Monday, October 21, 2013
Learning to Survive: Surviving Single Motherhood
Learning to Survive: Surviving Single Motherhood: Photo Courtesy of Angelisse Perez OK readers aren’t my babies the most adorable kids ever? Well as you all know I am going thro...
Surviving Single Motherhood
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| Photo Courtesy of Angelisse Perez |
OK readers aren’t my babies the most adorable kids ever?
Well as you all know I am going through a divorce right now. Actually I am
separated because so far no divorce has been filed and well I am perfectly fine
with that. I am in absolutely no rush to be honest. But this impending divorce
does have me now raising these three treasures as a single mom. Well I adore my kids and so being a single
mom is hard but it is worth it to have my kids. I think of my ex husband and
feel bad for him really because I get to be with these guys every day. I wake
up to them, I go to bed after saying good night to them, I talk with them
everyday, I play with them everyday, and I get to just be with them everyday!
But its hard I wont lie. I mean everyday its me. I
have a great support system in my parents, in my sisters, my brother in laws,
my nieces and nephews but I am mom. I am the one that is ultimately responsible
for the well being of these kids, I am the one who is responsible for making
them into model citizens and good Christians. I am the one to wipe away the
tears, lift them back up when they are down, I am their biggest cheerleader,
and I am the one who has to well break the news to them when things might not
go their way or the way they wanted things to go.
I am mom. I want to be their friend but that is not what God
has called me to do. He entrusted me these three beautiful, smart, strong and
even silly kids in my care to raise them to know Him and know about Him and
speak to others about Him. I am the one who one day will stand before God and
be accountable for what I did in their lives. Did I instruct them properly? Did
I guide and love them? Did I do right by them?
Being a single mom is not easy. I never fully understood all
that it entailed. There are days when I want to be selfish and think about me
and me alone but I cant. I have to ALWAYS put them first. I have to be the one
who is the bad guy and tell them they can not have something they want or do
something they really want to do. I am the one who has to discipline them when
they act the fool in public or even in private. I am the one who has to be the
parent, not just the mom but the mom and the dad too. When I was with my ex I
could say: Wait for your father to come home, or say go ask your father, or
even tell him go deal with your kids before I have a full on nervous breakdown.
I had a cushion to lean on. Now I am the one to do it all. Just this past week the kids were blessed with tickets to go to Disney World and to Universal Studios. It was a great thing for them but they left without doing chores, without taking care of their school work, without taking care of their responsibility of their dogs and mom here had to go nuts trying to get my school work done, get my things situated and try to even take care of all three dogs in the process. I had to lay down boundaries and ground rules. I hated that I had to do it but I feel good about my mothering skills that I did it. I can not always be the good guy and there will probably be days my kids would prefer their dad over me because I am the one here and placing all the rules on them and he will seem like the better parent because as Queen Latifah said in my favorite movie: "Its easy not to make mistakes when you are not around".
My kids are homeschooling this year. Next year we place them
in an actual brick and mortar school because it is what they truly desire but
with them homeschooling things might be easier in some respects for me. One I
am not having to be the mom taxi to all three of them and their activities. I
am not the one trying to juggle on Open House day which child’s teacher I meet
and which one I do not even get to because there is not enough time for it. I
am not the one having to pay $300 for an activity that they want to do. But
with homeschooling we are together 24/7 and there is a lot that goes into that.
I mean moms we need our time away. We need to unwind in order to not be overly
stressed and dealing with so much problems. We need me time! Me time does not
seem to exist very well when you home school, when you are a single parent, and
especially when you have three larger than life personalities who all want your
attention especially when you go into that glorious shower and even at the age
of 14, 12 and almost 11 they are knocking on the door asking you questions.
But all in all I am happy I get to be the one they are with.
I love my children. I love how funny they are. I mean look at this picture,
they are hilarious! I love how smart they are. Just today my son asked for help
in his Bible class. He had to read Genesis 13 and answer some questions on it.
He struggles still with reading and comprehension and so to help I read to him
aloud the chapter after he tried it and asked him the questions on it. Can you
believe his memory? He was able to quote back the Bible to me and I was the one
holding it not him! I love that their individual personalities are forming and
my oldest she is a smart, sarcastic, brilliant and even caring soul. She loves
and loves passionately cosplaying and can become a character that is nothing
like her real self and be outstanding. My middle one is hilarious! She can come
up with jokes faster than anyone I know. She is descriptive in getting her point
across and she is fabulous in her fashion sense. She has lost a bit of her
confidence throughout this divorce but I pray through the counseling she gains
it back. My son is amazing. For a kid who has battled with being different all
his life he is intelligent. He was diagnosed at the age of 7 with ADHD and now just this past year we found out that he also has a high functioning autism. Some look at him and say he is not autistic and that gets me mad. What does autism look like to begin with? Why is it such a bad thing that I tell you my son has autism? I am not going to let that diagnosis define him but I need to learn how to help him through it. He can memorize anything especially if it is about
the Bible. He is funny too. He is energetic but that of course is his
superpower from God. He is caring and sweet.
“Train up a child in the way he should
go; even when he is old
he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6ESV. My job as a mother, even if it is a
single mother, is to train and raise my kids up right in the Lord. Teach them
to be good, to be courageous for God, to be strong in His power and His might.
If I do my job right than I will be right in the eyes of God. I teach my kids to love. To not judge and sometimes I get criticism on that from believe it or not believers themselves. God said that we are not to judge others but to love them as He loves them. I have taught my kids to love others no matter their race, their age, their sex, or even their sexual orientation. For this last one is where I get the criticism but God loves everyone. God sent his only Son to die for our sins and yet we like to judge others for their sin when we sometimes need to look in a mirror and see the sin that is in us. There is no one sin that is greater to God than another and so if I were to tell a lie it is not any worse than someones sin of sexual promiscuity and this where I teach my kids not to judge others but to treat others with the same love and respect we are shown from our God. But I went off on a tangent there and maybe, just maybe I can do a blog post about that topic another day.
Readers thanks for coming along in my
journey with me today and as always readers…
Be Blessed in HIM!
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Learning to Survive: Survivng With The Doctor
Learning to Survive: Survivng With The Doctor: Photo Courtesy of Angelisse Perez and Doctor Who is Owned by the BBC Network First and foremost can I brag a bit here? I mean readers ch...
Survivng With The Doctor
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| Photo Courtesy of Angelisse Perez and Doctor Who is Owned by the BBC Network |
So why is this post titled Surviving with The Doctor? Well readers I am a huge fan of the show and I began to love it more and more especially the last time I was going through chemo. You see with Doctor Who I could sit there with my kids and watch a show where good always triumphs over evil. You see I was in a dark place and to be 100% honest with you all because I have given myself the disclosure that if I am going to do this blog I am going to be 100% open and honest in what I share I am still in a dark place and its good to have something you can watch and it reminds you that well you know what good does win over evil.
When I went through chemo the first time I did not have my ex with me. I did chose to make the conscience effort to send him off on deployment and yes I got many a weird look and many an argument by those who love me telling me to ask him to come home but I stuck to my guns and had him stay in Kuwait instead. You see the deployment was not a dangerous one for him. I justified it to myself that it was better he ride this deployment through instead of coming home to be with me and then once I was better having him deploy somewhere dangerous like Afghanistan. Well I think somehow God knew it better for him to be over there too because he kept me strong in sending him when truth be told there were days he was all I wanted. But if he would have come home trust me my marriage would have been over sooner. You see it was a difficult journey and he would have just left sooner I believe. I was also in a dark place because I did not have my mom, my dad, my sisters to take care of me. They were after all in Orlando while I was in El Paso. I had an amazing support group of women and church friends who took care of me but they were not my biological family and I make it a point to mention biological because they did become family none the less. Now I am undergoing chemo again and yet I am in a dark place AGAIN. This time I am without my husband again because he chose to be away this time and permanently, this time my finances are a mess because due to the impending divorce I had to leave my job, I am dealing with hearing they are planning to get married even though, even though we are still legally married, I miss my friends who became my family, I miss having my own home and doing things my own way, I miss alone time because the three kids and I share two bedrooms so therefore I do not even get my own room as a grown woman. I am just in a dark place.
In the show Doctor Who the Doctor faces one faithful foe (he has many but the one faithful foe he has that constantly comes back into the picture) and they are the Daleks. For my readers who do not know what a Dalek is picture a very large, very angry R2D2. These Daleks are just hate rolled up into a massive metal encasement. The Daleks would be my ex right now. You see I chose to have NO contact with him, none whatsoever, but every time I am out and about making my life my own and trying to be happy I get a text message from him. It is always one of picking a fight. ALWAYS. He says hateful things that make me wonder why? What could I have done to make him hate me so much? I stood by for 14 years, many moves, many financial hardships, deployments, and even a previous infidelity and yet he makes me, or correction he tries to make me feel like well I am a terrible person and someone so horrible to be married to or even associated to. I cannot understand why. The Daleks have this saying they say constantly, incessantly and annoyingly so and it is "EXTERMINATE" and they in the show want to exterminate the Doctor and the human race which he loves so much. My ex and his new fiancee want to seem to exterminate my joy.
The Doctor also has companions he travels with throughout space and time. The companions become his friends, his family, his loves. I see my companions as my children first and foremost. They were with me through it all. Through the hysterectomy, through the move to El Paso, through the making friends, through the deployments, through the chemo, through the jobs, through the move back home after realizing my marriage is over, they have been my companions through it all. My parents, my sisters, my friends both here and in El Paso, my nieces and nephews they are my companions too. They support me, they help me, they pull me through the dark moments and they "RUN" with me when the Daleks come to attack. You see when they attack the Doctor basically turns to his companions, grabs them by the hand and tells them to: RUN.
The Doctor also gets to run away sometimes too. I wish so badly sometimes to just run away. Run away and not face the problems but just like the Doctor if I try to escape them no matter what they follow me wherever I go. You see his Tardis, his time machine, doesn't always take him where he wants to go but to where he needs to go. When I left El Paso I thought I could run away to my parents house. I could run away and have them take care of me and everything. Now do not get me wrong my parents are amazing and they are helping me so much but I have to take care of my problems. Just because I wanted to run away from my problems and thought I would escape into Mars for a nice fun vacation I had to learn and discover that there is water on Mars and aliens bent on the destruction of those humans that I love so much! That was of course a Doctor Who reference and I apologize reader if you did not get it but it is a post on the show so therefore I am making the reference.
The Doctor meets some amazing people along the way. He meets a girl who is the Bad Wolf and ultimately falls in love with her but he himself can not be with her so gives his clone him to her (weird I know) but I see this as my ex and I can no longer be together. I do not want a clone of him but one day I might just get something way better. He meets a wonderful woman who falls in love with him but he is too dense to realize it and yet she meets the right man for her (the ex of the Bad Wolf) and well they have a happily ever after. I see this in my friends who loved some one before but that love was not the right love for them so they later on had to find the right one and now they are happier than they ever will be. He meets an infuriatingly wonderful woman (I love her and her sass) and they have a great friendship but he must leave her and make her forget him for her safety. I met some amazingly wonderful sassy women who I had the best friendships with and had to leave them. As much as I hope they never forget me their lives are different from mine now. I am no longer a wife like they are and let alone an Army wife either but as much I hope and pray we will be friends for the rest of our lives I am away from them. He then meets a little girl who became his best friend as she grew up. She traveled with him, she loved him her whole life, she fell in love with her childhood best friend who truth be told I fell in love with too because he is the model of a "perfect" husband if one really existed, she gave birth to his wife (again its sci-fi so it is weird like that) and she ultimately became his family! Their story is one of my favorites of all of the Doctor Who companions and stories. I have childhood friends who I still have. I love them as they were my family and they always will be. And now he is on to his latest companion who is the Impossible Girl. Who has been with him throughout his regenerations and has saved him one way or another. I see my sister as my Impossible Girl who saves me and protects me through it all. Oh and of course there is Captain Jack who well not only makes for great TV but makes for great visuals (I have just a small crush on him... LOL)
The Doctor has so much more meaning than all of this but this is why I say I survived with the Doctor. Good prevails over evil. Love knows no bounds through time and space. Friendships may come and go but the impact and legacy they leave lasts throughout the life times.
You see when I underwent chemo the last time I was in a dark place. As I undergo it again I am still in a dark place and I love the mental relief I get when I watch Doctor Who. "On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." Matthew 9:12. I am sick. I have cancer, I am heart broken, I am down and I need A DOCTOR.
Thank you for joining along with me readers and I hope you can if you do not know about Doctor Who see what it is that I am talking about. It is a great show after all and as always....
Be Blessed in HIM
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Surviving With Great Dreams
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| Photo Courtesy of Creative Commons |
I have been in love with the movie Joyful Noise and the soundtrack. The other night I had dream about the music of Joyful Noise. Oh I loved it. I was back in El Paso speaking at a woman's conference and saw all my Army Wife/El Paso friends. I was there speaking to women about overcoming and surviving this crazy Army life and how even though I no longer was an Army wife I will always be an Army sister to my friends and allowing them to learn from my experiences and my trials. The first song to open was "Not Enough" from the soundtrack. It spoke about not having enough trust in God, enough love even among the Army wife life and not enough to feel we can sustain. I spoke after this telling these women, some of which I knew and considered as my sisters and some I have never met an told them how when I was first diagnosed with cancer I didn't know but my faith was shook and I did not know if I had enough trust in God. Then I get diagnosed again after thinking I was fine and this time my husband was deploying and I thought God why me? Why did I have to go through this? Then dealing with cancer and treatment, dealing with deployment, dealing with issues with my daughter and depression, dealing with my marriage falling apart and knowing I could not fix it. I did not feel that there was enough love or trust then. Afterwards I sang "Man in the Mirror" and how I had through with Christ make a change in my life to make a change in my world. I say my world because I could not make a change in my husbands world no matter how much I wanted to, I could not make a change in my children's world no matter how much I wanted to, I could not even make a change in my friends worlds when I saw them suffer and go through things as well but I could make a chane in my world and hope and pray that the change in my world would make a change in the world of others who might go through similar situations and chose to allow God to help them as He helped me. Then I sang "Fix Me Jesus" and this one was because I have prayed this thousands of times in my situation. I have prayed for Jesus to fix my ovaries and cure me of the cancer. I pray that Jesus heal my heart and allow me to heal and forgive. I ask that he heal my mind of the self destructive thoughts I have had since my marriage has been destroyed. You see I have never been a Barbie looking girl but I have always had a positive self esteem. I have always thought well of myself no matter what the scale said, no matter what the size tag said, no matter if I had hair or not but once he left me I thought of myself as someone unworthy of love. But God is fixing me and reminding me that I am fearfully and wonderfully made and he is the one to determine me worthy of love and he hasn't. Then the choir sang "He's Everything". Oh how beautiful it was! God is everything! He is who makes all things great and wonderful. He is the one who makes us happy and takes away our pain. He does it all for us! We ended the conference with the choir singing "Higher Medley" reminding us that God is higher. He is bigger and better than our problems. He does it all for us! Oh I loved it. At the end of the conference we asked women to come forward who were struggling with problems in their marriage whether due to deployment, military life, or just regular everyday life and finding themselves distancing themselves from their husband and God, we asked women who needed healing from cancer or any other illness that took over their body, we asked women to come forward if they were dealing with issues of self esteem or depression or any mental health even such as PTSD, Post Partum and that to come forward and I witnessed so many come and talk about how God spoke to them during this conference telling them they were not alone in their situation. It was beautiful seeing women of all walks of life gathering together and helping and praying for one another because now they knew they were not alone and that God cared about their marriages, their health, their emotions. All the Glory be to God that He and He alone can bring people of all walks of life and show them the common ground that they all share.
This was my dream. A dream I wish were true! A dream that I woke up from with a big smile on my face!
Readers thank you for joining me in my journey with the most amazing dream of my life and as always readers...
Be Blessed in HIM!
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