Toodles, I've Lost My Marbles

     I never thought I'd be this 'down' i my entire fucking life. If it were not for my mother, my son and I would be living on the streets. Truly. My 'spawn,' as I affectionately refer to him, has only known poverty. We live on about $500 a month and that has to cover food and all bills. That breaks down to $369 in food stamps and about $170 in child support. The streets are just outside though. Waiting.

     You see my husband used to be a big time drug dealer. He is 61 now. But in his misspent youth he dealt cocaine. He has a hole in his nose where the septum has worn away from YEARS and kilos of use. It drips blood in the mornings. I could put a ring in it. But I'm the gross one because I've put on a few pounds after having three kids. I have never expressed this to anyone. I'm so down I don't know which way is up.

     My parents bought a house for 'us,' when my husband was with the family. He has his own home. But 'we' can't live there as a 'family' because that was where the home invasion robbery happened. Joshua hasn't been back to that house since the night the robbery happened. Luckily I had the other house from my parents. My husband hates my parents. They put down $120,000 as a down payment...half the value of the house. My husband put down $35k towards the down payment. Now he wants his money back. Or at least my mom should loan him some money. That bitch, he said. I don't know why he hates my parents. But then he struggles to understand why HE HAS no friends or family. They can't stand him. This has been a life long problem for him. Hmmm.

     But I'm the bitch that ruined his life. During 20 years together he has had five or six jobs. He got himself fired 'on purpose' with a dirty drug test because he didn't like the boss. Yeah. I know how to pick them. He turned down a Postal job to sell knives door to door. He was 'laid off' from a job in a boat yard...he's a stellar carpenter...but he said he heard thru the grapevine that the boss said he didn't fit in. He quit his last job as an insurance salesman because he was .... sad and depressed. His shrink told him to quit. 

     I too was sad and depressed but got up and went to work every day. Hmmm.

     I was the family earner, throwing myself into the burgeoning nursing industry. Kept us in high style WITH benefits. I paid extra money out of my paycheck to up our medical insurance to cover his #Hep C treatment. But I've fucked up his life. 

     My parents just bought me a laptop and a new car. They pay my rent, most of my bills for Josh and I. My husband pays $170.00 per month. That is it. It barely pays two bills. What's left over is used for luxuries like soap and toilet paper. But I'm the bitch. 

     I have stayed at home with my son since the day the robbery occurred. I was fired a few weeks after the robbery because my gem of a boss decided I needed to spend more time with my family. It was her way of saying I was spending too much time on the phone talking to shrinks, doctors, security firms, Josh, my ex. Maybe she was right. It still was a dirty deal, but that is life, right? And Nick did not understand that he had to take a more active role as a parent if I was to work and Josh needed to be homeschooled and taken to his activities. That was all too much for Nick. 

     Think my ex would pick up the torch while I acclimated myself to being a stay-at-home mom, get the hang of homeschooling & learning medical billing so I could work from home? By that time, my ex was not working. This was all during the time immediately after the robbery. All of us were diagnosed with #PTSD. We were each given 20 shrink visits a piece. What a learning curve that was. Got lucky, though, and found one who was raised in Compton, California. He knew gang violence, guns, robberies... he was perfect. My husband hated him. 'He's a quack.' Oh, I see, he can actually communicate with our better than you, because he is a professional, but that makes him bad and you hate the man.

     He wanted to change Josh's shrink. I fought like a hell cat and won. Only problem was I had to kick down my husband's bedroom door and tell him to get out of the house. @a_okafor007 would appreciate that detail! 

     Well, my ex did sort of pick up the torch. He 'made me' make him a website. Which he was convinced was going to magically make boat loads of money. AND, he moved back in the house.  In the mean time he took over the education of our son which basically consisted of, "You idiot." "What's wrong with you, the other kids 'get it!'" "Are you stupid or something? We just went over this!" "Fuck. All your friends get this shit." 

     I had to listen to that while I wrote copy about a particular friend of my ex's. His name was Greg. And my husband thought this guy was so cool because he and his #gf DIED after smearing each others body with cocaine and over-dosed. I just snapped. I knew it was going to get a lot worse before it got better. For him, not Joshua.

     My brilliant solution, because you know I'm perfection personified and never make mistakes, was to start smoking clove cigarettes and drink a lot of vodka. Vodka is so versatile. It goes with everything and you can cook with it, too. Brilliant crap, that vodka. As you can imagine the POlice were at our home frequently. But I was the caller usually. 

     The vodka and cloves, though delightful, had to go. 

     You see he had two guns in the house. I had to stay up at night. One night we had a very violent argument. In my mind, this thing was just the right excuse to call the cops and have them take the guns. He hated me for that. I prefer to think I was acting responsibly. 

     When his website went up, my adoring son came and said to me that dad said I had to loose a lot of weight so I could go to those fancy art parties. You want to talk about Medusa. He barricaded himself in his bedroom (he snores), but I still managed to kick the door in. Without the vodka. With a kick my son taught me! Sho Shu!

     He was kicked of therapy by our shrink for being difficult & non compliant with therapy. Well, all that did was throw more gas on a huge fire. He was even more against Dr. Lewis. All he could talk about was how much he hated that doctor and how famous he was going to become as an artist. It's been five years. No one has bought anything because he over priced everything. Not that I cared. By this time our son was old enough to be embarrassed by his fathers 'occupation.' His dad wasn't like the other dads. His dad slept on the couch all day or in his bedroom watching TV. 

     That was the end. He had taken another loan out on HIS house, $24k, rather than look for a good carpenter's job. It was just too hard. 

     That night I thought of all the times at night when he did not get up and nurse our precious infant son; the times when he was too busy growing his dope than to find a 'legal' job or bond with his son; all the school lunches that never got made; everything that he missed in this child's life...for nothing. Josh wanted him to go. I always defer to my son. You're only a kid once. I am ashamed that I was part of a lifestyle that left my son with less of a childhood than his father and I enjoyed as kids. 

     I was working on Joshua and myself. So when he called me to talk, I told him to get a shrink. I wasn't 'smart' enough to fix him. I was busy trying to 'fix' our son's life. And he asked to come back...

     He would call me all the time to argue or to beg. But when I'm done with you, that's the end. You might as well be made of stone. I have said I've always been the Medusa. I meant it literally. He tried to get back at me by stop paying all the bills at the Lodi house, the one my parents bought for us. He was trying to force 'us' out so we would feel as bad as him. Because, little narcissist that he was, no one could suffer like my ex.

     Never a thought to what he was doing to his son. 

     One night my brother in law, his brother called and told me that my ex had never wanted a kid or to get married. When confronted with what I always knew, my ex called his brother a liar. Which he may have been. How was I to know. For the record, to date my parents have contributed almost a quarter million dollars to 'raise' my son and keep off the streets and off the public dole. 

     My parents shell out over $1k a month to keep Josh and I afloat. But Nick, well, he still hates my parents, my mother, specifically. He's mad because she won't loan him any money. His family has contributed almost nothing by comparison. You see after my ex's mother died from pancreatic cancer, truly a saintly woman, the boys went bonkers in different ways. Tony, her spouse of fifty years waited a scant two weeks after we planted her in the ground, to call me and ask ME FOR PORNO. Why? Those two years of chemo were hard on my sex life. I wanted to vomit. 

     Did I mention that my husband hid 20 kilos of pot in the family wood shed. That was a splendid argument. 

     But I 'left' my ex after only 9 months of marriage. The growing, the selling meth and using, were things he kept doing after we left him when my son was 2 years old. But Nick kept following us around. Asking for second chances like they pass out 2 dollar bills. Not a lot of effort was put forth by him. Or he'd get it right & then fuck it, Josh, up again.

     The news is not ALL bad. Now that Nick has quit his LAST job to draw pictures of animals and children I feel so much more secure. Because ... darn it, Josh and I may be barely scraping by, but NICK IS HAPPY. Nick is fulfilled.

     Our son. Still struggles with abandonment issues, depression, his #PTSD, nightmares. He has fallen behind in school because all he can think of now is finishing the divorce. He is the driver of that issue. He feels he can't move forward and feel secure and happy if I am still married to my husband/ex/Nick. Josh is so tired of being broke. But I can't go back to work until after the divorce, because Nick, darling that he is, will seek alimony from MEdusa! Him and what army. Of course, I want to be free again. On paper.

     There. Those are the contents of my mind. I don't care if anyone reads this. I doubt it will help anyone. I don't know if it even helped me. I just know that the next three weeks can't go by fast enough for me. The final hearing. It's already turning into the longest three weeks of my life. 

      I hope getting this out of my head will at least make me feel better. Maybe I can become my old self again on Twitter. It has been my only source of social connection for the last 2 1/2 years. Thanks to some very loyal followers.

     Efahisto, my babies. Kalimerimerimerimesi! Oopa! To your health xOx #TheMedusa 

     

I'm Still Afraid of the Dark Rant

When I was a child, I had horrible night terrors. Dreaming I was in a home in which people
were murdered. Or I was in a home that was being robbed, but I kept looking for something. 
I was looking for my son on the night of the robbery. I dream about dead people. Like my father's 
mother, my YiaYia (Greek for grandma), because SHE understood his rages.  My father
was bipolar and had about 200 guns and ammo. I say the wrong word to set him off & I'm a 
dead girl. He was always up at night.


We used to go camping at Death Valley every year. Several times a year we went shooting 
with my Uncles's. 1 Marine; 2 Navy; 4 Airforce and one in the army, as well. Demolitions.
As my father became sicker, I relied upon these men to keep me alive. It was a pretty regular
thing for my dad and I to disappear for a couple of weeks in the desert ...by the bombing range.
From time to time, I thought my mother was trying to get me killed by sending me off
alone with my looney dad, with guns, no GPS then, and she would stay home. A nice gig
if you can get it. He could've wasted me and left me out in the desert, telling mother that
"She just wandered off, Joyce." or "The .45 misfired, she's 'gone' honey." How would she
know with all those pills, brandy, TV and bad novels?


Now I'm always up at night and mostly throughout the day, as well. You see people break in 
throughout the day. Small noises, big noises, medium noises...anything that doesn't sound like
it belongs to the daily going's on of this house is immediately suspected. So you hear this alot 
in my home, "Noise"; "It's ok, it's just me." "It's your mother." But it happened to us at night. 
until the sun is up. I'm awake by that time after a nap and ready to patrol the fortress while 
he sleeps. 


Josh, after seven years, still has nightmares about the break in. I think of the two #Petit girls 
and what they had to endure. How does a child's mind recover from such horrors. Sometimes
I think that you should be awarded with death to spare you from the memories of the trauma.


My son and I both sleep in the same room. We have a TV, a mini fridge  & two day beds & three authentic 
Kitana's. And several other noxious sprays, a variety of blunt objects. If someone tries to
break in again, they're in for a rude awakening. My mother thinks that's totally weird. But what she
doesn't understand is that Josh cannot just get over this trauma. We tried meds, therapy. I re-
fused to admit him to a hospital for observation. He'd still be there. When he sees me in the 
room with him, he can sleep. But by way of example, he didn't sleep at all last night because I and
my bad back slept on the couch. 


Parents, people, professionals don't understand that you can lead a teenager to therapy, they can
pretend it's good for them, but it's not working, and they're faking it. And they will harbor
a deep resentment, as you betrayed to a 'stranger' all their deepest, darkest feelings without 
their permission. According to teens, that is unforgivable. When they want therapy, they will
ask. You, the parent, have to learn how to be patient and wait. Perhaps for years.


What else have you got to do other than raise children. And I'll tell you that the stygma-
tization of the mentally ill has got to stop. I had to take my son out of school to home school him
because the teachers said there was something 'wrong' with him, but couldn't pin point it.
Once it was pointed out, though, it became as plain as the sun rising in the east.


My bottom line is this: Make sure your home is safe; trust no one, not even your relatives; you'll either make it out of this mess with your little family intact or you will come out of it with a 
family that resembles none like it on this earth. 


I wish his dad had just taken 13 seconds to shut the front door. Kids are so intuitive these days. We should 
listen to them more often. 'Paranoia' is really that inner voice so strong in kids. So listen to them when
they feel scared. What's the worst that can happen? Nothing? Or something & you stopped it.

It's been some time since I last posted anything to my blog. Kept it hidden for my own venal reasons. This will be the third and final post to my blog on the topic of home invasion robberies. Since my last post there was a horrible crime committed in Connecticut. The Wm. Petit family was murdered, raped & set on fire in the sanctity of their own home. Men with guns. How I hate those words. Moral men with guns is one thing. We call them cops. But just 'men' with guns has every American endangered. 


The damage a #HIR wreaks upon a family is sudden, loud, violent, bloody, surreal, you are terrified for your kids & spouse. But even if you survive, the damage is just as real as death. I wish there were a 'god' to help us. But there is not. If we are made in 'his' image, then 'god' perpetrates these violent acts upon 'his' people, whom he loves above all else.


They asked Dr. Petit if he was glad he was alive and he gave the pat answer, but the real answer was in his eyes. He'll never feel safe anywhere for a long time. I don't even feel safe in a new home, in a 'god' fearing small town, a quiet neighborhood. No. I still have a .45 on the premises. And I ditched my husband. Now I practice with that gun. I want to be ready. If it happens again, I will be ready. They will drop in the house. They will not get away. it is self defense. My home. Their bad. I'll flip the tables on the perps.


So it follows that i trust very few people. When I was in hospital for a month getting ready for my kidney removal, it was very hard to even trust the nurses, doctors, priests, parents, friends. I felt like I was finishing up the dying part of the breakin at the hospital. "You want to give me the last rites, mom? Ok fine." "Any priest will do, right," my mother tentatively inquired. "No, mother. We're going to give these people a show. Get me a Greek priest."


It was, even though an atheist, a magnificent bit of theater. Incenses, holy water, saintly relics, purple, lots of purple and that strange tongue. He circled my body several times. It was mysterious. I didn't know what was happening, really. It made my mother happy. It would've been a rotten time to ruin it for the audience and scream from the mountain top that I was a big, fat atheist. By this time, in #ICU, no one was listening to me unless I ASKED for a holy man. I should've asked for a Rastafarian. Imagine that.


I hated my husband for years. After all the robbery happened because he didn't shut a door. That's sneevy, though. There are plenty of other things to be mad at him about. A home invasion robbery is like a hurricane, a tsunami, an act of god. You know your life will never be the same. We had a 9 year old son. After everyone was patched up at the hospital, had it not been for the apartment I had in Lodi, my young son would've had to spend the night where the trauma began. But he was spared that.


NIck, my ex husband stayed a few safe, peaceful, blissful days in Lodi, but had to go back to the Stockton house where he dope was growing. And I think that is where the fissure occurred. Josh would never be able to VISIT his dad at his dad's home anymore according to the my son's shrink. 


We tried to make the marriage work with two different homes. But that didn't work out. As the 'season's' of growing require the adamant attention of the gardener. As my son grew, he saw this as a choice his dad made because he did not want to see him. So Josh decided not to see his dad. 


I was just all fucked up forever. Energy. I barely have enough to get out of bed, do the housework, cooking, teaching, cleaning the yard, shrinking my son. He is 16 years old now. Today his dad was over with some art he made for me to look at. There's no one else in his life that know that much about art. Josh had not spoken with his dad for 2 years. My son just has trouble with males in his life. Any male. The one male who was supposed to be able to save him from ANYthing, his father, was over come, pistol whipped, shot, beaten, dragged ... but TODAY, he invited his dad to Xmas Dinner. 


That's the trouble with psychiatry and children. Until their brain ages to 25 years old, it is very difficult to treat them: with meds and or therapy. 


My husband and I are not reconciling. Josh will always be suspicious of men, because of the 'men with guns' who broke in. And me. I have serious trust issues. And they make me feel safe. And this is the first time in my life that I've felt this way. 


(conclusion, Part 3)