Sometimes life is just too much...

It's amazing how much comfort my sons bring me without them even having to try. They are my own little creatures...one part me, one part Andy, and one part something special. Now that they are older, they see that even when we don't see eye to eye on things, they know their parents accept them as they are. They feel comfortable enough to discuss things with me, and I love the way their minds work. Makes me proud to have such free-thinking, independent kids.

I'm having a rough week. Feeling restless and unsure of where I stand in my own life. I tend to get quiet and withdrawn during these times.

It unnerved people when I'm quiet or when I don't want to eat. Sometimes I just like to be quiet. I spend so much time alone that it's become the norm. Being the wife of a soldier is a very lonely life. In between all the deployments and schools and training, I have a part time husband. When we manage to meet up and life is calm, it's rather enjoyable. But when we have one thing after another, it's hard to remember how to just "be".

I think that's what my therapist is trying to teach me....how to just be. I have no purpose in life today. I have no real goals anymore.

It sounds like a bad thing, but it's not. It's a clean slate with no expectations. I am taking time to really figure out what I want in my life, and stop measuring the successes and failures based on other peoples evaluations of it.

In other words, I don't give a rats ass if anyone likes it.

I plan to get back in a regular blogging mode next week. I've been doing it via iPhone, which is not easy.

There's more than one way to skin a cat.

That is a horrible saying. I was really unaware that cat hides were in high demand. It seems more reasonable to substitute buffalo or deer.

Or atleast I thought until last night.

We got a kitten about a week ago. Yeah, I know, because we needed another dependent creature. But Andy wanted one, and it's over a year since we lost our last one, so, I didn't really care. We named her Libby.

Libby is a sadist. A complete asshole. While I respect the fact that within one day, she made herself at home by way of unwrapping a foiled baked potato and eating half of it, as well as opening a box of pizza on the counter, giving the butter a few healthy licks, and stealing a peanut butter cookie...

Fucking with me while I attempt to sleep does not put one near and dear to my heart. Which she did ALL NIGHT last night, so I got two hours of sleep. I resorted to spraying her with a squirt bottle of water, which was fun the first few times until she started drinking the water when I sprayed it.

Next stop is canned air. My brother in law recommended using a giant air compressor. I might try that on my kids.

C'Mon, Irene!!!

Do we live in the path of the hurricane that is about to tear up the East Coast?

Sadly, no.

I like hurricanes. My husband thinks I am a dark soul for wishing there was a channel Luke the football channels, where you can show CNN, TWC, Msnbc all at the same time. I will be lying in bed all day Sunday, watching the carnage ensue.

To explain, my favorite movies happen to be ones that entail the destruction of earth. Watching natural disasters play out on tv is like a movie marathon. It's not that I wish harm to people, because I don't. It's simply amazing to watch, as are tornados. If given the chance, I would pay to go on a storm chasing trip in the Midwest. I'm lured by storms.

I tell Andy that I know this is the buildup to 2012, and he laughs at me. But things aren't exactly getting better this year, as far as natural catastrophes.

My husband is leaving this weekend for a month long PTSD treatment in TX. It's going to be difficult for me to have him leave but I know it's the best option for him. It's not an easy road when you have your husband leave all the time, and when they come home, they are different every time. But we all change and grow, don't we?

I haven't blogged much lately because I've had to do it on my phone. But in another week or two, my computer should be up and running and I will get back on the saddle.

Hostage by pregnancy

Seems like I missed the baby bandwagon, since everyone I know has baby fever. They are trying to get pregnant or they are pregnant. I don't have any desire to have another baby at all.

I just feel left out and shriveled up inside, like spoiled fruit.

Pregnancy is a lonely time. No drinking or smoking, which in itself is reason enough for me to not want to experience it again. I find Iake decisions based on my ability to be able to handle my issues with a nice glass of Pinot. You call it a drinking problem, I call it coping mechanism.

Potato, Patata.

It also makes you do weird things, like crave unnatural things. When pregnant with my second child, I craved toilet paper and tissues. Fucken weird, but don't judge me. My pregnant sister asked me to buy her a bag of goldfish cracker last weekend, which I find equally disturbing as wanting to eat paper. "The snack that smiles back."

You don't find that crazy? I don't want a face on ANYTHING I eat. You don't go to the animal farm and share meanful glances with your soon to be cheeseburger, do you? My relationship with my food is cordial, at best. Thank you for your contribution to my weight gain, high cholesterol and five minutes in fatty heaven.

I also find that the world sucks when it comes to getting pregnant. Why do people who have no business reproducing have no issues getting pregnant, while good, stable people try and try?

I will tell you why...
Natural selection.

The world needs weak individuals who won't make it to control the population. Sometimes you are just too special to produce multiple baby geniuses to run the planet. Case in point, most reality tv stars. Who would we laugh at on Worlds Dumbest Criminals if there were no poorly bred fools?

The New "Lost Generation"

Those of us born after the Baby Boomers have gotten a bad rap by our disapproving parents. They say we are lazy and unfocused. They refer to us as "late bloomers". They say we are the new "lost generation," referring to the generation during the first World War.

And to them I say, "you are right". We are a generation that is lost, and we have been given nothing to believe in. While other countries have evolved, we have grown up watching our own country regress, as our potential jobs and industries have been sent overseas. Our nation has fallen apart, much like our infrastructure, and I don't just refer to it's physical state, but also it's fiscal state. Our economy is nothing more than a Madoff Ponzi scheme, build upon a house of cards.

The examples set before us by our grandparents and parents alike, were war and materialistic greed. We are the "latch-key" kids, left to raise ourselves as the established the mantra of "all work and no play." Now we are underpaid, we overspend, and the growing stress of life kills us more rapidly.

Yet no one steps in to stop it.

We are a generation with no religion, only oppression of personal philosophy. Most of us are agnostic or atheist, as family values fell to the wayside; a casualty of our overworked single parents, who were to tired to take us to church, eat family meals together, and feel secure in our homes. As it was more important to "keep up with the Joneses" while we were virtually babysat with our cable tv, computers and video games.

When we were children, we watched the shuttles launch in to space, as we dreamed about our promise. Where will we go in the universe? What untold places would we explore? Now there is no space program, because our government is behind on the rent, and we are facing eviction. Our social programs are disintegrating, our health is failing, and we have no prayers left of ever retiring, as the prospect of Medicare and Social security fades in to black.

We are a generation that SHOULD be left with no hope.

But I believe.

I have a dream that one day, we will rise up and take what is ours-our government from politicians. We will make our leaders earn their paychecks by imposing strict term limits, eliminating "political dynasties." if they don't do what we elect them to do, they don't get respected. We take away privatized campaign funds, and let each candidate work with the same amount of money and airtime, so that we can elect leaders based on their abilities and qualifications, rather than who owes more backdoor favors to contributors and lobbyists. We eliminate political agendas, along with party ideologies, and work on dealing with issues on their own, rather than buying deals as a package, wrapped up it's pretty bureaucracy. We take back our country from big business, eliminate the bigotry and hate, and create a new American Dream, so that our grandchildren can once again be proud to call themselves Americans.

So you can keep calling us, "the new lost generation," because I find it inspiring to be grouped together with the likes of former "lists", such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot. Once you get out of our way, I think we will do as we did as children, and be fine left on our own.

So what's new in your life?

I am going home this weekend.

Not a long trip, but I'm getting rid of my kids for a week, so it's worth the drive. They are going to Disney World, which is good for them to get out of Bumfuck, NY for awhile, and out of the cloud that is perpetually hanging over us.

I am no longer working. I decided to take some much deserved me time, and get off my ass to start writing my book. I'm just going to self publish and if a book house decides to pick me up, then great. If not, it's one more thing I can check off my list of what I want to do on Earth.

My husband is going away for a month for PTSD treatment. After two deployments, it's hard for the strongest man to still admit that he needs help climbing out of a dark hole of depression, so I am proud of his decision to get help. They leave one person, and every other time they go, they lose a part of themselves, transforming in to the army's war machines, much like The Terminator. I know I will never see the man who left me to go to his first deployment in Iraq again, but there is still much of him left to save.

A strong man is not defined by physical strength or determination. A strong man knows when to admit he can't do it on his own. The army takes so much from us, and gives little in return. It's a hard life, to try to weather these storms individually and then try to come home and just go back to normal. I find myself grow cold and numb when he is gone, and it's just as hard for me to admit that the constant separation changes me too.

Another world, another time. Or is it?

I'm reading again. One of my favorite things to do to take me out of my own life and in to someone else's. I'm currently reading "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett. It takes place in the 1960's in Jackson, Mississippi, and it's about the differences in race and lifestyle.

It's an amazing read.

Growing up in a predominantly white place, I guess I never really thought people were still racist. Other than my great grandmother, who still referred to black people as 'coloreds" in her old age, and who we shamefully shyster when she did, I was always taught that race didn't matter, and never gave it much more thought. But when I got married and moved to Georgia, I was quickly slapped in to a reality where there was still so much pain from the past and fear of what was different, namely the color of your skin.

I encountered many judging looks and poor attitudes from some of the black women in the doth. I didn't understand it at the time, and I felt that they were wrong for judging me as a white woman. When we moved to Alaska, I began to notice more how white people spoke disdainfully of black people, even referring to MLK Jr's birthday as "Nigger Day". I found it disgusting.

When we moved back to Savannah, Georgia, I enrolled my preschool aged sons in a family run daycare. On enrollment day, they told me that my kids were the only white children there, as if that would make me suddenly change my mind. Instead, it reinforced my decision to send them there. When would my two white sons ever know what it was like to be a minority? I loved that school, and the family that ran it. They took extra time with my eldest son, as his Aspergers Syndrome was just starting to become apparent.

Finally one night, Gavin asked me why his friend Jamaal had brown skin and he had pink skin? I told my five year old boy that it was the same as him having red hair and me having blond, or him having blue eyes and his daddy having brown. God makes us in many colors so that the world is as colorful as a painting.

My boy is now eleven and I look forward to the day he gets married, so we can add some pretty colors to our family. I am proud that my children don't see color as a race. Especially after having the unpleasant acquaintance of a woman from Jackson, MS, and hearing how she couldn't voted for a black man for President even though her own children were half Puerto Rican, and how she had only married their father because she became pregnant put of wedlock. How horrible a day when her own kids realize they are worth less to their own mother because they aren't fully white?

I don't know what my point was in sharing these thoughts today, other than hoping that people will learn from their mistakes from the past. It's the socially acceptable thing now to hate Muslims, and even as the wife of a soldier, I am sickened by the hate and fear that people still let excuse their bad behavior because it's politically correct.

Next time you want to nervously eye someone of a different race, make the change within yourself and do what is right. I know far worse people of my own race than anyone I've ever met of a different one.

Who is going to give therapy to my therapist?

I shit you not, my therapists office is in a crack den.

I rolled up a good 45 minutes early for my appointment, as I wasn't entirely sure where I was going. After seeing the outside of the building, I was relatively sure that mace would've been a good idea.

I was already dreading the whole, "so what seems to be the problem" question, since none of this is easily explainable. With each element to my issues that I described, it became more difficult for her to mask her various facial expressions and reactions. She kept looking around uneasily, as though she was waiting for the hidden camera crew to bust in at anytime, confirming her beliefs she was getting punked.

When the main therapist came in during the intake, it was all I could do to keep from bursting into laughter through my tears.

I had already been told she was a Reverend when I signed my Hippa paperwork, as I had to specify if I minded her discussing spirituality. What was NOT mentioned, was the fact this Reverend was in full biker attire, including do-rag and Chad. She apologized for her attire, to which I promptly responded that it actually made me feel a lot less in a position to be judged.

After all, why start being a conformist now?

The best part came when the two of them sat there in front of me and openly discussed my diagnosis, to which I added my thoughts and preliminary diagnosis. It was like we were co-counsel. They also seemed very concerned that I had an eating disorder since I mentioned I haven't eaten in three days. I was a little shocked at the term "eating disorder" as it's not because I am choosing not to eat for my appearance. Believe me, I TRIED to become an anorexic before to lose weight, but found that I sadly lacked the motivation. My choice to eat as little as possible now has more to do with the fact I have had diabetes for four months and I'm not particularly partial to it.

The more I recalled the events of the past year of my life, the more I found I wanted to put do myself. If she was this awestruck of my inner strength, I found myself saying, "oh, that was nothing...you should hear about the first time my husband deployed and I had five car accidents!"

I loved the horrific reactions she gave me. She would be a perfect audience for my book that I am writing about my life.

And we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

So I know I have vanished for a while. My trip to CA was full of hilarious moments....and some uncomfortably emotional ones too. You can't be with two of your best friends since childhood and not lose your shit when your life is in crisis.

I've been trying everything possible to feel more like myself again. I slept all day, which was quite lovely and, in my opinion, far more addictive than any illegal substances would be when you are this worn out. I tried drinking, and gave it a good go, but I have learned I can't trust myself with a bottle of wine, because even if I promise it's only a glass, I finish the bottle every time. Being buzzed isn't the problem....that's the hangover and self-loathing afterwards. I've tried books on therapy and they suck. I've tried therapists, and they suck more because you have to wait weeks for an appointment and then leave feeling judged and disappointed. I'd rather read a good Chelsea Handler book with a nice gin and tonic by my side. That is a true and tested relaxation technique. Also helpful in a state of severe depression, is episodes of The Golden Girls. Watching 4 old bitches call each other sluts and berate each other is insurmountable fun. I even got Andy to watch it, and he snickered the whole time.

We have had ridiculous appointments, due to Andys the past two weeks and I have two more tomorrow. This was not completely what I had in mind when leaving my job to get myself to a more zen place. I was hoping more for a spa-like atmosphere, where I could sip monitor and read a whole book in one sitting. Of course, this fantasy also included my kids back in school and some sleep.

I don't really trust therapists, mostly because I've never met one who hasn't made questionable choices in their personal life. I also am much smarter than most of them, and they don't find it amusing to debate cognitive therapy versus group therapy with me. WebMD is evil to medical professionals and a direct threat because they get pissed they went to school all those years when you really only have to read, possess common sense and give good advice. Personally, I think shrinks would be more highly trusted if they were more honest to their patients. Let's face it...some people should be pushed toward an open window and encouraged to jump because they can't be helped. Sad, but true. Or I would advise consuming large amounts of alcohol to help mask the misery that will never leave them.

And this is why I am not a shrink.

However, I am starting personal therapy tomorrow and I am trying to be open-minded because I like a good surprise and maybe this shrink can pull some real advice or insight to my self-diagnosed state of acute depression and how to make it go the fuck away already, because I want to leave MYSELF after spending all week with me.

Of course, this depression could be otherwise explained by the lack of anything quality to watch on tv. I have 1500 channels and not one damn show that holds my interest for more than ten minutes.

Other fun things when you are depressed and have anxiety is grinding your teeth in your sleep. I wake up with my jaw so sore, you can relate to how a toothless hooker feels after a night of blow-jobs. It sucks. So I can further humiliate myself my wearing "Grind No More, which is a bite plate I get to sleep with every night.

All in all I am taking baby steps toward redemption and I will get there eventually. My lack of employment will give me time to continue writing my book, which will be an entertaining read.