goals

And JUST when I thought things were getting better….

I get slammed with all new insanity. Someone up there is laughing at me.

Ever live in a house infested with mold?

I have. At the end of August, I discovered a ginormous wet spot in our rental home’s dining room corner. Upon further investigation, it seems the HVAC condensation line had been leaking (between the walls, mind you) for only who knows how long and there was MOLD GROWTH that was all the way up in the master bedroom closet to all the way down in the kitchen. Mold growth on the OUTSIDE of the walls…which means it was leaking for a while!

Mold, y’all. MOLD. YUCK.

So of course, we got the *F* outta there. The leasing company released us from our lease agreement without penalty, thankfully, so now my brood and I are living with my parents (which is a whole other blog post) until I can find another home. Which means a new adventure of trying to buy a house. How fun!

And, as icing on the cake, at the beginning of September someone decided to try and make a left hand turn through my brand new, only made TWO payments on it car. This is not a new to me pre-owned car. This was a straight off the lot, brand new car where the only mileage on it was from test drives.

So there is that.

Currently, the things that filled my home are sitting in storage. Currently, my car is sitting at the collision center that my family has used for an umpteen number of years and I have no clue when I will get her back.

I had intended to keep up with this blog after my last post but…if my intentions were used for anything other than updating my blog, it would be for paving the road to hell…if I believed in hell. And again, life got in the way.

But seriously, can the universe just stop now? I’m tapping out. The mysterious “They” say events happen in threes. Well, I have had my three happen this summer right on top of each other and I am done. I give. I don’t know what else to do to get it through to whomever is laughing at me up there that the joke has been played out and is no longer funny. I’m ready for my life to be normal again. Well…as normal as it will ever be. I’m ready to sleep in my big bed, ready to have my own space, ready to drive my own car instead of this shitty rental.

These are all very first world, very whiny, priviledged wants and desires. I am fortunate to have a great job so I can afford my vehicle, fortunate to be able to pay for the awesome insurance I have (State Farm kicks ass, y’all) so my car can get fixed and I can HAVE a rental instead of driving around a wrecked car with a wheel that might fall off an any given moment. I am very fortunate to have the family support so I had a safe place for my children and pets when we moved and a roof over our heads until we move into our new house (when I find/buy it). I am extremely fortunate to be able to wake up everyday and have the coffee I want, wear the clothes I want, eat the food I want, etc etc etc…I get it. I am a very priviledged white chic who should count her blessings. And I do, believe me I do.

My situation could be vastly different. I’m so very cognizant of that. My life is pretty blessed compared to most so I really shouldn’t complain. I really shouldn’t but…

Dammit, I want my car back. I want my house. I want my LIFE AS I KNEW IT back!!! The only constant in the universe is change. I know that. Understand that. And I know that in order to grow, change must occur…but why does it all have to be at once?

Life.

It is something I don’t excel at at the moment, but I’m working on it. If anyone finds the instruction manual, send it my way, will ya? I’m struggling….

Failure is Okay

“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.” ~Mia Hamm
This is a hard topic. I know there are harder topics out there…but this is hard.

Parenting is hard. I love my kids. I would bend over backwards for them, kill for them, die for them. I love how intelligent they are. They have this way of just knowing, even if I don’t say anything, if I am having a bad day or feeling a bit down. But this current situation is hard and it hurts and I feel, as a mother, as though I have failed my son.

My son. My son is a smart, funny, compassionate, sweet, adorable, goofy, distracted, geeky, nerdy but in a cute way, suffering from ADD teenager. Honestly he is so much more than that, but I am not here to wax poetic about how amazing my kid is (which he is). My son is dealing with some school stuff that we have all been struggling with since the first day, honestly. As a parent, it is my job to push him, to challenge him, to make sure he understands how to follow through with his responsibilities. Follow through at school is such a struggle for him. With his ADD, medicine might help…or it might turn him into a zombie with no appetite again and that is the last thing we need. But he gets distracted. forgets things. Loses track of when items are due. No amount of organization attempts have really helped him. School meetings, action plans, parent/teacher conferences…nothing seems to help.

We did home based online school for a while. At his request, I re-enrolled him into public school as he missed the social aspect of it. We were confident after his semester in a home school situation, with his grades up, he would be great in public school. We were wrong. He has struggled since the beginning. And we are facing a bitter truth: this won’t be the year he passes this grade level. At least, that is what it is looking like.

Failure is a bitter pill to swallow. Thinking back over everything that could have been done as a parent, and realizing you did everything you could only to end up with the outcome you were dreading and trying to prevent is a very frustrating experience. And as defeated as I feel, I can only imagine how defeated my son must feel. This directly affects HIM. In the past, I would simply make the decision I thought best for him and be done with it. As his father and I are divorced, and as my kids live with me, I would make that ultimate decision and not accept feedback from his father or anything else. But I need support on this. I need back up. I need to know I am not the only one frustrated with this situation and I am not the only one grasping at straws trying to help my son. So I made that hard phone call to his father, who is well aware of our son’s struggles, and I am dreading his response.

I don’t do conflict well.

Failure is scary. It hurts, stings, reminds you of your fallibility and that sometimes, things don’t always work out the way we want them to. I refuse to look at this as a dead end, though, This is not the end for my son. He has many years of school, mistakes, proud moments, failures, and successes left to him. My job, as his parent, is to encourage and support him through all of these moments. His failures are not my failures and his successes are not my successes. But I can love him through all of it and that is the best, as his mom and biggest cheerleader, that I can do.

 

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.” C. S. Lewis

Life Gets In The Way of Good Intentions

“Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Yesterday was a complete cluster-fuck. I had zero time to carve out for blogging, my daughter had her end of the year chorus concert, work was I N S A N E…I am still exhausted. BUT, Everything I needed to complete for work was done. I met my deadlines.

I had every intention of hammering out a blog for my post a day challenge. I had every intention of writing some well thought out, meaningful, insightful piece and I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the time. I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t have the words to properly convey everything I wanted to, despite having this window open and staring at me during my teeny tiny moments of freedom I did manage to sneak.

An empty page. A frazzled brain. That is all I accomplished with my blog yesterday. I am okay with that, though. I’m a mom. An office manager. A wife. An assistant, a shipping coordinator, and event planner and so many other things. And yesterday, I did all of those things. At once. My busy life got in the way of my good intentions. Even after my day was almost complete, I still had to let personal things slide because the day was just too short to try and accomplish anything else. I fell into bed, wiped out, put on something soothing to listen to  so I could sleep while my husband watched Mountain Men and drifted off into his own needed rest. It was just one of those days.

Yesterday I did manage to reconnect with a friend I haven’t spoken to in a while. We made plans to try and get together for lunch at some point. She had reached out through Facebook, stating she had been a bad friend because of her absence in my life. I told her life gets in the way. And from there we made plans. But it is true. Life gets in the way. We get so caught up in our own shit, so consumed by it that we walk around, missing out on the people and the crazy, chaotic, wonderful things that surround us. We lose ourselves in the mire of everyday normality, forgetting that variety and experiences are the spice of life and in order to do that, we have to actually LIVE. We have to stop the zombie-esque shuffle from one task to the next and actually get out of our comfort zone and experience new things, meet new people, feel new emotions. We have to start living intentionally and making the most of what we have.

So, step by step, I am going to start to try living intentionally. This is not a “Resolution”, but merely an attempt at being more present in my own life. This will lead to me being more present in others lives, ie kids, husband, friends.

Life goals.

The struggle is real.

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us.”
― Richie Norton