An Introduction to Me and My Life...

I am a 36 year old woman. I have been a daughter, aunt, wife, mother, and caretaker. My life has been spent mostly taking care of others in my life.

I grew up in a well balanced family, an intact family, small but intact. My father, a wonderful man, died when I was 18 from a massive heart attack on May 6, 1991. He had been sick for many years and had numerous heart attacks. The last one was different. he was always scared when they happened, but not the last time. He held on long enough for my sister and I to arrive, just long enough to look me in the eyes one last time. A look I had never seen before, I knew at that moment that I had already lost him. His last look told me how much he loved me, and how sorry he was that he couldn't stay any longer. I was his little girl, the baby, the one who always sought to please him in everything I did.

My mother was the rock of the family, she changed when he died, I don't recognize her anymore. She is now permanently disabled, an automobile accident, permanent brain damage and chronic pain. She is even more foreign since her accident. She has never let go of my father, she can't move past that loss. I love her so much, but do not connect to her anymore.

I have two sisters, both older than I. My eldest and I were raised together, a strange relationship, never very close. Full of animocity and vindictiveness. She married young, she is still with her husband, they have one son, my beautiful nephew. My other sister was born with brain damage and is living in an institution. She is unmanageable, the mind of a 2-year old and is 38-years old. She hates me, everytime I try to see her she attacks me like a savage. I still can't help but love her and wish she had been a part of my life though. My parents had to institutionalize her after my birth since she was constantly trying to kill me as an infant.

We moved around alot, my father worked in the oilfield industry. I never had roots anywhere. I actually have the instinct to run when I feel roots attaching to the earth beneath me. I enjoy renewing my life. No matter how many times I do it, the pain remains, it lingers in the shadows like a stalker, waiting for that moment of weakness when it can overtake me again, victimizing me over and over again. I have accepted that. There is no running from your pain.

After I lost my father, I was totally shattered, I became completely lost. I didn't know where I was headed, where I wanted to go, what I did from day to day. Then I met him, the one, one look in the eyes and I knew him, I knew he was going to be my husband. He said he felt the same. We married quickly, and as soon as we married, I became pregnant. We both wanted the same things, or at least we thought we did at the time. Five months after we married, on New Year's Eve, he put a gun into his mouth and left me forever. Pregnant with our son, I was alone, and even more destroyed.

I trudged on, gave birth to our beautiful baby boy, raised him, went to school. He was sick early on, childhood asthma, but he managed to grow out of that, only to grow into severe pituitary dysfunctioning. He was amazing, smart, talented (guitar player), tender, generous, so very loving. The world was cruel to him. School, both students and staff, his father's family who refused to see him as his own person instead of his father reincarnated. The hormonal disorders, nightly injections, constant bullying. One night, I walked into his room and found him hanging. He had left me too after only 13 short years with me. My world was completely destroyed then. This was November 3, 2006.

I have learned there are levels of destruction in our hearts. My son, losing him, blasted every possible level there was, unimaginable pain that never goes away. Questions that never get answers. The most beautiful love of your life lost forever, until your own death arrives.

So here I am today, searching my soul for the reasons I have left to continue on, a new reason to wake each day, wondering when the Lord is going to give me some kind of happiness in life. I have searched and searched for it, I think I find it, then he takes it from me. Constantly reminding me that he is in control, not me.

While some of you who read my posts will find some disturbing, don't worry, it feels much better to have it out of my heart than keeping it locked away. I hope some of you will understand them, understand their contradictions and ability to be morphed into something else. Some are fiction, some are true, my writing interests are greatly varied. So, please enjoy, and please let me know what you think, even if it is sharing your own stories with me.