Rehash- ReCap

So much to unpack from the last few months.  I was sicker for more time (17 days!!) than I can recall ever being, with a thing that was neither flu nor covid.  Whirlwind romance which I am, at the moment, unprepared to detail.  My older son’s bike accident which resulted in a surgery and a cast for 3-5 months, and the painful reminder that his father and I will never again work as a team, even as parents due to thingS which he and my sister repeatedly and righteously did.  I long for the luxury to forget and move on.  My son complained of pain to his father, while there with him for the week.  His father flat out refused to get him medical care “because of the cost”, after having just dropped several hundred dollars on our younger son for his homecoming and also unnecesarily taking our younger son to urgent care for a covid test– because he was frustrated that he tested positive at home, several times.  This messaging to our sons is beyond devastating.  

I don’t get get to forget the childcare and child support which the boys’ father could be counted on to justify withholding for all of the years before finally going 50/50.  Medical and childcare and child support needs – he righteously denied.  The financial burden of being primary custodian of two BABIES who were frequently ill.  I was blessed to find per diem work for a friend which allowed me to miss work regularly without getting fired and for the heroic financial bailouts my mother generously provided, to keep us from losing the house which was purchased with MY money- NOT HIS NOT ONE PENNY of his. I was resourceful and relentless walking other people’s dogs, being a helper to elderly people, collecting other people’s recycling and junk from the roadside to redeem and sell.  

The two sisters the boys’ father counts on, each benefitted immensely from divorcing men with money.  There are two sisters whom he can rely on financially and whom he can manipulate and a third whom he cannot (and so they are estranged(he and the third)) These are his examples/his models for how to do life and relationships–how to seek and benefit from other people’s resources and reject and diminish those who are not an active supply or at least compliant. 

Determined not only to benefit from my resources, he set out to drain me.  When he realized he could not take the house from me, he committed to seeing how quickly he could make me lose it.  First by regularly withholding his less than 1000 dollars a month of support, then by demanding his name be removed from the loan (at a time when I was not FT employed and able to refinance myself) after demanding his name be on the loan when purchasing the home funded exclusively with proceeds from the sale of MY condo.  

The costs of my son’s surgery and continued care are crippling for me and continuing.  Harder than that though, is the reminder of my sister who guaranteed the permanent division of my boys’ parents.  How does a person forgive and forget and recover when the damage continues in perpetuity?

Add to that a recent hit and run incident in which I chased down and confronted the driver.  That experience felt impossibly similar to dealing with my sister and my boys’ father. I was flattened for the days following.  The car accident itself was minor and could have been handled without stress and in under 15 minutes if the woman who hit me would have taken responsibility for her part without me forcing her to.

As a highly sensitive person and one who only sleeps nightly from 10pm-2:47am, it is just a shitty and unchanging truth that I lack resilience and hardiness, oh also, plus trauma recovery.  Most days I have barely enough mental energy and clarity to execute only what absolutely must be done.  No bandwidth for living an enriching and engaging life to include creativity, goals, planning, relaxing…. After decades of circling the drain,  I am beat!