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| Time for Us |
Can you believe it? I am back to blogging?
Things will be changing around here and I truly hope you will stick around and enjoy the changes I am making and that I have made not only to this blog, but to myself, my commitment to God, my husband, my family and friends!
Where have I been you may have wondered?
I have been lost, flailing around in a pit of depression, extreme sadness and drowning in changes that happened to suddenly for my mind to comprehend and adjust to and somewhere in all the change, I lost myself, who I am and that is...
I am a Child of God, my mom and dad's daughter, wife to the most incredible and amazing husband, mom to 4 sons, grandmother to 10 grandchildren and great grandmother to 1.
Over the period of the past two years, I have lost so much of myself that I became withdrawn and isolated with the exception of attending church on Sunday's or going to dinner with the hubby, I stayed inside with the curtains drawn and the door locked tight.
The person I once was that was happy, let her hair down, laughed, made crazy jokes, enjoyed life, reached out to others, quilted for others suddenly found myself a complete opposite.
I quit laughing, became sad, lonely, controlling or trying to control everything around me because I was afraid to see in front of me for a minute, an hour, a day, every time the phone rang, I expected bad news.
Simply put, I was in a bad place!
What is worse than being in a bad place is the fact that I am the mistress of deceit, so I could smile to others, reach out to others, tell everyone I was doing great and behind the smile was a person so broken, so lost all I wanted was find peace.
My family could see something was going on, however, I am a very stubborn and strong minded person, they could not get me to see it for myself.
Things like bathing daily became difficult. Eating properly if I ate at all was a chore and my husband after working 12 hour days would come home to no dinner or frozen dinners. Bedtime for me was non-existent, I would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning and be right back up at 6, I wasn't sleeping.
This may be a difficult read for many of you, but it is important for me to show a side of mental health you may not know about and that is the side that shows up when a person entering their older years feels they are no longer worthy.
When I was raising my grandchildren, my life had an amazing purpose, I had a beautiful home, the kids were happy, we were happy and it was always the goal of ours to see them grow into productive adults.
Then overnight, they were gone out of our lives. Living with their dad and living close, but wanting to live with us, their loved and trusted grandparents.
We tried to do what we could, stay in their lives, be a part of their transition, but it seemed all they did was concentrate on the bad things (kids idea of bad is not bad at all), so they would call to talk to me and tell me how bad life was which sent me spiraling deeper into despair and yet, I didn't recognize it.
The more I tried to help out, the worse it became and the more I found myself in competition with the things of this world so I ran up my credit cards to their max, I quit buying anything for myself and only bought for them because I thought buying them things would make them happy.
What a crazy woman I was. There was no amount of name brand anything that was going to make my grands happy, because they didn't want things, they wanted life to go back to the way it was, to being a family and being happy.
I believed time would change things, I would become Ranny and be able to be a grandparent, but that wasn't going to work either because we raised these amazing kids and they wanted us back as a family.
That is where the problem is. We are not, never claimed to be their mom and dad. However, we have always been the stand in parents they never had, we raised them, fed them, clothed them, took care of them when they were sick, paid for and attended band functions, school functions, sports functions and were just there for them, always a constant.
You expect to see them grow up, become amazing citizens and then in the midst of their growing up, they are no longer there with their smiles in the morning, their tales of school during after school snacks and most days, you don't even hear from them.
My heart was broken, we had lost our home, 35+ years of accumulating possessions that held so many memories, my husband and grand daughters prized boat that not only took us all fishing, it took us on hot days to the lake watching the kids being towed on a raft behind the boat, the laughter and fun times, it was gone...all gone in an instant!
More about that later!
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