April was a month of pretty spectacular suckitude… I went from feeling pretty good about myself after having a bit of a health scare (or 2 actually, as the attack of the aspertame caused me to have several weeks of skin irritation with no real defined “cause”) and realizing that my finances could be back in order due to investments, tax refunds, and budgeting…

 

To feeling like I was going to lose my children because social services decided that they were going to investigate me for what amounted, in the end, to having tapped my kids on their behinds with a wooden spoon — in JEST — one day when I wanted to get them out of the kitchen and away from the hot stove while I was cooking.

That’s right. I was put through the wringer because I had teasingly tapped my children on their clothed bottoms with a wooden spoon! I was accused of “inappropriate discipline” and had to have 2 nosy CHILDLESS social workers come and look through my house to make sure that I was living in a clean environment that was not endangering my children.

 

Wow. When I think back to the conditions that the Stalker had HIS child living in — a house where you could not see even a square of the floor for the papers and garbage strewn about, where the bathroom and kitchen hadn’t been cleaned in MONTHS, where boxes were stacked about so high in every room that there was no longer room to MOVE freely, where walking on the floor often resulted in cuts or splinters, where many weeks the Stalker had to go without eating because he didn’t have food in his home, and where both Stalker and his son had to share one ripped, stained and reeking mattress (which the child regularly wet) even though the child was 8 years old at the time — I wonder why no one bothered to call child protection on HIM.

 

And to end the month I reached one of those age milestones that no woman wants to have to reach, nevermind trying to reach it GRACEFULLY. Generally my age has not bothered me in the past, getting older was just another thing that happened, but added to that the stress of suddenly realizing that I am at an age now where statistically I am likely to not be able to start over again in love and marriage… its kinda scary.

 

I don’t want to be alone the rest of my life… I want to rebuild a life with someone else. And its kinda scary to hear that women older than 35 have a lower chance of being able to find love (and marriage) than do younger women.

 

But… that’s not something I am going to stress about anymore.

 

Because there are good things going on in my life that I need to focus on (instead of worrying about drowning in the loneliness of being single at 35)…

 

1. I have a great boyfriend.

Yes, he needs to be poked a lot to communicate with me on a regular basis, but he does try. I get one text a day most days, and while he might not think to call me or chat with me on MSN right now, since he’s preoccupied with the crap that is going on with his estranged wife. 

 

There are things I wish that would change — I wish we lived closer to each other or that it was easier to communicate (I can’t afford to call him much and he doesn’t consider calling me most of the time)… but right now we are both going through a lot of crap in our personal lives (divorces, financial pressures, and dealing with lawyers and hopefully-soon-to-be-ex’s, kids) and so I am willing to be patient and work more on who I am. I know, despite the silences, that he loves me and cares about me. I don’t know if we will have a life together, but what we have now is satisfying when we get together and that is enough for me for now…

 

 I am not so much of a leaner… I mean, I will lean on my friends if I with them, but I do have a very VERY hard time reaching out to people when I need help the most. I am getting better (although it might be hard to see that).

 

Serin has been rather invaluable throughout the entire mess of the last 10 years of my life — the tumult of my marriage and the fight to maintain my marriage through the loneliness of a situation when my husband was DETERMINED to stay in a job that tore us apart, through having 2 kids and losing my SELF to a situation that I didn’t know how to control, through leaving theEx, through clawing myself up out of the shadow of my marriage, through the crap with the Stalker, through the process of serving and going through the legal bs to PREPARE for the divorce, who listened to me through the angst of dealing with lawyers, through my learning to deal with finances, through the Stalker becoming a STALKER, through my stint in online dating, through my silly twitterpation with Reg, and through the BS that contines with theEx, the Lawyer and the divorce. And I don’t doubt that we’ll continue to be friends for the foreseeable future… Too bad the damned boy lives so far away, there are a lot of times it would be nice to just have someone around to talk to or geek out with…

 

G has been there for me for most of my marriage and was the only person who was not driven away by theEx’s need to keep me from my friends.

 

C has been my friend since grade 5… and although we have less in common now than we did in our past lives, we still manage to get together for a movie now and then. I do know I should try to get out with her more, though.

 

MyssK has helped keep me afloat through the divorce process as she, and her sweet man in Ontario, have gone through their own separations and divorce dramas. Sometimes just knowing that you’re not the ONLY other human being in the world going through this stuff helps a LOT.

 

The problem, however, has just been that the people I would like to talk to or spend time with the most aren’t usually the ones that are available. While I would like to spend time with Reg, he is both out of my range (phone wise) and out of town and very distracted by his personal issues right now — so I don’t feel right bothering him right now. Serin lives SOOOO far away (damn him) and MyssK also lives so far away that we can’t just get toghether to have coffee (laugh). And while I could spend more time with G, there are other issues that make me want to not lean so heavily on her either right now.

 

I make enough money that, if I budgeted correctly, I could get by and pay all my bills without having to rely on child support. The fact is that I am not a great budgeter, and that means that I do not have as much savings as I could have, had I been more stringent. I get a decent wage and that is good.

 

My job offers me flexibility to get things done around work hours. If one of the kids (or both) have doctors appointments or school events in the daytime, I am able to take time off for part of a day or a whole day. I am able to take vacation days when I want them, working around the constraints of my job, and I am able to accrue days if I don’t take all my vacation over the year.

 

I would like to have a job where I do have the ability to move up in the company, which I do not have here. There isn’t anywhere for me to go in this branch, and due to the constraints of my separation agreement I can’t just leave the confines of the city without having a court battle over who the kids get to live with. So I am pretty much to stay in the Saskatoon area, where my growth is limited, if I want to keep my children in my life.