Yesterday, Today...& some deep reflections

I seem to never have time to sit down long enough to write anything. I have all these things I really want to write about but it just never happens.

Okay, for yesterday I ate careful all day even more so than normal. I made myself do more chores than I really wanted to do. Who wants to do housework and errands? I hate going to the grocery store and my husband even offered to go. I went anyway because in reality he don't know what's good for you and what's not. I made myself go even though I didn't want to. :)

This morning for breakfast I ate strawberries, banana, and 1/2 of an orange. I usually eat pancakes w/sugar free syrup, cold cereal, or eggs and dry toast. I know the fruit was much healthier.

Tomorrow we pick Kala (whom we are adopting) up and get to spend up to 10 hours with her. We are going to take her to church with us and then go skating. I wish this process didn't take so long. She wants to come home with us so bad and we haven't even got an over-night visit yet. I really feel like the agencies could do things quicker. She is already 13 and she needs to get adjusted into a normal life. I feel like alot of time has been wasted already. But how do you express this to the people that have so much control over the outcome? I can't take a chance on making them mad and stopping the whole thing. I can't even imagine how Kala would react at this point if they told her it wasn't going to happen. We have already bonded bigtime. I am getting very impatient and sometimes I want to scream.

I miss my children that are grown (21, 19, 17). Only one of them ever calls me and he only calls every 6 or 8 weeks. They have just totally drifted away from me. Long story short....when they were 5, 3, and 1 my very controlling, manipulative, know-it-all, abusive mother decided she could control me if she got custody of my children. (If someone wants to talk about control issues I can jump right in on that conversation.) Me being too young and ignorant of the laws, didn't know how to keep this from happening especially with all the high-up connections she had. She worked with the court system therefore I thought there was no chance for me. So in signing custody over to her she finally agreed to let me see them 1 hour a week (some kinda mom, right?). Of course when she got tired of them she would bring them and drop them of at my house, or have me come to stay at her house and she would leave me there with the children sometimes for 3 and 4 days at a time. She become very close to my children's father. When he got married a year after she took my children she was even trying to make them call his wife "Mom". That is how much she hates me. Over time it became very obvious that she had become best friends with his new wife. She had replaced me with her and she was trying to erase me completely.

I want to make it clear that I never neglected or abused my children. I would never hurt a child nor ever let anyone else hurt one. This was something she did to try to control me (or maybe even torture me, I still haven't figured out which). This woman never protected me from anything while I was growing up. I was sexually abused by her father, brother and several other people and when I went to her (the first time it happened it was her father) she slapped me across the face and told me never t talk about it again. Her brother was the next one that did it. Only he was sicker...he raped me, and ofcourse again I was threatened to never talk about it again. After that I realized that it was just something I was going to have to live with because in my mind "if your own mom don't help you when you get hurt...who will?". So all I lived with this stuff until I was seventeen and I got married to get away from it. Ofcourse the marriage didn't last, when I was 20 we divorced.

I just never was able to get out from under her control no matter how for away from her I went. When she seen that I was getting a little too far away she decided taking my children would again give her complete control of me. She did gain some control back and at the same time I came to hate her with a vengeance. It has been a battle ever since. My children don't see that she is controlling them now the same way she wanted to control me. My daughter (21) still lives with her because my mom makes her feel guilty for even thinking of moving out. Jonathon (19) joined the marines right out of highschool last year but he is still mentally under her control. Jordan (17) has signed up with the marines but I really don't even think he will make it through bootcamp because she has him so wrapped up he thinks he can't do anything without her approval and assistance. I hope he does make it and hope he learns that there is a world out there besides hers. She has made them think I am the worst person alive, and this trash has been drilled into there heads for 16 years so it isn't easy to change it. The thing I don't understand is that I have been there the whole time and they still don't see the real me... they see me through her eyes. I don't think they will ever understand that I truly love them with everything in me. It kills me that they are now old enough to make the decision to have a real relationship with me and they act like it doesn't matter one way or the other, whatever makes her happy is what they feel they need to do.

So, anyway they are off living their lives without me being even a passing thought while I sit here and can't get them off my mind. I am doing better than I used to. I don't sit around crying over them anymore and I have come to the realization that I can't keep my life on hold for them anymore. I have really just started living within the last year and it feels good. I still have these days when they are on my mind because I did give birth to them and I will always be their mom. They will know one day...probably when they have their own children.