Going Home

For 2 years after I left Broteus, I didn't live in our home. I couldn't pay the bills and take care of the kids with the little income that I had. I did what was best for my children. Moving out of the house was what was best for them. I had somewhere to go, he didn't. My grandparents let me live with them for about 9 months. I won't say that living with my grandma was a horrible experience because it wasn't. My grandmother was very good to me. She would stay up until i got home from work. She was by my side while I put myself through 6 weeks of unpaid CNA training. She encouraged and supported me through everything. She always had. My grandmother had always loved me, more than my own mother, and she treated me like i was hers. She was and had always been more of a mother to me than any woman, including the woman that gave birth to me, than any woman in my life ever was. Grandma always made sure i was ok and I always made sure she was ok. We had an unbreakable bond.

Shortly after moving in with my grandparents, I started drinking. I needed an escape. I had just made a complete mess of my life. Now, if you ask any person in my family why Broteus and I separated they will tell you it was because I cheated on him. That just is not true. There are two very very good friends of mine that know the truth. Now, you will know the truth, too.

I met a woman at my job working in the hospital. She was beautiful. We'll call her Michelle. Michelle had beautiful long red hair, porcelain skin, she was tall and thin. Her heart was beautiful. She was kind and extremely smart. I have always been attracted to women. However, being anything but "straight" was not acceptable to my family. When my sisters best friend came out to us, my family said horrible things behind her back. I could not handle that kind of judgement. I was absolutely taken back by Michelle. I wanted to know everything about her. I would spend the next year building a beautiful relationship with this woman. She was older than me by 10 years. She was a mutual friend of the man everyone thinks that i cheated on my husband, at the time, with. It was not this man that i wanted to be with, it was our friend Michelle. She wanted to be with me just as badly. My head was a mess. This is when i started drinking. How could I be interested in a woman? What would my family say? How would I ever be accepted by them if I left my husband for a woman? I was scared. I was terrified, actually. I regret ending our relationship because she and i would have been perfect together. One of the biggest regrets i have is breaking things off with her. Let me be clear, I never actually physically cheated on Broteus. I didn't engage in anything physical until after i left him, and that was short lived. The man that we were mutual friends with, was very interested in me. I figured, "What the hell! Why not?" so we started dating about 6 months after i moved in with my grandmother. Things were going good. I was lonely. He was lonely. We had a fairytale beginning and a tragic ending. I don't want to talk about him. I continued to drink through the entirety of these relationships.

I always had a bottle hidden. Patron was my weakness. I love Patron. I would put it in my water bottles and drink even when i was at work. That is the reason i lost my job. It was a whole mess and instead of admitting that i had a problem i told everyone that I was fired because I was sick with something else and couldn't work. I sure was sick. Alcoholism is no joke. But, how did NOBODY notice that i had been drinking, every day? I think i hid it well. Now, they will all tell you that marijuana is my vice. That is not the truth.

I am an alcoholic. My drink of choice is Patron. Recently I started receiving a shot called Vivitrol to help with this horrible addiction. For now, it is working. I am terrified that it will stop and i will fall back in to the pattern i had been in for the last 3 years. I don't WANT to drink but I know that being around alcohol and even having the means to buy it when I feel i need it, is very dangerous. Right now I am doing everything in my power to fight it.

Let's talk about the marijuana. I have used marijuana to help me with anxiety and sleeping issues for years. It is the only non pharmaceutical drug that has done anything for me and still allows me to function like a norma person. Marijuana is no stranger to my family. My dad has smoked marijuana for his whole life even in our house when we were children, and even now. He also deals marijuana. My paternal grandmother has used marijuana my entire life, too. As far as adults using marijuana, I don't believe that it should be considered a problem. Children using it just to have fun is a real issue. I'm not going to go in to my views on the "drug". Just know that yes i used and still use it.

About 6 months after i moved in with my grandma i was extremely tired of not having my kids with me. I would go to their house and spend every available moment i had with them until their father got home from work. I saw and was with them every single day. I just couldn't keep them overnight unless it was on the weekend, because i lived with my grandparents. It was really hard for me. Of course I drank lots of a patron to cope with this. There wasn't a night that I didn't drink for a solid year and a half. Anyways, at this point I did what I felt I had to do and only for the purpose of being with my kids. I moved in with the man that everyone thought i cheated on my husband with. He offered to pay for everything. He took out a $10,000 loan to buy furniture and things for the apartment we were about to move in to. This apartment was $1500 a month. I could have easily afforded it on my own because i had a good job and I worked a lot of doubles. He worked in a hospital 6 days a week. Shortly after moving in, i'm talking about 3 days, he financed and put a jeep wrangler in his name for me. He also bought a purebred Newfoundland for us that cost $5000. Things were finally falling in to place and i was able to have my kids for a week at a time every other week. I could make this work. Or so i thought I could. This man had a good heart. He meant well. He was good to my kids when they were there with us. He was good to me. Then, out of nowhere, he flipped the switch. I don't want to go in to detail but I was afraid of him. He scared me more than any man I had known. I couldn't make this work. I was afraid he would be that way when my kids were around and i could not subject them to that.

Here is a nice twist to this story. My ex husband and a very good male friend of mine came to the apartment and moved my kids and i back in to the house my ex husband lived in with my kids. I felt like a failure. There is no amount of money or material items in this world to make me stay in that kind of environment. I walked away from everything. I had to.

My ex husband let me move back in to my home with him and my kids. You read that correctly. This arrangement worked for about 5 months. Our divorce was finalized in November of the previous year, and while we got along for the kids sake, living together was not easy. I paid him for half of all of the bills every month that I lived there. In April, just a few months after I moved back home, there was an incident that just threw all of us in to a chaotic state. Our oldest daughter went to a friends house. My pap dropped her off because both Broteus and I were at work. I spoke with her that evening as I always did when she wasn't home. I had a weird feeling in my gut all day over her going to this friends house. I was known to be very anxious though so I pushed myself to think I was just being anxious and paranoid. I went to bed. Broteus and I were both up early that morning. I still couldn't shake this feeling. I called our daughter. No answer. I called her again, no answer. She called me back a little while later. I asked her where she was because I now knew that my feeling was correct. She lied to me twice before she told me the truth. I was in my bedroom when she finally told me that she was at her boyfriends house on the other side of the river. I was in the kitchen where Broteus was drinking his coffee now. I told him what was going on. I finally got the address out of Anastasia as to where she was. I gave the address to Broteus and told him to go get her because if I went I would have ended up in jail. He knew that. We knew what each other was capable of and that was the best decision. I immediately called my mom and she was at the house in less than 10 minutes. Anastasia came home. Broteus was off the hook as far as the punishment was concerned because I was seeing red by the time he brought our baby home. My mom had my back and was there to make sure I didn't completely lose my mind. She backed me up with everything I said and every punishment i gave because this time I really put my foot down and that is something she and my dad had been longing to see. Not for their amusement but because I was very lenient with this child in particular. I gave her a lot of chances and I was more of a friend than a mother to her for years. This needed to happen. Instead of being mad and punishing Anastasia when she came home from a sleepover and told me she tried marijuana, instead I called her doctor and I made an appointment for her where he lectured her about drugs. I was more concerned with her telling me the entire truth about the things she was doing and the places she was going for my own piece of mind, than I was concerned with punishing her and making her hate me.

I owe this child a lot. For 2 years before I gave birth to this beautiful baby, I was both bulimic and anorexic. I had chest pains from throwing up. I still don't have a gag reflex to this day. My stomach was always cramping. I had heartburn so bad it made me vomit. I would binge and purge. I would starve myself. Anastasia saved me. When i found out that i was pregnant with her, those things were no longer an option. I gained 83 pounds from the beginning to the end of my pregnancy. To get back down to a weight the doctor would be happy with i only needed to lose 20 pounds. I was healthy.

Now back to the punishment. I had Broteus remove the door from her room until further notice and i took her cell phone. If you know anything about teenage girls, you know that these are harsh punishments. She was also grounded until further notice. Shortly after i spoke with her, explained why i was upset and punished her, she wanted to talk to me. I went up in to her room where she told me that the boy that she was with was actually 21 and that they had been talking for months and that they had sex. I was fuming. I left the house with every intention on going to this "boys" house and beating his ass. Broteus called me and i told him what i was doing. He talked me in to just going to the police station. I did that but he sent me to the police station in the city that the incident occurred. I went back to the house to get Broteus and Anastasia. Broteus's dad stayed with our other two kids. Anastasia told the police what happened and said we could press charges. Broteus and i left feeling angry, glad the police couldddo something, but angry because jail wasn't enough of a punishment. Within 24 hours, Anastasia decided that she did not want to press charges and then she told us she wanted to kill herself. So, we admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. I don't believe for one second that she would have killed herself and neither did my mother. As harsh as it sounds, we believe she said it so that she could get out of trouble because she knew what she was doing and she consented to having sex with a 21 year old.

Anastasia being in the psychiatric facility is where it all started. She admitted to me that she was not raped. He was nothing but nice to her, and she wanted to have sex with him, knowing that it was wrong because he was 5 years older than her and over the age of 18. She talked about still talking to and being with him. I told the social worker and Broteus all of these things. By the time she came home, a few weeks later, she was medicated and almost back to normal, on the surface. No one could see that she wasn't ok, except me. They also didn't realize that she was taking medication that she did not need. What kind of psychiatric doctor puts a child on mood stabilizers just going off of her word and not speaking to the people that she lives with?! This one did.

With a mental health diagnosis, she became the diagnosis, and every diagnoses she seeked after that. Mental Health Diagnoses are not a personality trait. They are not a crutch. Taking on and consuming yourself with other people's issues to the point where you believe they are your own is wrong, and a problem all in itself. You will only hurt yourself in the end.

I was home and it was a chaotic environment. I was filled with so many questions. I would never find the answers. But, I was finally home.