Just some thoughts

I must honestly tell you that writing is kind of a passion for me and yet I always feel the need to pay attention to what I write with the audience in mind; however for this post I truly just want to write what I am feeling without a thought of anything but getting what I am feeling on the inside down on paper. I have been a single mom off and on since my children were 3 and 5 years old, they are now 15 and 17 years old. My first bout of single mom-ness happened when their father and my husband of 5 years, passed away suddenly. At the time of his death I was 27 and I had been the bread winner of our family, I had worked 70-80 hour work weeks and my children had been mainly in daycare and now I was responsible for taking care of these two fragile human beings who were grieving the death of their father. At 3 and 5 they still didn't truly grasp the knowledge of what had happened to their father they just knew he was never coming home, on my good days where I could get out from the covers and focus on their beautiful little lives one of them would come to me and tell me they wanted their daddy back. I will tell you vehemently that while moving back in with my parents was hard it was also essential for my recovery, I made some bad choices while living with them but I think the bad choices would have been worse if I hadn't moved back home when my husband died. 2 years into this journey of single motherhood I would fall in love and marry my second husband. I had a (in my opinion) a fairy tale wedding and for a few months what seemed to be a fairy tale marriage, within a year of our wedding we would move from California to Florida, it would be a move that would truly be a test for me. I didn't know anyone there and wasn't sure how we were going to make it and yet today as I write this blog I am still living in Florida almost 9 years from the move and almost 5 years since my divorce.

God is faithful even when we don't make the best decisions, 5 years into our marriage (exactly 2 days from our 5th wedding anniversary) I left my husband and took my children and moved in to another house across town and begun my second stint as a single mom. My children were now 10 and 12 and they were now older children grieving in a different way. While there are many things I feel need to be said I don't feel details of my marriage or divorce serve a purpose to helping anything heal, I know what took place and the reasons I felt it necessary to leave. I have held on for many years the guilt of those years and how they affected my children, however we have now been on our own for almost as many years as I was married, and it is now my responsibility for how my kids are being raised. I love them and I love the fact that they know their mother made hard decisions even if it meant I would have to raise them on my own, however sometimes the difficulty of our lives together seems almost too hard and I don't want to do it anymore. I want sometimes to have the ability to just turn decisions about money the kids health and so on to someone else from time to time. Not that I don't love being in my children's lives I just sometimes need a break from being the only go to person in their world. I have friends that have in my opinion beautiful marriages and I honestly go through a period of regret for not listening and waiting on God for a spouse and now trying to date almost seems impossible. I just carry too much for some, I have to constantly be willing to state the blessings in my life or else I will become overwhelmed with responsibility and guilt over the things I didn't do right.

Two weeks from tomorrow I will graduate from college with my Bachelors in Psychology, I will walk across the stage with my diploma with the ability to know that I have come so far and accomplished so much and now I am ready for a new phase in my life. I am ready to fall in love and get married and spend the rest of my life knowing what it is like to love and be loved by someone who wants to be with me. The difference is that this time I will wait on God and allow Him to make the difference in my life and not try and do it on my own. Life is hard but it gets better as I trust God more, I don't always understand what comes next, I get frustrated because I'm not sure how to do the next thing or where I'm supposed to do it and so on and so forth but as long as I keep turning to God for the answers, I will never go wrong. This time of my life is all about walking day by day and step by step and sometimes I will make a misstep but in the end I will keep trusting God to move me and trust that He will never leave me regardless of my mood that day...

Just some thoughts

Almost a month ago my 21 year old nephew went to be with Jesus, in the course of time since his death I have done a lot of thinking about my life. Where I am and where I am headed, why I make the decisions I do and why I sit lazily around and allow life to sometimes just take me by surprise. Right after his death I discovered some issues with my foot and gave myself permission to not run as often or as long, and now I have had some other leg issues and I wonder if the feelings I have are affecting my running. I have to be free, I have to be able to find joy in running or its just work for me. my weight has gone up again. I keep going back and forth, I find myself eating things I know will damage my successes and I can't honestly admit that I have made efforts to be successful I sabotage my own success. I was down to 186.5 and I was running a 11 mm and I was doing 10 mile long runs. I was wearing a size 10 pair of dress pants and I was only 11.5 pounds from my goal weight. At this point  I am 212, I am back in a size 14 and I am running about a 13 mm and my longest distance is 3 miles. I am angry and I am frustrated because I can't really decide what it is I want. Everything is coming to its end, for example once I get to my weight goal then what? where do I go from there, when I run a marathon what do I do next. I have spent my WHOLE life in the midst of a battle, a struggle and a lot of fight to prove I was something more than how I feel. I spent my life around mean, belittling people who let me know on a consistent basis I had no value and no worth. I lived in a world of having to defend my ability to be more than the words they spoke, I was always in a drama filled world and now those people are all gone. I now live in a world that I am not picked on, no one uses the words of negative tongue that I had experienced, now I hear words like Amazing, wonderful, beautiful, smart and so many other nice things and honestly there are days I just feel like such a fraud. I want to scream out ....Please stop, I am non of those things, all those people that told me I was worthless, ugly and stupid they must have been right to an extent, I recognize being a child of the King means I have more  value than I could ever have on my own, but some days that just doesn't feel like enough.

I feel like a disappointment to some of those people around me, people who have stayed by my side for all these years while I keep fighting for a weight loss goal that never seems attainable. I get it weight loss and anything else in this life if I am trying to get there for others I will never get there. It is time for me to decide what I really want. I need to admit out loud, I like attention (the good kind) and yet I don't want to be a burden or a person who needs constant attention. I want to get to my goal weight this year and earn the right to be the State Queen in TOPS with a chance for International Queen and yet I have felt bad for wanting that. If being a Queen will be the thing that keeps me motivated for a while than at least I can start there. So for today there are two things I am sure of, I want to be a teacher and I want to the be a Queen or at least a Queen runner up! I have no clue about the rest or when this will transpire but I will not give up. So tonight I go to bed knowing I ran and I ate my best today!