Frozen Nowhere

Starting over and learning to love MY life…

Things I want Thursday…

October22

Okay, so there is a interesting internet meme thing that has been going on in the blogs that I have been reading lately, and since I’m having a craptacular day, feeling really bad about a bunch of stuff and worried about a bunch MORE, I have decided I’m gonna play along….

 

So here it is, in all its wonderous forms:

1. for the ground to dry up. Seriously, the yard at work looks like a swamp and I am tired of cleaning up mud in the office and from my car and off my clothes!! Added to this wonderousness is the fact that the city/town is doing construction on the ONLY road to access the office, and I’m a bit worried that with the mud in the back of the shop being so deep my little neon is not gonna make it out of here tonight.

2. I want to go home. With the construction and the mud and the limited access in and out of here, I just wanna know that when it comes time to get out of here I will be able to GET OUT OF HERE. Seriously, it sucks not knowing if at the end of the day you will be stuck in the mud up to your axles and desperate to get home. I don’t know what will happen if I can’t get out easily… I have to get the kids and we have to get a bunch done tonight for BoyChild’s campout tomorrow night.

3. I want to feel pretty and desirable again. I want someone to CARE when I wear frilly underpants… I want my someone to APPRECIATE me in my frilly underthings. I want to dress up, go out, and be treated like I am enjoyable and desired… just once more in my life, please?

4. I want my boyfriend to want to talk to me once in a while. I don’t want to be the one doing all the phoning and chasing, I want to know that he cares about ME when i’m not there.

5. Karma sharks to get my ex husband. While I struggle to make ends meet he’s cornered me into agreeing not to seek the child support reassessment that I am entitled to (which I would have gone after by now if I had known my rights during this divorce process) thus allowing him to UNDERPAY support for the children for SIX MONTHS. Basically, he deserves something to make HIM feel powerless and small and guilty, the way he always does to ME when he intimidates and threatens me and uses guilt-nuggets to get me to “cooperate for the children” instead of standing up for my LEGAL RIGHTS. BIG FAT HUNGRY KARMA SHARKS!! I don’t expect him to ever care or understand that he should do things because they are right, I just want him to know how it feels to be intimidated and threatened.

That’s pretty much it… I want to stop being muddy, I want to know I’ll be able to get home tonight, I want to be loved and desired, I want to be missed/needed, I want my (soon to be) ExHusband to understand how his bullying makes me feel… So… how about YOU?

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Paradigm: This is the Life I Envision

October20

Paradigm: This is the Life I Envision

 

The thing I am realizing is this, if I am the person who has constructed my life the way it is right now, then I am the one who can change how I see things.

 

I am FREE to change the way I see things, I am free to interpret my life the way that I want.

 

This is something I have been fighting against for years. I have been too afraid to map my own life, too afraid of being “cast out” from the rest of the world…


And where has that gotten me?

 

For most of my life I have felt adrift, cast out and cast away from other people. Consequently I have had a hard time connecting with people and trusting myself to know what is “right”. 

 

How did it happen, though?

 

I can point to many many examples of being told that life was out of my control, right from the very beginning.



  • I was taught by my parents and grandparents that there is a all-knowing, all-seeing GOD type thing “out there” who has already mapped and planned my life for me and that I should go with it and not struggle against HIS will


  • I was told over and over that my mother/father/grandparents/babysitter/teacher/minister/husband knew what was best for me, and that things would work out if I listened to what others told me and obeyed


  • I was taught to fear being a “bitch” or a “harpy”, and that only shrill, bossy, bitchy women speak up and stand up against those who have authority


  • I was told that the abuses I suffered from men in my life were because I “deserved” it or because I “needed to learn my place”


  • I was constantly reminded that I am not good at math, that I can’t possibly control my own finances without disaster striking


  • I was taught to fear reaching out for support or help, because it is a sign of weakness


  • I was reminded that I only needed to Trust in God, because IT knew me better than I knew myself

 

And many other examples can be gleaned from reading the stories in my life book…

 

But there are stories, wonderful stories, of me standing up and telling people to “shove it” too



  • My rejection of the faith of my family for one that spoke to my heart and soul


  • My choice to stand up to the man who beat and raped me, and to find a way to not only help myself recover, but to help OTHERS


  • Choosing to stand up and continue my pregnancy with my daughter, in the face of extreme anger from theEx and the ensuing conditions he put on me for disobeying


  • Choosing to take a degree in a statistics based field, despite being told I’m stupid in math


  • Walking out of my marriage because the neglect from my husband, added to the jealousy, name calling, financial abuse, and isolation became too much for me to stand


  • Realizing that the relationship with the Stalker was NOT working for me, and standing up against his tantrums, threats, texts, phone calls, emails, and other forms of harassment AFTER I made it clear I was moving on


  • Moving on

 

So, obviously, there is only so much control that fear has over my life. Every once in a while I get fed up with things and I overthrow the rule of fear and make a change.

 

 I am working to change the paradigm that I live under.

 

I am working on walking away from the Control Paradigm and to focus on a more Connective Paradigm.

 

The only thing is this:

(I have never been really good at MAKING solid, lasting connections with other people)

 

It scares me, to let people in. I have never really had relationships, whether they were familial, friendship or romantic, that lasted, and I’m kinda worried that I just don’t know HOW to make connections and keep people in my life. Hell, even the THERAPISTS I have hired to help me (and my kids) through the trials of divorce have flaked on me…

 

I have lived with the belief that there is something so completely and fundamentally WRONG with me (and my children) that no one can possibly stand to continue to be part of our lives. From my mother on down through my life, this belief has played out its themes on me — failure to become “part of” the group, not being accepted because I have a different personality type or don’t react the way I am “supposed to”, feeling like I’m chasing after people who aren’t “that into” me, and finally abandoning or being abandoned by people I was close to because I am just differently social.

 

But I have been thinking… what if its not ME that’s the problem, but the people I’m trying to connect to?

 

I have to accept the fact that my mother will always wish I was someone else, that i have never lived up to what she wanted or envisioned her daughter would be. We have different visions of a relationship, and different personalities. My mother really wanted someone like HER — a social butterfly, flitting about the world, bubbly and outgoing. What she got was ME — a quiet introvert who prefers small group settings, intimate engagements, prefers home and familiar environments, chooses friends more for shared interests and quality of conversation than sheer availability or number, and is more studious and serious and less gregarious than most of the people around her.

 

Neither of us is wrong. The only problem is that the fact that I lacked qualities that my mother felt were necessary for a great mother-daughter relationship, and that effectively made it impossible for my mother to relate to me because as she has always put it, I am “difficult to get along with”.

 

Perhaps the fact that I am not as overly social, that I tend to feel deeply but not express it as openly, the fact that I have never been one to gush excitedly or dance around in glee the way she has. The fact that when I found out I was expecting each of my children my reaction was more of terror and horror and fear of what my husband would say rather than the glowing, sparkling happiness that she envisioned…

 

My mother has always been what she calls an optimist (I’m not entirely sure that’s the CORRECT term) while I have always tended to be more of the pragmatist type. She has seen me as someone who can’t enjoy life, because I’m always considering the implications of my actions or reactions on not only my life by the lives of those around me, and focused on how I will get through things that are presented to me. The difference is that because I plan for the unexpected (the GOOD unexpected as well as the UNGOOD unexpected) I usually have the wherewith all to weather the storms in my way, while she tends to ignore things until they get overwhelming.

 

I have, at long last, stopped expecting my mother to accept me the way I am. I have stopped feeling sorry that I have never had the mother/daughter bond with my mother that so many other women have. I have stopped feeling sorry for myself for the way she treats me. And I have stopped thinking that there is naturally something wrong with ME because I can’t be what she wants me to be.

 

I have shifted perspective of the situation: the issue is not that there is something about me that makes me unlovable or difficult to care for/about, but that I am genuinely who I am and if someone misses out on seeing the beauty in who I am (even if it is the person who should love me for me) because I am not what THEY want, then the person missing out is not ME, but THEM.

 

While I still crave acceptance and validation, while I still want to be loved and cared for, and I will likely still seek to be “perfect” I am slowly coming to terms with who I really am. I can’t be what other people want me to be, because that will disconnect me from myself, a place I am very familiar with.

 

I am NOT perfect. I hate the “you are perfect the way you are” stuff, because I know very well that there is a LOT more for me to do and a hell of a lot of things for me to work on — being a better mother, learning to connect to other people, getting out and not being afraid all the time, finding a place in my life, and even getting to a point where my daily life is full of loving, comfortable, and beautiful connections with other people. If I truly thought that I was perfect there would be no further need to work on uncovering the best I can be… 

 

For now, its a matter of starting to slowly (and painfully) shift how I see not only my world, but my relationships AND myself… 

Paradigm: This is the World I Created

October19

Paradigm: This is the World I Created
 

 

Wow. That’s profoundness right there.


I create the world in which I live, I construct the things that I see around me, and for the most part I am completely unaware of having done this thing.

 

I live my life according to some rules of what “they” believe I should be and how “they” believe I should live. I live a life of anxiety and fear, never quite sure what will happen if I don’t do what the amorphous “they” have decided is right for someone like me.

 

What do I mean?

 

I am a 35 year old woman. I have been raised to believe that by this point in my life I would

1) married,

2) a mother,

3) a homemaker,

4) work outside the home,

5) own rather than rent the place I live

6) volunteer at my kids’ school

7) have friends and family surrounding me all the time

 

But that’s not how it IS. How it is is that I am going through a divorce, I am no longer married, I no longer have someone that calls me their partner. I am a mother, but due to the situation of divorce I am forced to share my children’s time equally with their father, so I don’t even have children to come home to on a daily basis. I rent a basement suite, I own nothing. I work full time hours and do not have the opportunities to pour my time into my children’s lives or the lives of my larger community, and I certainly do NOT have a life surrounded by friends and family.

 

What I am told I should be is LOVED. What I really find myself being is LONELY.

 

What I don’t want is to be LONELY. What I do want to be is LOVED.

 

Its just that getting to LOVED from LONELY isn’t going to go the way that everyone around me seems to think it does. Right now I am not in that situation of a loving committed live-in relationship, I don’t have a lot of friends to lean on, and I feel, quite frankly LOST and confused about what it is that I need to do.

 

But…

 

What if I try to change the way I look at things?

 

So my situation isn’t ideal if what I am holding onto is what I have been raised to believe is right, if I think of my life as incomplete, or if I get stuck in the mindset that there is only one way to live a rich and full life, there is only one way to have a complete family?

 

For years I lived in a marriage that just didn’t work. But I stayed, because I believed that this was the only way that I would be socially acceptable, the only way to have a family, when it was so very clear that it wasn’t working. I lived in a control paradigm world — my exFIL controlled his wife and sons through his beliefs in the bible and by withholding love and praise, theEx controlled me by jealousy, mistrust, violation of privacy, finances, guilt, and criticism, and I, in turn, tried to control our children by fear, intimidation, discipline and bribery.

 

Now I am FREE.

 

I don’t have to be accountable to my parents, because I’m 35.

I don’t have to be accountable to my husband, because (as far as we are both concerned) we are no longer married.

I do not have to answer to Reg, because although we are in a relationship, we aren’t at a stage where I have to do more than respect his feelings… I do not need to ask permission.

 

I DO NOT NEED TO ASK PERMISSION.

 

I have to be accountable to MYSELF… I have to honour MY committments to the world and people around me… and I get to decide what committments I make. 

 

And you know what? I can choose NOT to commit to things or people too! It might sound like common sense, but to me its profound.

 

For example: I have children and because I choose to have my children (it was a very heart wrenching choice with each of them) and because I have fought to have as much time as possible with my children, I have made a committment to make their lives the best that we can. But, I do not have to commit to EVERYTHING in the world that comes along with the idea of parenthood.

- I have agreed to commit my time and energy to 2 activities for each child, for each of these activities I have committed myself to getting the child to and from the activity, to events related to the activity, and to help them doing fundraising for the activity.

- Because my life doesn’t allow for me to quit my job and be a full time home schooling parent (99% due to the fact that my legal agreement with theEx will NOT allow such a situation at all) my children attend public school. I will read to my children, I will have them read to me, I will help with homework, I will assist them in gaining extra information on things that interest them, I will guide them in working around the pedagogy that the school refuses to veer from… but I cannot do EVERYTHING. I have to believe that I know what is best for my children, and not allow the school system to drag down either myself or my children, or feed into theEx’s attempt to discredit me.

 

I can make the choices that work for US. And you know why? BECAUSE I AM A GOOD PARENT, and the few things that I can’t manage to find time for do NOT discredit that, as much as other parents, theEx, teachers, or other people believe that not being able to do EVERYTHING they demand means I am not.

 

It’s a matter of seeing things realistically.

 

A good parent takes care of their children’s basic needs — provides food, clothing, shelter, water — and I provide all that.

 

A good parent takes care of the emotional needs of their children — providing a feeling of safety, security, trust that they are loved and wanted, belief that they have someone to reach out for — and I do this too.

 

While I might not be able to give them EVERYTHING they want when they want it, and I might not be able to let them do whatever they want when they want to, I provide for there physical, intellectual and emotional needs to the very best of my abilities and I always have. Do I do everything absolutely perfectly? NO. And you know what? I likely never will.

 

There will be times when I cannot do things for them, when they have to do them for themselves. There will come a time when I can’t protect them from EVERYTHING. 

 

There will be times homework goes undone for the night.

There will be days when they go to bed without eating because they don’t like what is set before them.  

There will be events missed out on because they chose to break a rule or not listen.

There will be times when I yell or scream or cry… there will be times they yell or scream or cry…

There will be times they fall and I can’t catch them

 

NONE OF THESE THINGS DIMINISHES MY PLACE IN THEIR LIVES — even if I am not 100% perfect superwoman.

 

This is only STEP ONE of my work to shift how I see things… and sometimes I will STEP FORWARD, and sometimes I will SHUFFLE BACK…

 

Its a matter of keeping my balance and momentum and never letting what other people think hurt me (or my kids)…

 

Review: The Freak Manifesto (Part 1)

October13

I have to admit, I have been struggling to get myself ready to read the Freak Manifesto by Pace and Kyeli, I have tried, and I have avoided, and I have worried about this for 2 weeks.

Why?

I am afraid. I am afraid that I will read it and I will find that I am not a “freak”, that I do not belong, yet again, that I cannot be part of changing the world.

You see, I have always considered myself an outsider — I never quite FIT with anyone, EVER. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere, with anyone, and for the last little while I had been trying to come to terms with the fact that there was no one out there that could be my “people” — I didn’t fit with my family, I couldn’t stay married, I didn’t feel comfortable with my husband, I didn’t mesh with boyfriends, and I was having a HORRIBLE time making friends. I was (and still AM) desperately lonely, always seeking love and ACCEPTANCE from someone, anyone…

I have always sought to belong to someone, somewhere.

and so it was that I have retreated to the internet, to the blogosphere, looking for other outsiders, looking for CONNECTION in my life.

I don’t want to be lonely anymore.

But what if I am not a freak either? I don’t fit, I don’t feel like I can change anything, because here I am, trying to fit in, trying to connect to other people… and I’m STILL just playing at being “acceptable” and crying on the inside.

Here is my journey while I read the Freak Revolution…

Page 5: A call to Arms Heart

The tears start flowing almost before I finish reading the first sentence. I can see this happening to my son, of people teasing him because he’s a sensitive soul and because he is struggling with the life that he has been placed into — parents divorcing, difficulty in school, not fitting into what the school system says he should be, having trouble making friends, having issues learning to socialize — and how he’s slowly shutting down in front of my eyes… and it hurts me to see this and not know why I can’t help…

Further down the page my life leaps out at me:”A single mother picks her son and daughter up from day care. The kids screech and hit each other.  She screams at them to stop, nearly wrecking the car.” – here it is, in print, my failure looking me in the face, that despite rushing home from a job that makes me feel hopeless and dead inside to the 2 people that matter to me the MOST, I fail to be able to relax with them, I feel stressed by how very much I love them, and disappointed at how very VERY much I manage to fail connecting with them.

And I see myself in the last vignette — having a marriage destroyed because we were pulled apart by the fact that my husband and I did NOT connect, there were too many societal and career pressures on him for him to see me as valuable as a wife and stay-at-home mother, and when I went to work to make our finances better, we were FURTHER torn apart by jealousy and forgetting what pulled us together in the first place.

I have lived my life in a way that pulls me (and my family) apart… and I don’t know how to change…

But this is why I am HERE, because I realize that there is something essentially wrong in the way I am living.

It is why I left my husband, because as we lost connection with each other we started to DAMAGE each other. And as much as it hurts, I know that it was what I had to do to be able to go forward with my life, to become more than a weak little mousie and become AUTHENTICALLY myself.

It is why I have been trying to change the way I do things with my kids, why I am trying to relax and become a connected mom, despite the pressure I feel working outside the home 8 hours a day and the expectations of the schools and society and everything else that tries to yank me away from my kids. I am trying to heal, I am trying to help my children heal, I am trying to become AUTHENTIC and I am trying to help my children grow up to feel connected to me, connected to themselves, connected to other people… they are a gift to me, a gift to the world, a chance to heal and CHANGE the world for not only myself, but for EVERYONE…

I am here because I know I am a freak — who I feel I really am is not matching who I am pretending to be — and I am ready to own who I am, I am ready to stop being AFRAID to be who I am, I am going to stop being AFRAID to let people in, I am going to not only learn who I am, but I am going to love and learn and encourage those coming up behind me, my kids, to become truly beautiful people who are NOT afraid of who they really are.

We are here to change the world…its time to shift paradigms…

Come along with me as I work through how I live my life, and hopefully how I make small changes in my life (in ways that I can) to slowly shift how I work, live, eat, breathe, and RELATE to other people…

Come along with us, join the revolution, and share the manifesto… :)

It’s been a while

October6
It’s been a while
 
I admit, its been a while since I wrote. It’s been a LONG while. It’s been a long, complicated, frustrating, lonely, rushed, anxious, tearful period of time… and I just haven’t known how to write about the things that are going on, the movements forward and steps backward and the quick slips sideways that have been occuring in my life lately…
 
It’s like the times I most need to write, I am most paralyzed with fear of actually writing things down, facing them.
Things are… complicated.
 
I am in love with a wonderful man… but I have to face the fact that right now I can’t really see a way that we can have a future together. The fact that I can’t say that there is NO way, that things might change as we both manage to get our lives back in order and our divorces finalized is the only thing that has kept me from breaking my own heart into a million peices and starting over. There is slight hope, it isn’t totally impossible, its just very difficult, very uncertain…
 
I am struggling to be patient with life… I really am. But I keep getting the feeling that I am 35 and as I get older I have less and less chance to find a life partner or someone to share my life with. At the same time, I have a great guy right now, we get along, we love each other and we are working on uncomplicating our lives…
 
Still… I don’t even KNOW if he sees a real future with me, or what he wants anymore… it seems to have changed in the year we’ve known each other.
 
I am still working on getting my divorce. Every time I think that I have done everything that I need to do to get the paperwork filed, my lawyer tells me that I need to get him something else, or call someone else or do something else. Back in January we all (my ex, his lawyer, me and MY lawyer) that after the separation agreement was dealt with and all conditions were met MY lawyer would do up the divorce paperwork.
 
But he dropped the ball on that. The conditions were met, and he just did NOTHING.
 
And I poked him and was told that now I needed to do THREE more things, that I needed to meet THREE more conditions to get a divorce granted. And I told him that he needed to start this and work through it, because we had agreed that I was going to do it (little did I know how much MORE my lawyer would make me do, since he made it sound like it was a simple matter back in JANUARY)…
 
I had to get my ex OR his lawyer (if she was still acting on his behalf) to agree to the divorce. Which I thought we had already done.
 
I had to get information on my ex’s address and current working status.
 
We had to revise the child support agreement into an ORDER OF SUPPORT… which is further complicated by the fact that my ex got himself another job in July and since I couldn’t get in touch with my lawyer I was unable to get the original support agreement revised to reflect his new income… and now my ex is being a total wanker about the fact that he will have earned 45% MORE income in this calendar year than was claimed when the support agreement was issued, and legally I have a right to have that adjusted (and morally, he admits he knew he should pay more, but there were things he WANTED to do and WANTED to buy, so he felt justified keeping money from the kids)…
 
Now, my ex is a jerk most of the time, and a bully at the best of time. He uses his money and power, his education, and his sheer SIZE to intimidate me and has for the past 15 years. Its a strategy he utilized from the time we were merely dating through our engagement and our ENTIRE marriage. It is a tactic he has used against me from the time I first questioned and stated I was leaving, and how he’s gotten away with not doing what is right during this whole separation and divorce process. He knows he does it, he does it consciously… which is why he objects to having lawyers involved (he also has spending problems and ego problems that make his spending worse)…
 
His intimidation and unwillingness to treat me fairly in the separation was what FORCED me to get a lawyer and drive up the expensese in the first place. And his failure to do what he admits he KNOWS he has to do, or what he states he should do to make the process easier and less expensive for BOTH of us, has been what has driven up BOTH our expenses AND kept the lawyers involved.
I still have the right to pursue a revision of the order, because its not a paltry amount (the amount we’re talking about is actually about the AVERAGE for a DUAL income family in our province… for HALF A YEAR for ONE PERSON… about $500/month MORE that he should have been paying for the months of July through December 2009)… but because I am afraid of what he will do to me or the kids if I DO go to court over this, my hands are tied until May… and then if theEx will not see reason, I will have to deal with the court and he knows it. Its not GREED so much as if I let him do it this time he will do it to me again and again and again, whining about imagined “poverty” and of debts that he blames on me, and trying to pass off portions of income as one-time unexpected winfalls… he has to learn that he (like myself) have to be LEGALLY fair in this situation, and that what he THINKS is “fair” to him is not legally “fair” to either myself or our children…
At this rate my divorce is going to cost as much as my first degree did!! 
I am SUPER busy. I still work 40-50 hour days at my office job. But on Monday nights I am now GirlChild’s Beaver Leader so I am generally with the Beavers and waiting for BoyChild to finish Cubs until 8pm Monday nights. Tuesday nights I have my Beginner Irish dance class until 8:15pm. The weekends I have the kids BoyChild has Tae Kwon Do for part of the morning, trying to get all the errands done, have some down time, and relax and play with the kids. Sunday GirlChild has her Beginner Irish dance class from 3pm to 4pm… 
And then it starts again…
I’m finding that sometimes I am exhausted at the end of the week. Last Saturday, not having to get up to take BoyChild to TKD, I slept in until 9am. And the next day, snuggling with Reg, we slept in until noon! I was completely DEAD-TIRED (okay, the sex helped too)… 
Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in a day, or days in a week… with work and housework, errands, kids, volunteering, and activities it always feels like I’m rushing to do something, be somewhere, get something accomplished…
I want to stop that feeling and just allow myself to like what I do get done, where I do accomplish things… 
I have decided to make a commitment to myself:
I am restarting Goddess School. I am redoing the Making Space for your Inner Goddess eCourse for a second time, and I’m slowly working through the activities again (I first did it in July this year the first time and kinda got stuck with a bunch of things going on in my life at that time and having a hard time getting past some of my issues with where I live)… I am going to keep going and slowly work through this course this time, no matter how long it takes… 
I have booked my flight and my hotel room to go and visit Pace and Kyeli. This is a HUGE thing for me… 
I am going to find a way to start being creative, to find some time in EACH day that isn’t JUST work, and that fuels my exploration of who I am.
I am going to stop being afraid of my ex, I am going to let go of his expectations of me… although I don’t expect that it will be EASY to do.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This is the blog of a 30-something woman. I am a single mother of 2 children (9 year old son, 7 year old daughter). I am walking a Pagan Path. I am divorced. I am a geek girl. I am a nature’s child. I am a seeker. I am a talker. I am sometimes jubilant, sometimes creative, sometimes anxious, sometimes bitter… I run the gamut of emotions as I go through walking not only my Pagan Path but my everyday daily LIFE Path.

My interests include creativity, art, crafts, magick, nature, spirituality, writing, collecting blank books, pens and office supplies, technology, myths, kids, colours… hell… I might write on ANYTHING that strikes my fancy.


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