it’s not that I can’t start a conversation.  And I’ve got on well with lots of people.  But I am still very lonely for a girlfriend.  I have made some good friends over the years.  Well, I thought they were good friends but then something awful happens and they so freely walk away from me.   And I am left scratching my head, wondering what the hell just happened.

It started when I got married.  My best friend at the time was hurt that I spent so much time with Dave while we dated and when it came time for us to marry, we had to change plans at the last second and postpone the wedding.  We didn’t want to wait for several months for our issue to be worked out so we decided to just get married by a judge in judge’s chambers.  For personal reasons most of Dave’s family chose not to attend, save for his brother and his wife/kids.  My best friend also decided that she wasn’t going to attend for similar reasons and from the time she gave me the note saying as much, our relationship was over- it became very superficial after that.  I deeply mourned the loss of our close, close friendship for years and to this day (15 years later), it still hurts to think about it all.

When we lived in NH I met a woman whom I clicked with instantaneously and we became very good friends and I adored her for her strength and kindness and humor.  I thought that finally, I have found another bosom friend!  But we moved back to WV and after a couple of years of corresponding back and forth regularly, she stopped writing back or responding at all to letters and I now haven’t spoken to her since Dec. 2006.   I don’t know what happened.

While in NC I met a woman just 2 years older than me and we (again) got along extremely well and there was just this great connection between us.  We both struggled with depression and understood one anothers issues so well.  She was going through a difficult time with her husband (they ended up divorcing) and leaned heavily on me for support both emotionally and financially.  I loved it.  I loved helping her and listening to her and laughing with her.  I just loved having a friend again.  She filled a big hole in my heart/soul.  Well….. can you see where this is going?  She suddenly went silent on me.  Didn’t want to talk to me or text or anything.  Said she was ‘in a cave’.  I was confused and tried to ask what was wrong and that’s all she would say.  About a week later I texted her and asked what was going on and she said that by pushing the issue it just pushed her away.  What would you have done?  She never said that she was having a hard time with depression and needed some space, nothing like that at all.  Just ‘I’m in a cave’.  I was hurt and confused and one morning, after suffering from insomnia the entire night before, I emailed her an emotional letter practically begging her to just please explain what was going on, tell me what I had done to push her away, ask her why she felt she could no longer speak to me, etc.  I was emotional and had PMS so it was a heavy, wet, snot-filled email since I had been crying for hours.  LOL  This email led to a series of emails wherein she told me she felt she had explained things to me quite well and couldn’t understand why I was so upset with her.  She said that my overly-emotional email (that I later apologized for, explaining that I had written to her on nearly no sleep) scared her and she felt that she needed to protect her son and was going to just concentrate on him for the time being.  I was stunned.  Protect her son?  From ME?  The person who babysat for her countless times for free (happily and willingly), who took really good care of her son and who’s kids adored him?  She wasn’t interested in trying to talk things out with me, try and get on the same page.  And after that, she was done.  Wouldn’t speak to me anymore and as the months went by was curt and short or just ignored any attempts I made to try and patch things up.  I was the bad person because I got upset that she refused to speak to me with no explanation.

It’s been just over a year now and every time I think about things with her I get angry and hurt again.  I sent every email and text that we exchanged to my sister and told her to be brutally honest with me- was I wrong, or was I a loon or did I say something totally insane that was unforgivable?  She told me she couldn’t see that I had said anything offensive at all and didn’t understand this woman’s reaction.  My sister would have been very honest with me if she felt I was wrong so I trust her opinion.

Last year, right around the time everything happened w/ the last woman, I met someone new.  And again, we hit it off and started up a great friendship.  We chatted and texted constantly and we got along very, very well.  There were some issues w/ my religious stance on something that upset her but we talked about it and after a little while she seemed to be fine and we picked up where we left off.  We moved back to WV in December and this girl and I still chatted on-line as often as we could until May.  In our last conversation we talked about the problems she was having with her boyfriend and his daughter and while I didn’t agree with everything she said, I was supportive and kind and tried to offer suggestions that may (or may not) have been helpful to her.  I went and reread our last IM conversation yesterday because shortly after that last conversation she stopped speaking to me.  Didn’t respond to email or IM’s or anything at all.  I finally found out yesterday that she is mad at me because she felt I was being judgemental about her situation w/ her boyfriends daughter.  She felt that I was judging her for her not being the perfect step parent.

I was shocked because I couldn’t figure out what I had said.  So, as I said, I went back and reread our last conversation and I’m still confused.  I said things like ‘I’m so sorry for what you are going through’ and ‘I wish I could help you’ and ‘I’m really sorry’ and ‘I only want you to be happy’…..  Over and over, between suggestions and chatting about things, I kept saying how I felt sad that she was sad and unhappy.  And yet I find out that all came across as judgmental to her.  I am at a loss now.  What the hell is wrong with me????  How can I keep meeting these women whom I get along so well with and end up looking like the biggest ass when the friendship (inevitably) ends?  Dave is supportive and says it’s not me, it’s them and while I look at things and see why he says that, I can’t help but feel that it MUST be me.  There must be something inherently wrong with me that I keep losing these friendships.

I want a girlfriend.  Someone to hang out with and laugh with and chat with.  Someone to go shopping with and have a girls’ nite out with.  But I can’t find anyone that will stay friends with me very long.  I try so hard to be a good friend- supportive and helpful and available and just plain nice.  And each time it blows up in my face.  It’s really hard to not think that I’m just a bad person, a bad friend and that I’m just not meant to find that kind of happiness in this life.

I feel sad right now.  Defeated.  I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.  I do think that I’m a good friend and that I am a good person with a lot of love to give but I have been so expendable to all of these women.  I’m not important enough to fight for, to work through the rough patches that come with every relationship.  I’m so easily tossed aside and pushed away.

To all of you that I’ve met on-line and those that know me from years past- thank you.  For sticking by while I got lost in the depression and for cheering on my accomplishments and goals.  For not tossing me aside like garbage when I wasn’t convenient anymore.  It means a lot that you do care, even if we’ve never met in person or haven’t seen each other in years.  Thank you.