Long days, trying to be nice, and self-care Sundays

Today was self-careSunday. Got my nails done and a massage. Something I’ve been doing for several months now and something I never did before. Not sure why I never did anything like this before Robby died. He would get so frustrated with me sometimes when he was trying to get me to do something nice for myself. Or compliment me. Or brag on me or say something nice to me, like when he was proud of me. I would just get uncomfortable and say something like, “That’s sweet. Thanks.” But what I wanted to say was, “Please stop talking, you’re making me feel weird.” Sometimes he would go on and on until I would practically cover his mouth with my hand and say, “I get it. I get it. Please stop.”

I got a little better with self care during the pandemic. My employer started paying 100% for online therapy during the pandemic, so I cashed in. The reason? I was miserable. On top of being in lockdown and watching people get sick or die with Covid, Robby had decided—on his own and with no advice--the pandemic was a great time to go off his meds for depression. I didn’t know it until I mentioned he should speak to his doctor about increasing his dose because he was becoming unbearable to live with. He just looked at me and said, “Yeah, I quit taking that because I didn’t like the way it made me feel.”

My response probably could have gone better. I asked, “How long ago was that and does your doctor know?” He smiled and said, “Oh, around February and no.” We just stared at each other. Teeth clinched. Both knowing what the other was thinking and trying to get through this conversation without it turning into a full-blown argument. I wanted to cry. I was so tired of everything, and I was so worried one of us would get Covid that it hadn’t occurred to me that Robby was really depressed on top of everything. But at that moment it finally made sense.

Living with someone who is depressed is really hard—and I know that sounds simple but it’s not. And most people have experienced it or are experiencing it now and know what I mean.  There are days where you see them start to feel better and you feel a little lighter, like things will get better. Then there are days where you can’t breathe because their darkness is almost suffocating--and that’s where we were at that moment. I had started going back to therapy because I thought there was something wrong with me for not being able to get along with my husband. I felt sad all the time. I wasn’t happy, at all. And I was tired of feeling that way. I wasn’t being kind to him and I definitely wasn’t being kind to myself.

I told my new online therapist that I felt suffocated when I finished working for the day. I worked all day and never really had a moment to myself. And I couldn’t go anywhere because of the pandemic. She gave me tools to start finding some me time and to start practicing self care. Robby understood I needed some space and promised to leave me alone when I needed that time alone. I started going to my room and closing the door so I could read or watch a movie. I would go in the bathroom and do a mud mask thing or paint my nails or soak in the tub and listen to music. I started doing Zoom calls just for fun to play games with friends and family or maybe have a girls’ happy hour. I started feeling the clouds lift just a bit and I could breathe a little easier.

Around late July, Robby did finally get his meds worked out and we looked at doing marriage counseling again to get back on track. My therapist told me that was good idea and we decided to break for a while so I could focus on trying to repair my marriage with a different therapist. I am glad it all worked out and that Robby and I were able to repair our relationship and he was able to fix his relationship with the kids because it would have been a tragedy for him to die like that. He seemed to have left all of his relationships on a pretty high note. With the depression subsided, he had more energy to go see friends, follow through on promises and just be nice to everyone. Which was nice to watch, because Robby is a nice person. He does love his family and friends and that grouchy miserable man I had been living with was not him or who he wanted to be.

I talked to my therapist again in October and she asked how the marriage counseling went. I told her Robby died and she was shocked. She said, “Oh my god, what happened?” I said what I said to everyone, “I’m not sure. He just died. Probably his heart.”

I kept waiting for her to ask, “So what are you going to do now?” But she didn’t. We talked but I don’t remember a lot of it. I just remember talking about taking care of myself and how important that was. How I needed to not hide under the covers or quit going to work. I needed to find a way to put one foot in front of the other and do simple things like brush my hair and my teeth, eat a good dinner, get some sleep and spend time with other people. Those are hard to do when you don’t feel like it.

It’s hard to be good to yourself when you don’t feel you deserve it. The same way it’s hard to take a compliment or have people brag on you. It’s no wonder I used to drive Robby crazy. Watching someone not be their best self is heartbreaking because you love them and you think they are great. There is still a part of me that has a hard time making the nail appointment or spending money to get someone to rub my neck, but those things make me a nicer person to be around. I don’t want to suffocate anyone and most importantly, I don’t want anyone to feel it’s their job to cheer me up so I can keep moving, keep brushing my hair and keep wearing clean clothes.   

Years ago, I read a story in a self-help book that really resonated with me at the time. It was about a woman driving her car to get somewhere. She was stressed, depressed, and running late. Her car was filthy from a dust storm. It started to rain, but just a little. She put on her wipers and slowly turned the dirt on her windshield into mud. The more she ran her wipers, the worse it got until she couldn’t see the road. Frustrated, she pulled over where it was safe to try to figure out what to do. Frustrated, she sat for a while. Finally closing her eyes and taking deep breaths to calm herself. The rain finally picked up after a while and large drops of water began to clear the mess so she could get the mud off her windshield and see clearly again. She slowly put her car in drive and got back on the road, safely, slowly, and with a clearer path of where she was heading.

That’s what my self-care days do for me. It’s that chance to pull over, even when I don’t want to because I’m so busy or I don’t feel I deserve it. It’s that chance to just let the rain fall and clear away the dirt so I can see a little clearer and feel a little lighter. Sometimes you can’t get to where you want to be on your own terms. You have to let someone help—let the rain clean your car kind of thing. Let someone be nice to you. Let them do for you what you can’t--or let them do for you the things you don’t have to do alone. So, at the end of the day, you can do what you really need to do, which is to be nice to yourself and the people you love, and maybe even be nice to a total stranger because you don’t feel like you’re suffocating.  

Some doors open, some go round and round

 When I was going through my divorce, I would wake up in the morning and remind myself my marriage was over. He was gone. The life I thought I would have forever was no more. It would take a few minutes to adjust my thoughts and feelings and then I’d make myself get up and get the day started. I knew if I stayed in bed too long, I’d never get up. Never get out. I don’t remember how long that routine lasted but I can remember exactly how it felt. It took so much energy to think and smile and just be a person. My feet were heavy. My mind was dull. My smile was fake.

It’s been over nine months since Robby died, and I still find myself having to remember he’s gone. I wake up some mornings and it takes a second or so to say, oh, yeah, Robby’s dead. I see his picture in the kitchen when I’m getting something to drink and think, I should text him about dinner and then it sinks in that I can’t. Sometimes I try to stop everything and stay in that moment to feel that feeling I had just a second before I realized he’s gone, where I’m not sad or clouded. But I can’t make it happen no matter how still I am. And then it becomes hard to breathe. Hard to move. Hard to remember what day it is and what I am supposed to be doing.

My days are a mix of remembering, forgetting, ignoring, and trying to stay so busy I don’t have time to be sad or lonely. There are large parts of my days that I don’t remember very much because I’m so busy pushing everything down. I can’t focus. And then when I try to remember, I just remember one thing, I’m sad. Really sad. The kind of sad that sticks in your chest and makes you feel like something is squeezing your heart, slowly suffocating you but you don’t want to take a deep breath because you may start crying.

But I don’t want anyone to know. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to feel it. It scares me. I worry if I let myself feel it, when can I stop it? Will I be able to turn it off so I can work a full day without messing up? My job requires great attention to detail. I can get lost in those details for hours. That’s comforting. I can stay focused for hours so long as I am busy. I don’t want to lose that. I already feel like everyone is watching me, waiting for me to lose it. To not smile. To cry. To be sad. To screw up. To call in sick and stay gone a few days. I don’t want that to happen either. 

I was listening to a Foo Fighters song, ‘End Over End,’ the other day and I started thinking about the intro lyrics:

Burn all the candles out
Make a wish but not aloud
Relive the here and now
See you now and then
I'm a revolvin' door
I've seen it all before
I will begin again
But I can't start until I've seen the end

As I swirled the words around in my head, it made me realize I can’t wait until the end to start living again. I mean really living where I'm not holding back, holding everything in, and just floating through my day. I have no idea if that’s what the lyrics are about, but that’s what I started thinking about. I feel like right now I’m just reliving the same day over and over. Wake up, don’t be sad. Get up and get dressed. Go outside and smile. Talk to people and make them laugh. Eat healthy and try to exercise even though you don’t want to. Answer your phone and your texts. Don’t get mad when you are corrected. Tell people you’re OK just trying to stay busy. Hug your children and tell them you love them. Get overly upset about other people’s real problems and try to find a way to help them. Look through online dating ads and think you might be ready to try tomorrow. Clean the house and buy groceries. Make plans and keep them. Drink a glass of wine or two and watch TV alone. Try to pretend you care about other people’s seemingly trivial bullshit. Take a shower and put on your dead husband’s old T-shirt. Read your book or watch more TV. Wonder if you told your children goodnight and kissed them? Get so tired you finally fall asleep. Wake up and do it all over again. And again, and again, and again. Like the revolvin’ door. It’s exhausting and mind numbing, and I really need to find a way stop it. I just can't see a way out right now and if I'm honest, this is just easier for me right now.

What’s funny is I hate using a revolving door. I get anxious. Do you slow down for people to get in? Will they slow down for you? What if my bag gets stuck in that slender gap or what if I’m separated from my kids and I can’t get them to get out with me? I mean, why not just have a regular entryway? A door that makes it easy to go inside and outside. Why make it harder for people to get in and out of a building? It's because we get so used to thinking the revolving door is somehow faster or somehow easier, that we get in it and go around and get anxious and exhausted even though a perfectly normal door is usual nearby. But usually totally unnoticed. 

Sometimes I pass the normal door because I think it must be locked or not allowed because no one else is using it. Everyone is going around and around, going inside and outside, and never reaching for the handle of the easy door that’s right there. I mean, it’s right there. Easy to reach. Easy to open. Easy to close. But so hard to see.

My husband died, IRL.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything personal. Like most things without a deadline, I planned to get around to it. I wrote my last blog at the end of September 2019 thinking the worst was behind me and that I needed to start dealing with the things that had been weighing me down. I had no idea that 2020 was around the corner and that life was about to get really f’d up for everyone.

Quite frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to start the blog back up right now, but when I saw my last post was dated September 29, 2019, I heard that deep Robby voice in my head say, “Well, darling, looks like you are writing a blog today.”

Frustrated, I knew I had to. The date? Exactly one year before my husband Robby died. If you had told me that day that I had one year left with my love, I’m not sure what I would have thought. Part of me would have believed it because his health had been up and down, but a much bigger part of me would not have been able to wrap my brain around what that would actually mean in real life—In Real Life.

In Real Life has been harder for me to imagine than the thought that someone will die someday. If you’re not familiar with IRL, you’ve probably seen it in a text or meme or somewhere in a digital space; it has its own meaning--to refer to social interaction in the physical world rather than video games or other online contexts. For example, some of you reading my blog have never met me IRL.

I think we all try to imagine what our life will be like if something happens and we find our reality is never quite what we imagined. Several years ago, I told my therapist I was tired of being Robby’s caretaker and that I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life. I had never said that out loud to anyone. I was embarrassed I felt that way. I thought she would just nod and listen, but she cut me off and said I wouldn’t have to because he would die before me. Total sucker punch.  

After my therapy session, I tried to imagine what that day would be like—the day where it was just me and no Robby. I couldn’t really. It didn’t seem possible. I just imagined he would get healthier and we would grow old together.

Now that it is my real life, it’s hard for me to remember what I thought life would be without him during those few minutes where I would allow myself to even slightly believe there would somehow be a day where I was here and he wasn’t.

I thought I would be older. The house would be cleaner. Friends would be calling to check in on me and life would just be a little different. I couldn’t imagine how much my life would change on the inside but still look very similar on the outside—you know, IRL.

I didn’t picture myself reaching for my cell every time something happened only to remember he’s not there. I didn’t imagine the paperwork and sterile conversations involved with death. I didn’t think about our kids crying and crying and expecting me to make things OK. I didn’t realize that people in your life just disappear because they don’t know how to handle death and seeing your face makes them sad. I couldn’t imagine I would still talk about him like he’s here. I didn’t know I would be so angry, and I never imagined I would feel so alone.

Nighttime and weekends are terrible for most widows. At first, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Robby and I started our mornings together with coffee at the bar in the kitchen. We planned the day—who was picking up kids, getting dinner, etc. A quick kiss and then we were on our way to work separately. Once work was over for the day, we usually met back up in the same spot at the bar and enjoyed a cocktail and talked about our day, cooked dinner, ate at the table like a family, heard about the kids’ day, cleaned up, watched a little TV, got ready for bed, and went to sleep until the alarm clock told us it was time to do it all over again. Not much changed in our routines during COVID except we were at home together all the time, working from home, and not worrying about finding places to go on the weekend. Our Friday happy hour was at home, but the schedule was still pretty much the same. The stress was high and the uncertainty of life was there, but we kept each other occupied and tried to find our new normal.

It was easy to think those days were a little boring. And in IRL, they were. But in my mind now, they were pretty great. Pretty simple. Pretty easy.

So, now, I have to find the new reality of my days. It’s easy to sit and think about what you believe life will be like one day. Everyone is different. Some people like to paint a beautiful picture in their heads while others assume the worst is yet to come.

The last day Robby was alive was a pretty good day. We started with our coffee and simple chit chat. I went to the office, and he was still teaching virtually from home. Kids were home all day. I returned home to Robby sitting at the bar waiting for me with a glass of wine already poured. He was cooking pasta and had warmed up my homemade meatballs. I don’t remember what we talked about, but he was in a great mood and was talking, talking, talking, like he always did when he was happy. He finally got his hearing aids to work and could hear me clearly for the first time in a long time. He mentioned several times about how he felt good—his low blood pressure had evened out and he believed he was on the mend. He went on to bed around 7:30 like he always did so he could do his dialysis. I came to bed later that night around 9:30 and spilled my cup of water by the bed, making a loud noise and waking him up. He said, “Really?!” and for some reason it made me giggle which made him glare at me with his lips pulled tight—a look I knew well. I said I was sorry. I cleaned it up and went to bed beside him. We both drifted off quickly.

He must have passed not long after that because when I woke up around 11, he was gone. Just like that. Totally gone. No more weird recipe ideas he wanted to try out. No more jokes about how horrible his life had become with me and the kids. No more cocktail hour or morning coffee at the bar. No more crazy ideas about the latest comic book he wanted to write or how he was going to turn the backyard into a parrot-head paradise. No more family movie nights or hearing his latest tale of how the kids had said something funny in the car on the way home. No more deep-bellied laughs and no more Robby hugs.

I think one of the hardest parts about not having Robby IRL is the silence. He was so loud--All The Time--and sometimes we would fight because I would turn off everything in the house to get a little silence and he hated it. He wanted his music on and the TV on in the background. He wanted to talk all the time and he was always making jokes so he could hear you laugh and that would make him laugh—and that laugh is a laugh that you can’t replicate no matter how hard you try. I would get mad and say, “One day, I won’t be here because I’ll be living in a cave where it’s totally quiet and you’ll wonder whatever happened to your wife.” And he would say something funny like, “You know you could never live without your Big Daddy and you'd be back by dinner.” I never would have thought my pretend cave would end up being my own house, IRL.

Sometimes when I’m feeling lonely, I think about my therapist trying to prepare me for a life without this booming presence. It seemed silly and abstract at the time. What I thought it would be like and what happens IRL are not the same. Anyone who has lost somebody they love, knows that to be true. I’m not saying anything you don’t know. I’m saying something I didn’t know.

But when I think about how much I have overcome in my life, I know I can make peace with this new life and this new version of myself. I have no intentions of turning my back on life or holding myself back from what’s next.

It’s easy to daydream about what life should be or how you can make it better somehow but that doesn’t always line up with real life. Real life can be beautiful at times, even when you are just sitting with someone you love drinking a cup of coffee, knowing you only have three minutes until you have to go to work. Life can be tragic at times. Life will end at some point. Life will begin at another. And the reality is life will never just pause so you can catch your breath or re-do the last sentence you just said. You can’t rewind to the spot where you spilled a cup of water late at night, hearing someone’s voice for the last time, and have the chance to say, “I love you.” Life is uncontrollable. Life is constant. And living IRL is sometimes breathtaking and raw and painful, but it’s real, and we have to find a way to handle it somehow. 

Digging deep and moving forward

It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog and I wasn’t planning to write one for a while but sometimes you just know when it’s time to get back in the saddle. My last blog was about my daughter not doing well in school. Since then, she graduated from high school and started college with a scholarship and is doing very well—I’m surprised, too. She’s happy, she’s getting out the house, she’s got a new perspective on life and more importantly, she’s being honest about herself and working on her shit. It’s been pretty awesome to watch.

But man, these past few years have been a struggle for me. And it’s not just her constant anger and sadness that were taking a toll on me. I had become somewhat of a constant caretaker to my sick husband who has been in and out of the hospital so many times these past several years I lost track. Holidays became a blur and days were filled with that constant dread of, ‘is today going to be a good day or another bad day?’ I think I finally got to the end of my rope when I came home from work in April to find him unresponsive. I couldn’t find his pulse, his heart was racing so high you could see his shirt flutter on his chest and he couldn’t wake up. Luckily, my daughter had stayed home from school that day (again) and called me and asked me to come home and check on him because he was still asleep at noon. It turned out to be a staph infection—not sure how that happened but the doctor did give me a lecture on keeping my house clean. You know, because people never get staph infections when they’ve been in the hospital repeatedly, but whatever. Add it to the list of things that made me angry that week.

I’m not really sure how my husband survived that episode, but once again, we left the hospital and went home and tried to regroup. He had open heart surgery at the end of May to repair his leaky valve and small hole he had in heart and seemed to be on the mend but then his gallbladder went south and we spent a good portion of the summer in the hospital. He couldn’t drive and I think that’s when I finally realized, I’ve gotta get some help.

We finally got to redeem what was left of summer

break with a trip to the beach.

During all of this craziness in the past few years, I somehow showed up for work at 4 a.m. every day, left around 1 p.m. and freelanced until around 3 p.m. and picked up my son from school. I did the grocery shopping, dropped my kids at whatever activity they did that day, went home to work some more and cook dinner and then pick up kids and then tried to get everyone to sit at the table to eat dinner like a normal family so I could at least get a chance to look at my family and find out how everyone’s day was and then get ready for bed so I could get up in the morning and do it all over again and hope that my phone didn’t ring with someone sick or someone refusing to go to school or someone needed whatever last bit of energy I had left in my body.


And to top it all off, I had grown to really hate my job at the TV station. I loved the people I worked with but the work itself was miserable. My freelance work helped me balance that part of my life for a while, but it just finally got to be too much. My job was to create content for our website and to create content for our social media. I had one other co-worker who did the same job as me and we weren’t scheduled to work weekends, but we were routinely expected to also fill that web content void on the weekend, so it was hard to tune out work or live a normal work routine. And if you’ve ever spent much time on a news channel’s social media page, you know what I was up against. The comments, which we had to monitor, were horrible. “Fake news! Fake news! Fake news!” It didn’t matter what I wrote and reported, there were always the usual suspects that were constantly lurking in the shadows just waiting for me to post a news story about the president’s latest twitter rant or gay marriage or claims that the Georgia race for governor was a complete cluster when it came to voter suppression—these are not my personal stories, these are what us journalists call actual news that people need to know about. And forget facts, those people don’t care if you put logic and facts in a news story, they will stay say it’s fake news and I should lose my job.

I’d have people call at 5 a.m. to ask me why I was reporting lies and how I should lose my job. And these same people don’t just want to hurt your feelings, many of them want to physically hurt you. Walking to and from my car in our gated parking lot became more of a race every day. I was scared. And then when I had to spend the last hurricane sleeping at the station and working 12 hours shifts while my family was safely stashed away on the other side of the state, I realized something very important, I’ll always have the heart of ‘girl reporter’ and I love my free speech, but I’m not going to die for journalism—at least not while my family is so completely dependent on me.


So, in June, I quit that job and took a corporate marketing gig and made the decision to take a break from freelance and try to find myself again. It’s easy to lose yourself when your entire life is all about taking care of everyone else but yourself. It’s easy to set your brain on autopilot and just get up every day, do your job, take care of everything, go to bed and do it all over again. And again, and again.

I decided that after I felt like I had taken that break, I would go back to writing and working on some personal projects I’ve had to put on hold for the past few years since it’s hard to do anything personal when  you work 60 hours a week typing away on your keyboard for other people.

Yesterday, I talked to my dad on the phone to catch up and check in and he asked if I was working on my personal writing projects yet. I told him no, and said, I know I’m going to have to dig deep to work on it and I’m not ready to do that yet. As an artist, he understood what I meant, and I was glad to not have to explain it any more than that. It’s not just about digging in and pulling up the anger and sadness that fuels the work, it’s about being in a place where you can unplug from the world long enough to dig deep and find the words you want to say. And plus, part of being able to get up, work, cook, clean, repeat is being able to turn off those thoughts and feelings. At least for me it is.

And quite frankly, I’m not sure if I really am ready to dig deep because part of me is worried it’s going to open up all this sadness and anger I’ve been holding in these past few years because there hasn’t been space in my life to allow those feelings to sink in.

About a week ago, I found out one of my favorite teachers from high school passed away. He and his family had lived across the street from us when I was little, so I had a special connection to him aside from school. I was telling my husband about him and the tears came to my eyes. I realized I instantly shut that down. I honestly don’t remember the last time I just cried or let myself just let go and feel the pain and sadness—or the happiness.

But as my mom says, the feeling is the healing. If you don’t let yourself truly feel those feelings, it’s damn hard to heal that crap. So, I guess it’s time to pick up the old laptop and start healing the way I know how to heal by clicking away at this keyboard over and over until I get those words on the page and can move on to something else. I mean, life moves fast, and if I’m not careful, I’ll be old and wonder what ever happened to that project I wanted to finish. But more importantly, I’ll look in the mirror and wonder what the hell ever happened to that girl reporter who was ready to set the world on fire with her words.

Leave it to Google to put your problems in perspective

Before I get into this blog, I want to be sure to explain that I have a lot of guilt just writing this. In my line of work, I see terrible stories everyday about parents losing their children, having children taken away from them, or parents desperate for their children to return home. I cannot imagine that pain and I’m not in any way trying to say that what I am going through now is in any way like losing a child. I know, in the end, I am the lucky one. I still have my child. I still love her and she deep down still loves me. 

Remember this guy?

 

That being said, you can probably guess what I am about to write. My 18-year-old daughter has decided she’s an adult now and doesn’t need or want to be at home any longer. Which to some people may sound harmless but the way she has decided to just destroy every important relationship in her life along with her future is nothing short of heartbreaking. 

She’s failing school and very likely won’t graduate from high school even though she’s already been accepted to college and has the opportunity to get scholarships to pay for most of it. She’s destroyed meaningful relationships because she just has to get her way. When she doesn’t get her way, she has an absolute meltdown and won’t stop pushing and poking until she gets what she wants and if you don’t give it to her, well then, she has to keep pushing until that relationship is simply destroyed. The words that come out of her mouth are frightening. Yes, she's in therapy, and now that really isn't working.

And all of this is going on while my husband has been in the hospital and has been very sick and can’t drive or go to work. So, yeah, it’s been stressful lately to say the least. 

But I’m not trying to get anyone’s sympathy—as I said in the beginning, my issues will most likely work themselves out, this will pass, and life will go on. Nothing has been permanently damaged... yet. 

The point of writing this blog is for a few reasons. One, to just let others know that this kind of distress can happen to anyone. And two, to find the humor in a bad situation. Because if you can’t laugh about, what are you going to do? Cry? Sure, I’ve cried, but I’m ready to laugh a little now.  

The other day, I had one of those early morning phone calls from my daughter while I was at work and she was supposed to be getting ready for school at home. She calls with this weak voice that lets me know, she’s about to tell me about how bad she feels and why she can’t go to school again. My neck immediately tenses up at the sound of the weak, “mama?” I tell her she has to go to school and hang up the phone knowing that it’s going to be one of those bad days and there is no telling what is waiting for me when I get home.  

My fingers go to the keyboard of my computer and I type in “how do you kick out an adult child from your home?” My anger slowly starts to slide and I find myself almost laughing. I scan down the page to see the related searches include: 

1. Can I legally hit my adult child?
2. It is legal to lock your adult child out of your house?
3. Can you move out your adult child’s belongings from your home without their consent?
4. Are you legally responsible to feed your adult child? 
   

The list keeps going. I start to wonder, what else are parents like me typing into Google after dealing with an ungrateful, self-destructive child? But most importantly, it showed me, I’m not alone—not by a long shot.  

I think the biggest takeaway I’ve gotten through all of this is to learn the answer to an even more important question, “how do you stop enabling an ungrateful, self-destructive child?” Because at the end of the day, the only thing I can control is myself. And the only thing that keeps me going in the right direction is to put an image of my daughter in my head where she walks away from her own children and husband one day because she didn’t get her way and I never made the tough decisions to not enable this type of behavior.  

She has a long road ahead of herself and hopefully she’ll get back on track before she destroys her chance to go to college next year and more importantly, before she destroys all of the important relationships in her life and is left all alone with nothing.  But she has to figure that out—you cannot make someone happy and you cannot make someone change when they do not want to change. Not sure why I need to keep learning that lesson, but apparently, I do. 

In the meantime, I’ll find ways to distract myself with getting out of the house and Google searches. Which reminds me, the related searches for "how can I get my adult child to behave,” are pretty great, too.