Early from bed
And late to return
to protect the open gates
that guard what lies within.

Should you awake
and watch from beside
you’ll see me smile,
hear me laugh and cry.

I live other lives
within those gates,
dreams and nightmares both
I traverse through the night.

Names of lovers gone
and friends long dead,
of choices made in haste
or missed for too much thought.

If you ask me
while I sleep
what I see
beyond my lids…

You may get an answer
that makes some sense
but you may get one
of ridiculousness.

I am not myself
when I sleep,
yet never truer
to me either.

What do I dream?
Who do I see?
Of universes and stories.
Multitudes and I.

I needed this last year to end. That’s what I thought. I thought the significance of a few numbers changing on my calendar would give me some sort of closure, would set some mental block in place against all the hell the past year had held.

The hell kept going, though. The year rolled on from one to the next and the hell kept rising, the devil kept calling, the demons kept pulling at my soul with such human-like hands.

I wonder what will happen in the coming year. I wonder what new antics are being planned, I wonder what new manipulations are being set to the music of lies they orchestrate.

I remember when the sunrise called to me of change, promised me the colors of a brighter, happier future, warmed my face against the cold night of yesterday and the nightmares it held.

I remember when sunset wasn’t the fading of hope, but the awaking of dreams and stories from secreted places of the mind. Where fantastical worlds were whispered into existence behind my eyes that made reality fall into place. When the stars weren’t the only beautiful piece of the darkness but the wholeness of the night’s nature.

There was birth and death and rebirth once again, there were seasons with beauty and ugliness of being truthful about what they were.

The colors have drained away from the sun, watered down and away by the tears shed by my children and I. The wishes of hope were replaced with the wishes of trauma and drama and should have beens.

We’ve tried to bring the colors back, the lights, the magic, the peace of the quiet and the promise of the dawn. Sometimes it even works, for a little while, till the tears rain down on the canvas again and wash it all away. It seems like it’s sticking, though, a little at a time. It wasn’t at first, but the more layers we use the more remains after the tears.

Soon, I hope, the colors will be true, and the colors will stay, and we all will be better ever after.

I grew up in what you might call a group home. It wasn’t exactly an orphanage. There were lots of kids and lots of moms who weren’t moms looking after us. No one belonged to anyone else, we were all just there together. Some would come and stay for a little while, some would go and never come back. It was kind of scary but it was kind of exciting.

There were always lots of colors, so many that it sometimes hurt my eyes. Lots of lights and glitter, like Wonderland.

On special days or bad days, if I asked for Mother Merry, one of the non-moms for her. Those were the days I asked for Mother Merry. She didn’t come around very often and, unlike the other non-moms, she wore simple colors of black and white and she shimmered like an angel. She was quiet, like me, with a soft smile. She looked sad sometimes when she looked at me but it still made me happy to see her, our eyes matched. I didn’t match anybody else in Wonderland.

On my birthday, I drew her a picture. I love to draw and last year she brought me pretty pencils. I hide them from the other kids so they don’t get broken. This year, for my birthday, I drew Mother Merry a special picture of me and her. It wasn’t flashy like Wonderland, I didn’t use any glitter or gems. Sometimes, we like to be plain, to be who we are under all the colors and sparkles. So, I drew us like we are with matching eyes.

I thought I’d done it wrong when I gave it to Mother Merry because it made her cry. I didn’t mean to make her cry. Her crying made me cry, too. I told her I was sorry for hurting her feelings but instead of being cross she smiled and hugged me.

She said I hadn’t hurt her feelings at all but had really made mother very happy.

I had finally gotten a call back from an interview for a second interview only to realize I didn’t have another “work professional” outfit other than my one grey dress. So there I was, out in the dark racing closing time to find something cheap and usable in the next hour for tomorrow’s early morning appointment.

One of the perks of being in the dark… you can see the stars. Tonight was odd, the sky was black but no stars were out to be seen. The humidity seemed to be playing tricks on the sky, tossing up random fluff bank blankets to play peekaboo with, and tonight was one of those nights. For a moment, though, or maybe only half a moment, I saw a small light streak ever so slightly through the darkness, clear and bright as if the night was a curtain to the next day and the light had found a forgotten tear to pierce through.

I wished… nothing. I didn’t believe in wishes anymore… and, even if I had, I hadn’t been quick enough. But I then wished for healing anyways, because that’s how hopes start, and then I prayed for healing, because that’s how the work starts.

Never pray for anything you aren’t ready to receive.

I hadn’t prayed for myself in a long time. The thought terrified me. I felt like I was struggling through each day but making it. I didn’t want to jeopardize that by asking to be in a better place and then being required to take the opportunities thrown at me to get to progress when I was still fighting for the success of surviving the daily heartbreak. But now I’d gone and done it.

The next day, while my children video-chatted with their dad, he dropped the name of some mysterious five year old girl like they should know who she was. He tried to equate her with them, create a connection of mutual experience, he was prepping them, and most certainly get under my skin, I’m sure. The children had no idea who this mystery girl was… the age gap, though, fits with so many things involved with the descent of our marriage into hell and I can’t help but wonder if they might be related.

The analysis was secondary to the reaction of his introduction of the kids to a half-sibling or step-sibling by a random name drop over video-chat. The analysis was running in the back of my mind while I made dinner. I focused on the pans, on the stirring, on the turning, on the browning, and on the serving, all while the emotions roiled closer and closer to the surface as the back of my mind got louder during the evening.

I had prayed for healing and this was the form it was taking. I had been missing the man I had married, the man he had been before… he turned into the downward spiral. My daughter’s refusal to speak to her father over video or telephone had triggered an onset of dreams about the man he had been and how that man would be treating his family current day if he still existed. I had been waking up missing this marital corpse for a week.

That star that had cut through the night sky brought about the severing of that reminiscent spirit, that blade that had cut through the night’s curtain in to tomorrow’s light had cut out that small yet insistent part of my heart. That’s the thing about infection, though, when it gets bad, sometimes that part needs to be taken out in order for what’s left of the whole to heal.

I had wished for the result and I had prayed for the work.

Now I had no choice but to grow out of the pain in to healing.

I signed my marriage away today… not that I had much of a choice mind you. He had been the one to file, he had been the one who started the subterfuge and sabotage more than three years ago. It had become apparent as he tried to accuse me and and people perjured themselves and all sorts of wonderfulness that he had been planning this, or at least someone had been guiding the planning of this, for a long time.

This last month, though… this last month, when he tried to bury me alive under incomplete financial records in what was probably an attempt to be an overwhelming jack ass to get his way… that’s when I saw it… the 03/2016 date stamp of the first concrete step he took towards, not only the dissolution of our marriage, but the screwing over of myself financially, emotionally, psychologically, not to mention the trauma our kids underwent that he then tried to claim was all my fault and the reason why he should have sole custody.

I COULD have a forensic accountant go through all the records, I COULD drag this to trial, I COULD do this, I COULD do that, but in the end he’s not worth it. And that might very well have been his end game, to make himself so full of bullshit that I’d be willing to pay him to stop traumatizing the kids and I to the utmost extent I could facilitate. Maybe. If that was his goal, he succeeded in being a deplorable human being, congrats. The kids are finally safe EVERY DAY, not just until daddy comes home. For right now anyways while they’re out of reach.

The emotional bullshit he tries to pull with them just on the phone is ridiculous. I am trying to raise them to discern the truth. That is what will serve them best in this situation. That and to know that they are loved, that none of this was their faults. I tell them that I love them, no matter what. I encourage their emotional intelligence and their creativity and their brilliant individuality. At least, that’s how I’m trying to raise them.

The people who see me every day, family and friends, the people who see me every day without knowing the backstory, too, they all see us getting happier and happier as the days go by. We still have days where we miss people and such, but we are healing and life is continuing on.

No matter how far I move on, I can’t imagine ever not loving the man I married… but, truth be told, I’ve been mourning his loss for even longer than my ex-husband was planning his divorce. I miss the man who was an adolescent friend in school, an on and off again crush, the guy I would go to in my attempts to figure out why guys were such jerks and cry on when I was heartbroken.

Funny thing, he tried to be that for me after the first time he served me papers… yes, there were two divorces within 30 days of each other, probably less… much less… I had been crying, and crying, and he wanted to talk to me, to comfort me, and I told him “you did this to me, you don’t get to make it better”… and it hurt so much to say, not to him so much, but to myself. I COULD be weak and sleep with him like he wanted while we went through our divorce, I COULD act like nothing had changed despite the fact that we weren’t married anymore, I COULD have have buried my head in the sand again in an attempt to just make things “easier” for him so long as it meant less conflict for the kids… but I could have protected my kids and I in the scariest way possible and left before he went from crazy to butt-ton-bonkers.

These and so many other thoughts ran through my head while initialing that huge stack of papers. Comments from my doctors, yes-multiple doctors, about how I always seemed healthier when he was gone flitted in and out as well…

I cried, I cried in anguish, I cried in mourning, and I cried from betrayal, I cried from the hurt, I cried because I had been right about the toxic people I fought to keep out of our lives who kept poisoning our family, and I cried without knowing why, I even cried when I didn’t feel anything at all, just the tears streaming down my face.

I wonder… if any of it was true.
I wonder… if he could lie so well for so long… were not just our nine years of marriage a lie but also the ten years of friendship before that.
I wonder… if my health hadn’t failed so utterly when it did, would he still have filed for divorce or would he have thought I was useful enough to keep on using for a couple more years.
And I wonder… perhaps… that was the method to the madness, that the control over my life that I had been given had been given to someone unworthy, and so that control was taken back in the form of my health to help save me from something worse than a slow death… an atrophied life.

I’m not wondering about what life hold from here on out, I’m just getting through today. I don’t want to go through any of this again. I don’t want to go through even the hope of any of the good times before the bad times again.

In the quiet moments, when I wake up shaking from dreams where he’s my wonderful, loving husband again who held me through so many nightmares, I cry, and I miss him… but I miss the him he was before the him he is now. I miss the man who fought his demons instead of letting them steamroll him. And he’s gone. And that is probably the part of all of this that really, truly, hurts the most.

He’s gone. And while the military and the associated stresses probably did have something to do with it, the true culprit is the person who should have had his back the most instead of her own interests and control games as priority. She has helped destroy two of his marriages, totally screw with his mind, and encourage a delusional and narcissistic peter pan who is afraid to be his own man for fear of losing his mommy’s pat on the head for a job well done.

After so many years of my body being hell, I found a way to help myself.

It’s not a medication.
It’s not a drug.

It’s a naturally occurring molecule that my body should have been making. SO, in supplementing my body with this molecule, I’m getting back to my old self. The self before chronic pain and heartbreak and broken dreams.

Is this “molecule” doing all that? Don’t be silly.

This immunity training molecule has helped train my immune system to stop beating itself up and start actually doing it’s job, possibly for the first time in my life. My kids and I are healthier and happier than we’ve ever. IT’s made it so we can start thriving instead of surviving which is exactly how we are meant to live.

The divorce is still an ongoing ugliness but it’s almost done, I hope. This week should be a large indicator of that. Seems like he’s serious about trying to get me to pay him child support and alimony back as part of our community debt. He’s been absolutely ingenious when it came to trying to screw me over and get sole custody of our kids, but he was at a complete and utter loss and/or willingness to put even half as much effort in to our marriage… it makes no sense to me.

All in all, I’m going to quote the wise old lady form “The Croods with a “STILL ALIVE” and hope life continues to settle into a less stressful sort of normal.

1. Apple picking in Julian

2. A walk on the beach at sunset

3. A ceremony

4. A honeymoon

5. Respect

6. A thank you

7. Understanding

8. Meeting halfway

9. Integrity

10. Loyalty