I’m up insanely early for summer, mostly because Troy had to work today & I figured I could get a few things done this morning while it was still cool (although, the only thing I seem to be getting done right now is breakfast). I need to run to the store in awhile & buy some sponges, so I can get my dishes done.

I bought some of those fizzy vitamin C supplements that you dissolve in water & drink, with the hopes that I can start building up my immune system before flu season hits. I’m pretty sure that thinking about it, or at least buying it, caused me to have a really weird dream early this morning. I dreamed that I went to the doctor to get on a weight loss program or to get help with my weight or something. He gave me a prescription for one diet pill or another, but told me that if I really wanted to lose weight faster & more efficiently, I needed to dissolve the pill in water before I took it & drink the resulting liquid quickly. This made perfect sense in my dream & I probably would have continued to dream about it for awhile longer, but I think I started over-thinking the process in my sleep & realized how horrible it would taste & woke myself up. I’m always doing stuff like that, but at least I always know when I’m dreaming & have very few truly horrible dreams.

I took Rhi to work early last night, so I could take her in & buy her some food for her dinner break. We finished that really fast & had some time left to wander around & look at stuff, so we did. She found a really cute hoodie that she’d like to have & I told her that I might get it for her for Christmas. We looked at a few other things, too & ended up in the intimates section. They had some really cute things that would make really fun bridal lingerie for women on the the younger end. I remember when I was young & skinny & the thought of wearing that stuff wasn’t ludicrous, but my time for that has passed.

We took a minute to talk to Morgan, since she was at work, too. She seems to be enjoying her job & it’s good that she is looking to the future & thinking past fast food, especially since she has a child to think of. After all of that, I checked out & Rhi walked me to the car, we stood there for a few minutes talking & she went into work. I picked her up this morning, shortly after 7 & now I’m sleepy & needing either a nap or some coffee. I haven’t decided which one will win yet.

Sometimes it feels like I just don’t have anything to look forward to anymore. I used to look forward to the weekend, because I got to spent a lot of time with my best friends, but now I don’t really feel welcome over there & don’t go unless I have to. It’s not my best friends who seem to have the issue with me these days, but their room-mates. I’ve explained to my friends that I won’t be around much, for the time being & they understand. It still makes me sad & lonely, though.

So, I try to spend my time just doing things to pass it, like checking the mail, in spite of the fact that all we ever get is sale ads and bills. At the very least, it’s something to do. I have a membership to Gamehouse’s FunPass, which helps quite a bit, because I always have a new game to play that way. I could clean, but who really does that when they’re bored, unless they’ve exhausted every other avenue? I’ve spent time watching TV & visiting with Erin, and at times, Rhi. Troy starts his weekend today, so that’ll make it easier to deal with, plus tonight is Gathering for our troth, which always breaks up the monotony. I don’t know that I’ll go gaming tomorrow night, or not, we’ll see how emotionally stable I’m feeling when the time comes.

Why can’t people just grow up?

I’m not sure if I mentioned that my dad was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer over here or not. I’ll probably never forget the day that my mom called me & told me. I held it together on the phone, even though, on the inside, I was breaking down. Troy was standing behind as I got ready to hang up, because he was just coming in from work. I hung up & told him to just stand behind me & hold me, when he did, I lost it. He was very patient in waiting to hear what was wrong, I’m sure he was concerned about it, but he just held me & waited until I could talk.

It’s a non-aggressive strain & they caught it really early, the doctor is very sure they can get it all with a few rounds of chemo and neither of my parents are stressed out sbout it (of course they could be putting on a front for me, too), but the last time someone I was even remotely close to in my family died I was 5. I’m so not ready to even think about my parents’ mortality. At all. I’m also really worried that they won’t be able to pay their medical bills & am wondering if they need to look into getting some medigap insurance to help pay what their medicare won’t cover. I’m just not sure if it’s too late, now or not.

He had his consultation with the oncologist the other day & I’m waiting for my mom to call & let me know when they need me to go & sit with my grandma while he gets his chemo treatment, but I haven’t heard anything.I hope that means that everything is okay, or that they just haven’t heard anything, but they can sometimes be a little secretive about things, so I’m hoping for the best.

We managed to get things worked out with our daughter, but it took a long time to get to the point where she was willing to even talk. I’m trying to back away from the things she doesn’t want me to know about & trying like hell not to worry so much about her, but that’s going to take time.

I’ve had other things going on, outside of my family, but within my friends & I’ve had to make some decisions about what I’m going to do & how I’m going to handle it. Let’s just say that I don’t like people who stir shit behind everyone’s backs & create drama in situations where none is necessary & I’ve just about reached my tolerance for it. I’m so tired of people who use extremely proper English & big words (when a smaller one is just as acceptable) to make themselves look or feel above the rest of the world.  It makes normal conversation clunky & unwieldy and a simple sentence takes forever to get out, because they’re sitting there trying to think of the biggest & most proper word they can use at the time. It makes you look like a poser, by the way, not a genius. I just don’t understand why people can’t be satisfied with having friends, why they have to try to control their friends & change who they are & how they live their lives. It seems to me, that if it bothers you so much, you either need to walk away or make your own changes in order to be more tolerant.

Anyway, enough griping, especially since it has to be nonspecific anyway to keep the peace.

Right before my daughter graduated, they had a job fair at her school, where all of the local companies go out & show the students what they do & what job opportunities they have and so on. Troy’s company is one of the major employers here, and they went out with swag for the kids. I was so jealous because one of the marketing pens they gave out was a space pen, which I’ve always wanted. I asked him to get me one & he told me they didn’t even have access to them, but one day, one showed up in his pen cup on his desk & he brought it to me. I really like it because I can write on my calendars while they’re on the wall without them stuttering & stopping. Seems like a silly thing, but it saves me a little time when I have to add something.

I know I didn’t explain my previous post very well, but basically, what it comes down to is my daughter nearly died from an overdose in June. She didn’t tell either of us about it & we would have never known if it hadn’t shown up on the insurance. Granted, she’s an adult & we have no right to any of her private business, but for Gods’ sakes, we’re her parents. Her friends didn’t tell us, no one called, if she had died, we would have found out when they informed her next of kin, if we were even listed as such. She got pissed off at us for being upset about it & for even knowing, accusing us of prying. Doesn’t matter to her that we have a $5000 hospital bill that we can’t pay now or that we very nearly lost our only daughter, just that it’s not our business.

She’s stopped going to work now, too. She has rent due in a week, but all she can think to do is talk to the landlady & tell her that the rent will be late again. Her not going to work isn’t my business, either, and noticing that she didn’t constitutes “spying” on her now. Apparently, I’m supposed to close my eyes when I pull into my driveway so that I don’t see any part of her house. We’ll see how that goes when I come home from my meeting tonight. At any rate, she wants us out of her life, so we shut off her internet, which we pay for. We asked for her phone, which we also pay for, but since we didn’t provide the phone, we’ll have to cancel her contract & pay the cost on that, too. I took the scooter that we bought & is registered in Troy’s name away & asked for my house key. To her, it’s all about money & that’s all we care about. To me, it’s about respect & concern. I’m worried about her, I know she stops working when she’s depressed, so of course I’m going to worry. Apparently, i’m not allowed to love her anymore.

I don’t know how to erase every memory that I have of the past 18 years to make it stop hurting, because everything in my life for at least 21 years has been about my kids. If I remember yesterday, there are things in it about her, how do I go on? How do you stop loving one of your children? How do you stop caring?

I’m having one of those days - weeks really - where it’s a damned good thing that I don’t have anything lethal in my house. I’m so tired of being emotionally wrung out & my heart hurting that I’d almost welcome the big sleep. I probably have some diet pills lying around somewhere, but I’d end up being hyper all night or something, which would just be more frustrating. I guess I’ll just have to tough it out like I always have & keep on going. I’m just tired of it all, and sometimes you start wishing for an end, you know? I know that it’ll eventually stop hurting, or she’ll decide that she needs us after all & that loving her isn’t a crime, but it’s all going to take time, she has so much pent up rage about how unfair her life has been that who knows if she’ll ever move past it?

I have no energy to do anything today, and all I feel is sad. I know I’m depressed & I’ll go to the doctor if it doesn’t pass, but for right now, I’ll just let myself be sad. I’m just so tired of trying to justify everything I ever did in the past 18 years. I always tried to do my best & be the best parent I could be, but what do you do when you not only get blamed for every time you ever said “no,” but for everything that everyone you know has ever said to her? I’m not responsible for what other people say or think, am I?

Well, not you really, but does your child have talent? Have you ever wondered how all of these kids get into show business? I know that in many cases, it’s not how talented a child id, but who you know & I think that’s really unfair. There’s a terrific service that’s available to parents and children, called Gonnabe.com. While the program isn’t for everyone, it can serve as a springboard for your child into the entertainment industry.

This isn’t a talent agency or anything like that, it’s a membership based networking center with it’s own production company. When you sign up with them, you & your children get the fantastic opportunity to work with professionals, develop contacts, attend auditions, sign with agents and get valuable exposure in the industry. They’ll also be afforded the chance to practice and develop skills that will help the succeed in the the entertainment field.

At GonnaBe.com you will be able to search the job database, post your child’s resume, apply for jobs, submit for casting calls, meet celebrities, find out about all of your local shoots, get discounts on merchandise and events, take online classes and a ton more. So, if you have a talented child, check them out, it can’t hurt, right?

I really do love Saturdays, and probably not for the “normal” reasons that everyone else on the planet does. Saturday night is when we go to Tuatha, the multi-path Pagan collective that I belong to. I always feel so energized and peaceful all at the same time, when I leave there to come home. It’s a place of love and trust, where we joke around a lot, sing, dance, worship and get into some pretty intense discussions. There can be anything discussed from someone’s drumming technique to whether there is such a thing as legal steroids and everything in between. Right now, we’re in the process of trying to decide exactly where we want the tribe to go & how structured we want everything to be & it’s a really exciting time to be a part of it all.

There are all of the normal reasons that I love Saturdays, too, but really, those things only come into play when Troy isn’t working & I can spend time with him, especially now that I can pretty much sleep in whenever I want to. Today will be even busier & probably more fun, too, since we’re going to Justin’s birthday party in the park before we go to Tuatha, I can’t believe he’s already 14.

Right this minute I’m in the process of moving some files from my desktop to my laptop so that I can use them on both machines & not have to switch computers in the middle of a project, which really slows things down because I’m lazy. I’m also really good at procrastination, so those things, plus having to switch computers = slow progress.

I had been planning to turn Rhi’s old bedroom into my office here pretty soon. I had just been waiting until after Faire, so that I had the time to devote to it. I wanted to buy myself some pretty, matching office furniture to put in there, paint the walls & clean the carpet, but now I have a dilemma. I’m really not sure what Rhi is doing right now, she hasn’t really been going to work for the past few days & I have no idea whether she even still has a job or if she’ll be able to pay her rent at the beginning of August. If she can’t, then she will probably need to move back in with us, at least for awhile, and I don’t want to have to figure out what to do with my office in the event.

What would you do? Should I talk to her about it? If I do, will she think I’m butting into her life? I don’t want her to get mad at me about it again, but I don’t want to start a project like that if she plans to come back home. Also, there’s no way we can take all of her pets, since she has 2 kittens, 2 rats & a hamster. I just don’t know what to do.