After the Fall. Again.

I lost my new job the same day I finally dropped my classes at the college.  Then I dropped my optimism. 

This is where Faith gets tested. My belief says “Everything Happens For A Reason”. My brain says, “What The Hell Could The Reason Be For This To Happen?” 

I still get mad. Then I shake it off and get puzzled. Then I try and move forward anyway. I have to. It’s not about me. I have kids that need a better life. 

I am writing this to the drone of my father-in-laws voice going on about the constitution and how “THEY” will be killing off people by putting poison in medicines. 

Then I have to throw in my own paranoid theories about how television has brainwashed our culture into essentially being shiftless lazy consumerist bastards who want everything handed to us. The fact I can type this and keep my own thought processes rolling, throw in a few conspiracy theories to egg him on and still type makes me wonder how sane I am today. 

Welcome to Montana, folks. This is what we do. Oh. Wait. This is what a lot of people do. Sit around and theorize about what the evil all powerful “THEY” are doing to us next…and stay sitting on our asses talking about it instead of going out there and trying to find out the truth or do something to change the state of our nation and better our country and our lives. Waiting for Superman. 

Now we have moved on to how jet trails aren’t really the reaction of hot airplane exhaust with cold upper atmospheric air but really ground up aluminum sprayed out of airplanes and used to kill people. 

*sigh* 

I have learned, over a period of a few short months that when a person goes through a serious period of personal change that they can ‘outgrow’ the people around them. 

When you take account of where you are in your life, spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, and decide you are sorely lacking in one or more of these areas, then decide you need to change them, and begin those changes you don’t look back. Well, you don’t if you have set foot on that path then fallen off once before, seen the wreckage you have made of your life so far and have the very real awakening that if YOU don’t make the change then NOTHING will change. 

It started last year. I was, once again, at the bottom of a huge depression. I was probably stoned. That’s usually when I would have the biggest ‘insights’. I was sitting on the hillside, staring down the hill at this monstrosity of an ‘addition’ that GM was building us to live in. It hit me like a ton of bricks. 

If something doesn’t change drastically, then this IS as good as it gets. As good as it will ever get. You are going to have to be the one to initiate the changes because you know your husband won’t do it. 

I know he doesn’t have evil in his heart. His intentions are not evil. But I also know he has an unwillingness to go through what he considers ‘unpleasantries’ in order to do what it takes to make a real and decent life for his family. Instead, we live in a modern poverty lifestyle nightmare. 

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to live an unconventional lifestyle. However, the lifestyle I pictured included us working together to clean up the garbage and scrap iron on our property, build our organic garden, dig the root cellar, plot where we would have the orchard and build the house. I thought we would work TOGETHER. I thought, since I was the one with the YEARS of hands on landscaping, gardening, plant knowledge composting that when I spoke of the kind of soil and water system we would need that my husband would listen, understand and support me. 

I was a fucking idiot. 

“”It would be ‘too hard’ to find a way to get the junk car bodies in to the scrap yard (they will come to you, I called to check). 

“That scrap iron isn’t ‘ours’.” (Scuse me? The land was GIVEN to us? OURS. To do what we wanted? Your Dad is on oxygen and can’t walk down the street much less haul his ass up here to load scrap. Fine! Sell the scrap, give your Dad half the money, we keep the other half for labor costs for clean up! Your thieving, lying, manipulative mother gets NOTHING btw.) 

“My car doesn’t have the room to haul the garbage to the fucking dump. Besides, all they do is go bury it into the ground somewhere else!” (Can I even believe I am HAVING this argument with you? You want me to grow a garden on a garbage heap because you are TOO FUCKING LAZY to put the garbage in your car because you don’t want you car (the car with all the garbage, cans, old food wrappers dirt and filth piled on the floorboards) to SMELL?) 

“Well my GRANDPA didn’t have to have a garden planted that way, he planted it this way.” 

“Well my GRANDPA didn’t have running water and he had hot water (thanks to the cookstove with a hot water heating tank on it!), he had water for his garden (thanks to the nearby freshwater source!).” 

“Well my GRANDPA had a root cellar and HE didn’t have to can this way or that way or….” 

Anymore my response is “YOUR GRANDPA IS FUCKING DEAD, HAS BEEN FOR OVER TEN YEARS AND WHAT HE DID HAS NO BEARING WHAT-SO-FUCKING-EVER ON HOW WE NEED TO LIVE AND SUPPORT OUR CHILDREN RIGHT NOW!!!!!” 

I think, in some totally screwed up way, if my husband can hang on to all this shit about how his Grandpa lived his life (without my husband ever working the dirt beside him to learn), then he doesn’t have to do any of it today because in his own belief system my ideas and ways aren’t “the RIGHT way to do it.” 

In the end, he only uses it as a complete excuse to not deal with any of it at all. My husband has a lot of excuses why he ‘can’t’ do things. Like provide for his family. Fix his failing marriage. Work with his wife on issues instead of assume I am telling him every problem in the world is his fault. He has a ‘right’ to be angry and scream incoherently if I am telling him it’s all his fault, you see. It’s easier for him that way. He doesn’t have to work to fix anything. 

I have been stupid for the past ten years. Well, eight because two of them I wasn’t with him. Unfortunately he was still too tied into my life. 

I have been too sucked into his constant negativity. Until I began working on making real deep and lasting positive changes in my life, I did not fully understand the slow poison I was living with every single day. 

It is true that you are the sum of the five grown people you hang out with the most. My dilemma is, I pretty much had no social life outside of my husband until last October. This means that my attitude and personal growth ability had been influenced by the person I have hung out with the most. 

Now though, I am hanging out with more people. People who want to grow in life. Who want to make good lives for their families and themselves. People who want to serve others and not be self serving. People who don’t believe in excuses. People who believe in doing what it takes and doing ALL it takes to get their families taken care of. 

My husband puts more time, effort and thought into making himself wooden boxes to take with him to his middle ages reenactment group events than he does into planning on how he is going to support his kids. He would tell you that he is ‘improving his carpentry skills’ by getting ‘practice’ building these things, but he is already floundering and sabotaging himself with the project dresser he was supposed to build for a woman and make some profit on. His shop instructor fell suddenly ill and is in the hospital so now my husband is saying he won’t be able to build it instead of trying to find a way he can. Always, every day, several times a day I listen to why or how he CAN’T do even the simplest of things. Frankly, my ears hurt. So I am not going to listen anymore. I am calling him on it every time and I am finding a way out for my kids and I. I made a mistake AGAIN in going back with him. He came to counseling with me twice and I thought we were on a path together. As soon as I was under the same roof with him again, it all went away. 

We are supposed to be celebrating our two year wedding anniversary this month. I realized today there has not been a single time in the past two years I have not regretted that day as the worst mistake I have ever made in my life. I knew it the week after we were married. Hell, I probably knew it two weeks before. 

I have let people know I am looking to trade everything I own for a 24 foot self contained camp trailer. That way I can own a place for my kids and I to live until I put more work into the retail aspect of my business and have more than the modest income I have from it now. I have to step it up. My kids need me. My kids need a home. 

I think I am going to go outside for awhile. I think I see an airplane. With a jet trail. I think I will go inhale deeply as it flies overhead. Who knows. If it doesn’t kill me maybe it will give me super powers or something. I could use a couple right now.