I have barely blogged at all this month, but it certainly isn’t for lack of trying.  Every time I sit down and open up my admin panel to write, my mind either goes blank or I can’t think of anything to write that is fit for public consumption.  I miss writing because my blog is my best “therapeutic” outlet, but I just can’t seem to get the words from my mind to the keyboard.  There is just so much going on in my head and in my life right now and sometimes I feel so lost that it’s hard to remember which way is up.  Sorting it all out has become almost an obsession, a necessary one if I am going to remain even remotely sane.  It seems like every time I make two steps forward, something happens to make me take four steps back.  All I want is to get out of this hole I feel like I am in, and it just doesn’t help to constantly feel like I am being pushed back.  I don’t even know what to do about it anymore and I am so emotionally exhausted that it is ridiculous.  I have never been a sad person in general, but I can’t count the number of times a day when I just want to curl up and bawl.  That is just not me, and I hate it.  Something has to change, if not with the situation then with me.  Somehow I have to find a little peace and happiness or I am going to lose my mind.  It is like a vicious circle, though.  I know I need to get in touch with my spirituality again, and really feel it again.  I feel like I have lost any connection I once had to my spirituality and I know that doesn’t help that lost feeling I carry with me.  But I am so blah and disheartened by everything else going on in my life that I can’t find the energy or the desire to put the work necessary into it.  Sometimes I really hate being solitary in my beliefs, because it makes finding my way that much harder.

Mood: sad  Weather: snowy, high of 29°  TV: The Today Show

Sometimes there are moments when my heart is touched and my faith in humanity is at least temporarily restored.  The best of those moments come from unexpected people at unexpected times, and I am sure that the person who gave me this moment doesn’t even realize how much it meant to me.  But it is those little things that mean so me, something my own family just doesn’t seem to get or care about.

I get so little appreciation from my own family that when I get it from someone else, it truly touches me.  I guess that is kind of a sad statement on my value within my family, huh?!  And I have to admit, it made me resent my family a little.  It almost highlights how badly I get treated in my own home, and that is just demoralizing.  I have spent far too long fighting to be treated decently in my house and the fact that I am still fighting that battle hurts my heart in ways they just don’t understand.  Part of me resents the hell out of the fact that I have to fight this hard to be treated like I am worth something, but the other part of me wonders if this is all I deserve. 

But this isn’t just about my family.  It’s about my whole life and the people I have been close to in my past, friends and lovers alike.  I have a bad habit of accepting and forgiving people and situations that don’t necessarily deserve that acceptance and forgiveness.  And it always costs me my own happiness and another piece of my spirit.  I hate feeling like this and would like to believe that I deserve better, but when it happens over and over again?  When you put your heart and soul into something and the situation never gets better?  At what point do you finally accept that you really aren’t worth the effort it would apparently take to love you?  I know full well that I can be too accepting and understanding, but it is a part of me and I don’t know how to change it without losing another piece of myself.  I also don’t want to accept that maybe I am not worth the effort, but sometimes I think the only way I am going to find any peace is to give up and accept it.

I have been suffering from massive blogstipation for days, a term coined by my friend Dan to describe my inability to put my thoughts into words.  Usually my blog is the one place where I can let it all out, vent my frustrations, and be done with it.  But, for whatever reason, I just haven’t been able to make the leap from mind to blog.  I am so completely overwhelmed and completely lost these days that I sometimes don’t know which end is up.  There are things that need to change in my life, and nothing seems to be working in that direction.  I guess I had really hoped that it would be different this time, easier for change to happen.  The fact that it isn’t changing has thoroughly demoralized me and left me feeling like hell.  It hurts that it is such an uphill battle when it shouldn’t have to be a battle at all.  I resent the hell out of the fact that I am still having to fight for things that I should be able to expect.  It makes me feel completely unloved and worthless.  So there I am, trying to muddle my way through and find some happiness on the other side.

Clearly I wronged someone in a past life and my sins have come back to bite me in the ass in the form of boy children.  Sometimes I wonder if I have gone so far around the bend of insanity that I am actually speaking in tongues and don’t realize.  That would explain the inability for my man children to listen and retain any and all information imparted to them.  It’s either that or my children have either extreme selective hearing OR they have extremely early onset of Alzheimer’s.  Either way, I am going to lose what is left of my mind.  I’m sure of it.

Not too long ago, our Ice Age DVD broke so I bought both of the first two movies on sale at Amazon to replace it.  I got them the 3rd one, and a companion DVD, for Christmas and suddenly the first two are missing.  So when the middle two returned home from school, they were given the mission to find the movies.  Not only did they fail in their mission, they were discovered to have totally trashed their room, just days after they were supposed to have sanitized it.  That extended their mission from simply a search & rescue mission, to a full on field sanitation mission.  It was amazing just how long a 15 minute job can take when you are pissed at your mom.  Sucks to be them.

That was nothing, however, compared to the events of this morning and one Ka’lani Keller, age 12.  As most of you know, for the next few months, we have two soldiers staying with us, Jason and Trevor.  Well, Jason is having some medical issues that put the kabash on caffeine intake.  To me, that would be a fate worse than death since I thoroughly ♥ my coffee, but you do whatcha gotta do!  With that in mind (his medical issues, not my insane yen for coffee), I packed up my freshlypurchased caffeinated tea bags and bought a new box of Salada decaf ones, all for the daily gallon of iced tea that I also inhale.  Once the evil caffeinated ones were packed up, I put the storage container on the top of the cabinets, a place where no sane person would put anything they use with any regularity, since it would require wings for flying or climbing on counters to retrieve it.  Multiple times, I told young Master Ka’lani to forget they were there, to NOT use them, since he is the tea guru in the house.  “Okay, Mom” I heard several times in that exasperated voice that only a child can do so well.  I showed him the new box of Salada bags, in the same place where we always keep the tea bags for iced tea.  The caffeinated ones come in a big box so I have a smaller plastic container that I replenish from the bigger box as I use them.  That smaller box was sitting on the counter, empty, when Ka’lani went to go make fresh tea last night.  Apparently, the child had a massive brain fart, and couldn’t figure out why it was empty when it had been freshly filled the previous day.  So he came to me and asked.  I rem inded him of the new blue box of tea bags that he was supposed to use, and told him he could empty that into the plastic container, since it is airtight.  Nodding his head in acceptance and implied understanding, he turned and beat feet into the kitchen, about 7.5′ away.  This morning, I was standing at the coffee maker (next to where the tea bags are kept), pouring my first blood of life, when I noticed that the plastic box held not the decaf bags, but the caffeinated ones, the very ones I had told him NOT to use.  The blue box of decaf was still sitting in its spot, sealed, and the plastic container was right on top of it.  I questioned him,… loudly.  I got no useful answers.  But I have to ask myself several things,…

1. How did he not see the blue box of tea in the exact spot where the tea bags are always kept?
2. How did seeing the previously filled plastic box now empty not remind him?
3. And when it didn’t, how did he manage to forget in less than 30 seconds that I told him to use the blue box tea when he came and asked why the box was empty?
4. Why didn’t the fact that he had to climb on a counter and stand up on it to reach the caffeinated tea container not give him a clue that perhaps something was different?
5. Why didn’t the fact that the tea bags were in a totally different container and a completely different location clue him in?
6. And finally, WHAT THE HELL?!!!!!

And here ends my rant of the day!