Flash Fiction Friday- struggling hope

Every Friday write a story of 55 words
no more, no less and report it to the G-Man!!




"how do i stop this tension in my head,
when the demons are playing
with all that went unsaid?
I've struggled and screamed,
i cried on the floor
letting go is the answer
i can't fight anymore.
this dream of "us" i
will pray to hold
because the love i feel
will never grow old"

I have been struggling this week and this is where i am at, here you go G-man. Wes's birthday is this weekend, his friend has decided to do a surprise party tomorrow, so there won't be any conflict, but we are still going to stay home on Sunday. i just feel like i was used by my friend as her scapegoat, her excuse to leave the group. and i don't like the way that makes me feel. Wes is off for 10 days, he will be putting in a lot of studying and I will be cooking and visiting with his mother. i am looking forward to it, she is a nice lady with no one to visit. she lives alone and i am a good housekeeper and i think i am good company. plus i really miss my mom and this will be nice to have a mom again, even if i am borrowing his. there really is so much to be grateful for. when i get out of the way life is pretty good, i just need to remember it is not 'life on Suzie's terms' it is 'life on life's terms.' if i want change i need to make it.

i will i know i can and everything i am learning now will only benefit me later. i am truly grateful for all your thoughts and comments, thank you for taking the time to not only read, but to leave comments.

i will be reading up on Mr. know-it all's spot in the morning to catch up on all of Fridays players, and to check out my own dash board. Wes will be in school till 11 am then we are off to lunch at his friends, he doesn't know it. i made a collage of his rafting pictures and had it blown up to a 20x30 and framed and mounted, his friend picked it up for me, his friend is sitting in the front of the raft with him, and he just though it was awesome. so i think my honey will like it. i wanted him to have it hanging in the room so when he wakes up in the morning he sees he has some good things to be grateful for. i think he is grateful, i just think i read way too much into what he says. i am so used to people who manipulate are say one thing and mean another, that i just take for granted he is not that way.

it takes me a few days to get humble and to be grateful for my life. it sickens me how i behave when i am lost in an alternate reality. i twist the truth and i become really angry and spiteful.
i don't like this about me. i still feel like i am not being heard, and it makes me resentful. i really don't know what he thinks, and i don't like that either.

i know he loves me, i know when i come at him with all my thunderous emotions, he tries to calm me down and tells me 'we are on the same team, i am not your enemy.' when i am angry i feel like he is my enemy. i REALLY need a meeting. here is my thought today; "hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and do the right thing, the dawn will come. you wait and watch and work: you don't give up."-Ann Lamott

surrender to the next level

no sooner did i hit 'publish post' yesterday, then my bean came to me and said 'mommy i need to go potty'. i swear i almost cried. she asked 4 or 5 times yesterday.

now for my real post. we had therapy last night. i am very angry over it today. i am acting out in anger over little things now and i know why i am angry, but do not know how to surrender this. it's such a long story but i have to try to get it out so i can function today without being angry.

we discussed finances last night and the fact that i feel very subservient to Wes. we had an argument the other day about going to a meeting. i was invited to go to the women's meeting but it would mean "A" would baby sit for an hour. Wes asked how much did we owe her already, he then said didn't you go to your sponsors this week? and i was like yes your right, then he said it is regional weekend and we will be owing her 50 bucks for that. so i did not go to the meeting, in fact i have not been to a meeting in over a week. he told the counselor that he wasn't saying i couldn't go to the meeting, but this is what i am talking about. i am a little kid in this what ever you want to call it, relationship i guess. so that was not the part that upset me, we discussed how i tend to feel like a victim and then he brought up captain stupid again and said it is like i think he is him or something.

this is what upset me, the counselor then started to talk to him about my perspective and he said he had this fear that one day he would come home and i would make some obscene purchase and we would not have money to pay bills. he said that has happened before and it will NEVER happen again, period. not that i ever have access to any money, besides the 25 dollar allowance he gives me once in a while, like every couple of months.

so here is my situation, i have no job, i have no income, i have no reasonable family left to help me, i am not allowed to go shopping, when i make a request for something, remember the Harlem globe trotters, it makes him feel bad or gives him fear that if i did have access to money i would go and do something like that. and he stated, when she said well if you came home and she did this it would simply have to be taken back to the store, you know make a big purchase without consulting him, he said oh there won't be a possibility of that ever happening again i will never be put in that position again.

this was not said in the meeting, but I have never, ever put him in that position, his ex-wife did. she was a real treat, he knew her for less then a year and married her, they were together for almost 3 years and he divorced her and it was ugly. she put him through the ringer. right now i hate this woman with every fiber of my being.

i did not say anything about his comment of the situation. i felt like, this is never going to work between us. he has no trust in me, then in the same sentence he was saying 'she thinks because we get into arguments we are not on the same team!'

we aren't on the same team, he has me pigeonholed and just pushed far enough away not to trust me. they talked about 'his' budget and that i need to respect that. i thought it was our budget, and i do respect that, does this mean i can't say i want something? he wants things all the time, in fact he talks about me asking for too much, he went to a men's retreat and spent a couple of hundred dollars, how did that fit into his budget? he went to Colorado and spent about 500 dollars, was that in his budget? i went to a sleepover that cost 15 bucks, and i am not frugal enough!!! my ABS went out in my car, we did nothing for it, he decided his new truck was running rough from the trip so he bought new shocks and had them installed , then it was still a little rough so he spent a little more money and had his tires rotated, my car hasn't been serviced in a year, but i am the one who makes all the big purchases because i said i wanted to go to the Harlem Globetrotters, oh and the other thing we were in Sam's club last summer and i saw one of those wooded playgrounds, you know with a slide and swing, it was 400 dollars and i asked him if we could get it. he said no i let it go and he brought that up to the therapist ooh, i am some big money hungry bitch or something out to get his money.

like i don't? and to top it off after i was left feeling about 2 centimeters tall, we get home and my sister needed me to watch her kids, she said, i don't have the time to go get the 12 bucks to pay the lady for watching my kids can you watch them?!? do you think she paid me? no. then when i was bathing the kids, they were splashing too much and Wes came out of his room and screamed "Everyone out of the F'n tub now!!" if that didn't trigger captain stupid. i haven't spoken to him since, he came out of his room late last night and apologized for getting angry, but with all the crap that i am not allowed to talk about because of this 24 hour rule, and the fact that i am now in this irrational thought process that this morning i wouldn't even give him a kiss good by.

so now it won't matter why i am upset, because of the fact that i am holding on to being angry, no matter what the reason, i will be the one who is wrong. we do not see the counselor until the first of December.

really there is nothing i can do, they are his feelings. as far as i know he will always be afraid of me and not trust my judgment when it comes to finances. that is fine with me, but don't be a hypocrite and say we are on the same team when there is no trust.

i don't want to ask him for anything, i have to this is the situation we are in. i have no job, i discussed getting one and he said in order to afford the sitter for our kids i would need a job that paid 15 bucks an hour if i was going to have any money left over. every time i try to do something that would make money it only costs money and now this damn daycare thing, i can't even purchase a mount for my fire extinguisher. we have to go to a manufacturer and ask them to get one and god only knows how long that will take. at this point i just want to get my license and get a clientele and make my own money so i can leave. then he won't have to worry about me messing with 'his' budget and he will never have to worry how i spend money, it will be my money.

he just emailed me and asked to get him the information the counselor told him about some online test we need to take and it costs 75 bucks for each of us to take it. if he decided to i will tell him to go ahead, i will not spend 75 dollars on this, i don't need to know my personality. i am just there and i do not want to accept that it is just where he is, because i feel he will never change. i think it will only get worse, look how angry he was last night, it gets easier you know. to yell. it is like i turn men into abusers and if i stay with him much longer, that is what he will become. that is where i am at today, and i don't like being here.

here is my thought today, then i have housekeeping, and a ton of running around to do. i believe this a very appropriate thought for me, it helps me with humility and looking at my situation without building it into something it is not. when i read over this, again, because i will, it will help me to surrender a little bit more, and just accept where i am at because right now there is nothing i can do to change my situation so here goes; "Gently remind yourself that life is okay the way it is, right now. In the absence of your judgment, everything would be fine. As you begin to eliminate your need for perfection in all areas of your life, you'll begin to discover the perfection in life itself."- Richard Carlson (Don't sweat the Small Stuff)

why won't she go potty?

look at her, ain't she cute? why won't she go potty?!? we have been practicing for a long time now, a month. she absolutely refuses to go, i have to take her down there and sit her on the potty. we did good for the second week. she even did #2 twice, now it is like she is reverting or giving up.
i am not sure i have patience for this. i even went and bought her a new potty chair. we got stickers for when she goes. there is nothing i can do but try to be patient.
i know she is ready, she has all the signs, main one being she pulls those diapers off. she fights every time we need to diaper change and i mean fights. she knows when she goes and she can go all night and have a dry diaper. so what does it take to make a child go potty? well how about another perspective...

Why do we bother to potty train at all?

i mean dogs just go. your gonna go weather you want to or not and by the time a woman has had a child she needs to start wearing a diaper anyway because every time she sneezes she leaks a bit.
so i ask ya, why are we torturing our children and tampering with our sanity to make them go potty in a round tub that needs to be cleaned out every time any way? might as well be a diaper.

old people need diapers, why aren't they potty trained, or were they and they just forgot? we forget what we learn. if we had everyone go back to diapers, and i am talking about cloth diapers, we're going green here, then there would be way less unemployment!!

can you imagine the giant changing stations manned with people who were there to change you and then others to clean the diapers. a ton of jobs right there, and imagine how much water we would save on not flushing the toilets!! we wouldn't even need indoor plumbing, we would replenish the earth with more water because of no toilets. no more plunging over flowing toilets!!

landfills would shrink because we would not be wasting so much non biodegradable diapers and dumping them on the earth, welfare lines would be a thing of the past, if you need assistance you automatically have a job working at one of the massive changing facilities across the nation!!!

would this be a Utopian society out of some novel or what?!?people would be motivated to learn and get an education it would also cause more kids to go to college, because they would not want to work in diaper changing stations!! you know it is hard to talk them out of working at fast food, but a diaper changing station, i tell ya every teenager would have straight "A's" and dream of being rocket scientists!!!

So now that i have solved half of the worlds problems and started us on the path to world peace, how do i get her to go potty?!? back to reality i go. i need some serenity. i feel like a failure because she won't go. there is a place in town we go to. very peaceful, every night at nine the "Keeper of the Plains" lights up.

there are 5 or 6 of these round gas burners that light up every night for 15 minutes

here is a view from the bridge, you can see the keeper up top there

here he is about 50 feet tall, it is very peaceful and serene and calming, it calms the stresses of the day away, and since i pay taxes it costs no out of pocket until april. all cities should have such a place, it sits on the river and you can here the water flowing and warm your face by the flames. watching the night. very, very peaceful. i come up with my grandiose ideas sitting on the benches by the river, did i mention it is polluted? maybe why my ideas can get way out there. but hey it looks good on paper, just imagine the possibilities...

so here i sit praying for the willingness to give her time to learn something she is going to unlearn any way. which i guess leaves me with today's thought, very fitting for this post; "Be willing to be a beginner every single morning."

--Meister Eckhart