Moving!!!

The renters from the cottage moved out this week, and we can start moving in. Although my Mom just told me that my brother and his family may be moving suddenly out of the upstairs apartment, and she would rather have us live there. That puts me in a tough position because I know we will be struggling to keep up with the rent for the cottage, and it's smaller than the apartment too; but I really don't want to live in my parents' house. On the other hand, my Mom really doesn't want strangers living in her house. There is plenty of visual privacy but not much sound privacy. They aren't going to like Mark's music, and strangers aren't going to like all the noise the kids make. And I am going to be uncomfortable - still - having sex when I know people can hear us. Sound carries in a big old house at night. I'd much prefer the cottage.

Still, my parents are cutting us a break on the rent and I don't think I should insist on keeping the more expensive place. I guess if my brother ends up moving that fast, I will take it as a sign that the apartment was meant for us. Either way, it's a huge improvement over what we had last month!! 

My other blog

Suffer The Children

Photo post of last summer Part 1

I realized while cleaning out my blog that I never did post the promised photos of our Oklahoma trip. Actually, it took quite a while to collect them all. So here goes.

This was when we first arrived. It was pouring rain.

But it was over in a day or so.

There were plenty of these.

And these.

All together now...... "AWWWWWW" Lol.

Hunter was such a little gentleman.

This was in between the screams over whose turn it was on which swing hehe.

The water park trips were a necessity in that heat.

Hahahahaha! He waited and waited for that.

I think it may have been the ONLY place Andy had any fun.

Kissing cousins? Hehe. They were so cute.

But it did get a little crowded. No problem.

We all went to an awesome play park in the nearest big town an hour away.

We rode the carousel.

And played on the playground.

The rest will have to wait for Part 2.

Fresh

I decided, rather than leave each year's struggles and advice out in cyberspace for everyone to read forever, I am going to save my blog to a flash drive at the end of every year and let it start fresh. Part of this is because I began a second blog that I want to publicize more widely without giving this one up. Part of it is because I don't want to leave all the negativity of last year out there. But it is helpful to go back and read, so I intend to make a habit of this. It will be the best journal I can come up with.

Hybrids

Mark told me last night that my family was a hybrid. He's right. I've been reading several new blogs lately by women who have come out of strict Fundamentalist families, and their struggles and the paths they have taken to find healing for themselves and make a difference in raising their own children. I can relate to most of what they say, but there is a missing element. And that element is significant.

My parents were never part of a "movement," such as Quiverfull or that Bill Gothard stuff, I forget what they call it - psychology turned into a religion and used to abuse and manipulate all the non-heads of the households. I have friends who were part of it. I never had any close friends, I wasn't outside the house often enough to maintain normal relationships with anyone but my siblings and parents. (The closest I ever had to a best friend was a girl named Kimberly Brown who lived in the apartments behind our home when we were eight, and I lost touch with her after her parents divorced and she went to Florida with her father. I believe we were friends for about 7 months.) The friends/acquaintances who were part of these ferocious patriarchal teachings were my friends by default, and we have grown apart over the years despite our best penpal efforts. We no longer have anything in common. I am a wife and mother, and now a working woman. At 30 and nearly 30 years old, my friends are still dutifully keeping their father's house, raising their younger siblings, and waiting with earnest prayers for their father to meet the right man for them. What is left for us to say to each other?

Several of the families we associated with throughout my teens (if such distant, infrequent contact could be called association) were of this mindset to some degree. There were two major differences, however. The first difference was immediately apparent and always a source of great controversy between my mother and the other parents. My family was matriarchal. Where that came from had actually nothing at all to do with Scripture, and everything to do with an abused, and I dare say neglected, but strong-willed girl who grew into a very intelligent and controlling woman and decided to adopt my mother spiritually. And emotionally. She believed she was a prophet, and she was certainly something. She is a powerful person. She will make the Bible say anything she needs it too, and verbally bully and abuse anyone who dares argue with her until they are cowed into submission. 

It was her influence, less widespread but just as heavy as any other doctrines out there, that shaped my childhood. Americans were God's new chosen people. Women were his new chosen teachers because there were no good men left. My mother's place was in politics and publishing. My place was in the kitchen and laundry room, making sure that my parents' physical gifts from God (my siblings and I) didn't get in the way of my mother's spiritual gifts, which were far more important and must take priority over all else. My mother led the church services in our home. My Dad's place was working hard to provide for all of us, and spanking the boys if Mom's whippings weren't effective enough. I barely knew my Dad growing up. I was repressed and fearful of men, and he was respectful and somewhat confused about his oldest daughter's distrust, so we didn't really have much of a relationship.

Spankings were a major part of life. When you are told that God wants you to do a huge mountain of work and that there is something wrong with your children if their existence interferes, it causes problems. Most of us got whipped a few times a week, some a few times a day. My mother would cry and yell and wonder why on earth we didn't just LEARN! Why did we keep doing what she said not to OVER and OVER? And she wasn't being manipulative. She honestly believed that a child shouldn't need to be told more than once. I didn't understand until years later, after talking with her friend, how much of that was the result of her being manipulated and fed a load of insane, unrealistic bull-honky about what a Christian family should be like. Her "friend" would come to visit and criticize everything she was doing or not doing, everything she said and did, everything we said and did. Later, after my in-laws came smashing into our lives like a wrecking ball, she would draw unpleasant comparisons between the cleaniness of their house and the well-behaved silence of their kids, and the slightly disheveled appearance of our lived-in, bustling home. My mother was obsessed with getting her house perfect, fearing that she somehow set a bad example as a Christian if her kids spoke without being first addressed or left a toy on the floor, or if there was - Horror! Dust on the furniture!

Of course, my mother-in-law was an abusive, near-schizo hellcat who cleaned obsessively when angry, which was most of the time, and whose children feared to breathe loudly in her presence. But this was the role model that my mother's nose was rubbed in year after year, until the blessed day she finally took back the reins of her family for real and told my mother-in-law not to come back. It took being screamed at and cursed out in our driveway in front of all the children, but she finally did it.

And in doing so, she lost the friendship of someone she valued dearly, but whom she has been much better off without. My parents have changed a lot since I left home 10 years ago. They still believe most of the same stuff on paper - we recently had an argument about interracial marriage that got some blood boiling - but my mother has a lot more sense than she gave herself credit for.

And that is why we are hybrids. Because in spite of all the control, the criticism, the bullying, and yes, at times, the abuse, however unintentional - my parents raised us to think. They never wanted us to just go along. They studied the Bible. They made us study, even when we hated it. I was never allowed to argue about anything before I left home, because it set a bad example in front of the younger kids. But as my brothers grew up, and became vocal in their disagreements, and entered into conversations hitherto restricted to the adults, the dialogue in my family has slowly grown to a pretty healthy level. We all have political and religious discussions now, as a family, and we all disagree on a lot of things, some vehemently so. But we have yet to cut anyone off because of it. I pray we never stoop to that. It has taken me a long time to shed the inhibitions of my childhood enough to participate in these discussions. But it's been good. I wish some of the younger ones would be little more inhibited at times, and not run off at the mouth so hastily and show how little they know. Hehe.

So yes, I can relate to a lot of the articles I read. I too have had a long journey to find truth, to sort the chaff out. I know my Mom is going to be horrified that I decided today to stop spanking my boys. I just don't believe in it, and after living here for a month, I can no longer deny that I mostly do it because she expects me to. That is a bad reason. I still have a hard time with some things that I know are leftovers from the past, but they get less oppressive every day.

And I see the reason that I am healing, and still close to my family at the same time, when we have these tableside discussions. Because I have one brother who is using the Pearls to raise his kids, in spite of the fact that it is clearly not even beginning to work for his eldest; one who believes the world is ending on May 21st and that Sunday doesn't matter any more; one who has turned to the Fundamentalist patriarchal garbage so many of his friends believed; a sister who has confided in me something about her possible future that will rock my parents' world when they hear it, if anything comes of it; several more siblings at various stages of their own paths; and myself, trying to make sense of a life that had no place in my upbringing and find a way to unite it with my beliefs. I have a mother who was a coal miner's daughter from the mountain hollows, born to a Southern Baptist preacher and raised in poverty, but with love and care; and a father who was a Fortunate Son, the American dream come true, the only son of well-to-do atheist parents, raised in San Francisco. How did those two ever become compatible?! Because they loved God and each other, and they believed in making things work. And they passed that legacy on to us.

Romans 2:12-16

I'm sure we have all heard the standard Christian view that no one who has not made a public confession of Christ and chosen a set of Christian doctrines to adhere to, can go to heaven. I have questioned that for some time now.

I had a discussion once with a friend of my little brother, who was visiting with his very Calvinist pre-destinarian family, about whether or not "good" people in other countries would go to hell if someone did not find them and reveal the gospel to them. The idea that God needs a human being to reveal Him to another human being, when He created them both, bothers me. I told the boy that I believe no one goes to hell without having made a conscious decision, at some point in their life, to turn away from the path they knew was right and selfishly do the wrong thing instead, knowing that thing to be wrong. We are all born with a conscience. Our instincts tell us that it is wrong and unnatural to wilfully hurt another person who has not wronged us. We don't need the Bible to inform us of this. And on the same note I believe that every person born feels the calling of the Creator in their heart, and bears an eternal responsibility for their reaction.

I have never tried to express this openly, because I didn't have anything in the Scriptures to back it up. Until today. During service this morning I was looking through Romans and came upon the following words of Paul to the Jewish converts:

"For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another:) In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel."

In other words, ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS! And I am so thoroughly sick of words. When will the Christian community figure this out?

I reposted this from another blog because it was so intense. I wish every so-called "Christian" counselor who thinks they have a handle on sexual healing could read it.


"I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don't want people to wonder why I did this. Since I've never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn't use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it's less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It's the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it's surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I'm trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can't concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I'm exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I'm reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I've never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying "Hi" or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I'm responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven't touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There's no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I'll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I'm not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn't realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn't stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I'd be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it'd be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn't work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn't help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn't the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn't feel "right". The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn't attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn't the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I'm straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I'd ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren't so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn't matter because I couldn't be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I'd feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn't stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It's likely that things wouldn't have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn't have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There's no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn't apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I'll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She's just one more person in a long list of people I've hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I've had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I've hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I've spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I've told different people a lot of things, but I've never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don't care about their word or what they've promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don't blame anyone in particular, I guess it's just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don't care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I'm capable of.

So I've realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I'm just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there's nothing I can do to escape it. I don't know any other existence. I don't know what life feels like where I'm apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn't understand and can't connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There's no point in identifying who molested me, so I'm just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they're based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it's selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won't feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it's also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I'm just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I've tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can't fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I'd be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I'm prepared for death. I'm prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

---

I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead--one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they've constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don't understand that good and decent people exist all around us, "saved" or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:

"I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist." - George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point), that's your choice, but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she's Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it's tiring.

Since being kicked out, I've interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what's been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it's not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn't "saved", since she believes I'm going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn't deserve to live. All I know is that I can't deal with this pain any longer and I'm am truly sorry I couldn't wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I've wished that I'd be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.

---

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I'm sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can't understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Zeller

---

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don't want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I'm worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don't mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I'd prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.

This is what happens when I forget my crochet!

Lol. I have nothing to do but write a blog post.
We ar. signing Andy up for Kindergarten in two weeks. That's a big step since it means the transition from private to public school. I have my reservations, but private school from this point on is both.cost prohibitive and presents major transportation issues.
My brother and SIL have her mom back from the hospital. They tried hard to refuse since they have no room and cannot properly care for her, and her behavior is a major problem with their children. But the hospital said they would turn her out homeless otherwise, and even though they legally can't, my brother was tired of fighting them.
My sister from OK, Joshua's mother, visited with her family at New Year's. It was wonderful to see them. And she is pregnant again, and very worried, so please send her your prayers and warm thoughts.

Happy New Year

This is why I blog

I decided to go back and read over the year in my blog today. I'm glad I did. It made me feel much better about the decisions I made at the end of 2010 to read the struggles I was going through at the beginning. At least I can say that while it may have taken 12 months, I finally made some of the changes I needed to.

I also realized that some important updates were left out in the midst of it all. Some because my thoughts were too scattered, and some because I was too angry to even type about them at the time. One of the latter was Mark getting arrested again, a week after I started my job. For something very stupid. Something that I could not blame on his childhood, his stress level, or anything else. He was simply an asshole who lied to me so he could screw everything up royally. My parents bailed him out, and the case has been continued twice and will probably be dropped in February since two lawyers are involved. But it was an eye opener about just how much he didn't "get it." And my Dad was pissed. As well he should have been.

He is off probation though, for now, and is eligible to get his license back in March. I can hardly wait.

Stevie is doing well physically. No apparent changes in any other way, but time will tell. That's between him and God. He still doesn't have the full use of his left arm and hand, but they are not as unsightly as they could be and he is right-handed. The healing will take a while longer still.

My two grandmothers are both deteriorating rapidly in health. I doubt they will live out this year. I've been glad for the time with my Dad's mother though, since she has spent the year out here in an assisted living facility. Her Alzheimer's is very bad now, but she has taken a special liking to Andy and he loves her as well. He asks to visit her often.

Time to go put my kiddos to bed. School is back in tomorrow!

In my next 30 years.....

....I'm not talking about my life ad nauseum any more. I think I've analyzed the bejeepers out of it the past few years, and it's time to stop digging for answers and put the ones I've found into practice.

....I'm not making any more friends or pursuing any more relationships with Mark's health in mind. Of course I'm still concerned about his well-being, but his relationships are his own responsibility and I need to make some healthy ones of my own. I've come to realize that maybe the same things aren't necessarily good for both of us.

....I'm not trying to keep anyone else happy. I believe that everyone is individually responsible for their own happiness, and it's time to put it into practice. Happiness and well-being are not the same thing. I will never stop caring for the well-being of others, but I am not arranging my life to anyone else's tastes any more.

....I'm going to work on my relationship with my children first, and the rest can follow.

....I am going to wait on the Lord. Not make any more plans, just do what I think is best in each decision and let the chips fall. If I believe He is directing my life, I need to let Him direct it and stop projecting so much stress onto everyone else. Part of that is not letting myself feel responsible for things I cannot change or prevent.

It's a new year. I don't need anything from it. I just want to be a better person at the end of it.