Frozen Nowhere

Last week I suffered a disappointment.

Not in something that I wanted. But in my identity as a mother…

My son has been lying to me (in particular) about his homework. Yes, he has been lying to his father as well, but the fact of the matter is that he has been telling me every day for MONTHS that he has had “no homework” when, in fact he has been steadily getting farther and farther behind in his work.

Now, because the teachers have decided to allow the children to take “ownership” of their workload, my son has been coasting along without any adult intervention in this. Not once has the teacher or school indicated, to myself (or presumably to…

I often feel like the ONLY parent in the universe who has kids who are struggling. Maybe I’m just the ONLY PARENT IN THE UNIVERSE who will admit that their kids aren’t perfect angels? Maybe I’m the only parent willing to say “hey, listen, I’m struggling to find a way to help my kids”…

Or maybe my kids ARE the only ones who have “issues” as yet undetermined?

Whatever the case, 90% of my interaction with the school/teachers* has been relatively NEGATIVE in nature. It seems more often than not I am being asked to explain WHY one or the other (or both) of my children are having problems.  I am frustrated. I have no set of peers to talk…

Some days it just feels like I am not fully equip to live in normal society.  There are a LOT of days where I feel IMMENSE and IMMEASUREABLE (although, let’s admit it I still TRY to measure it, I measure everything) guilt over the decisions I made in the past few years – right OR wrong – and how horribly I have “broken” things.

Every SINGLE day I deal with a litany of complaints from ALL arenas about my children. Either theEx is complaining because of expenses associated with the children or having to deal with some issue with that the kids are having, or it’s GirlChild’s teacher complaining about how GirlChild BEHAVES. And a lot of the issues are…

Much of my life makes me lonely …
I live (primarily) alone with cats. I have my kids only 2 weeks out of a month, and because my schedule is divided like this it makes it harder to take classes or join groups that require concrete commitments. I want to go out and DO things, but when I have my kids I also want to spend my evenings with THEM, not send them to a babysitter, not after they have been at a babysitter most of the afternoon.
 
I am conflicted.
 
I want to go out and join in things, but I don’t want to give up TOO much of my children’s time… and I don’t want to

…

Four days Away…

I want to write about the first vacation I took my kids on.

I want to write about my time with Serin.

I want to write.

But…

Well… previous attempts at detailing previous trips to visit with Serin have been rather… well…. boring. Not that that is an unusual thing, it seems that I have issues with trying to find my “voice” in my writing. I write too much detail, I try to keep the good snippets alive by writing out EVERY LAST boring thing, I never seem to have any point, and the entries seem to be endless blathering nonsense that no one cares about.

And with the struggles of the last 2 years, leaving my…