This Place

This place was created for me by my beloved. He thought it would help me find some peace. It did, for a bit.

Now when I look back at the posts, I realize I have not been very honest with you...or me. I fill the pages with lovely photos from a life I cobble together 10 or 15 minutes a day. The rest of the time, I am in bed. Or watching the world move slowly from my window because I lack the ability to leave the house. It looks lovely because I am good at that. I can make the ugliest things so beautiful. I look best when I have no sleep. I think it is a survival technique I picked up over the years of living on this planet. It does not mean I am overly broken or overly flawed. It just means that I am simply human.

If you are reading this, know that much of it is geared to a team of attorneys in Los Angeles who have had a field day with my life for the last two and half years. They have read every word in this blog, photocopied it, offered it as evidence that I am happy. They dig up my children's father, the crack addict and brought him into the picture after 11 years. They have had vans parked out in front of my house and filmed me for weeks. In the weeks they were filming, they got three days of footage. Why only three? I am sorry to say, most days...I was been in bed. It is hard to admit, especially when I look at my former life of 16 hour days and working seven days a week. Tears are welling as I type, because I love life. Ask anyone who knows me. I can find beauty in the smallest detail...I have been wasting my life, mourning for old friends and relationships that have dissolved. My work with 25 wonderful children has been erased, my relationship with their parents, gone. My career has been ruined. Waldorf is a small community. I am blacklisted.

I am trying to move forward, but I keep looking back...

It was the Summer Solstice, 1999, I left an abusive relationship to an addict with two small children in the dark of night. I roused the babes from their beds and started a new life. Within a week, I had a job as waitress in clothes I bought from the thrift store with borrowed money. I borrowed $50 from the friends I was staying to use as my bank(cash one uses to make their own change,etc.) for work until I made enough tips to have my own bank. Before the end of the summer, I was living in a brand new apartment. I was making enough money to support the children and I had enrolled in a Waldorf teacher training program. Within a few months, it all came together.

My children's father disappeared. We did not know if he was alive or dead. The children began counseling, not because we were overly broken, but because that is what normal people do when life's challenges overwhelm them. After some time, their counselor told me that their worries were the worries of every child their age and we could go forth in happiness. And we did. I was happy to be in school and thriving. I was promoted to manager at the restaurant and put in charge of hiring. I earned enough money to pay for school, and even take the children on mini-breaks to the coast. He didn't break me. In fact, I grew stronger. So you are wrong, Los Angeles Attorneys. Very wrong.

One night, I was working the busiest station in the restaurant. A party of 10 had just been sat in my station. As I exited the kitchen, I was dumbstruck. My children's father was standing three feet from me. I had not seen or heard from him in months. I had no idea where he had been or what he had been doing. It was like seeing an apparition. I turned right around and walked back into the kitchen, leaned my back against the cold steel of the walk-in and slid to the ground.