Dawn Is Me

I’m late. I missed the traditional 2011 New Year’s Eve retrospective post. And that is just as well because I don’t really have anything to say about 2011 except to be glad that it’s over.

I’m sure the entire year couldn’t have been entirely awful but the last six months of it was so terrible that I don’t really remember the first six months of it. Let’s see …

July = disclosure and arrest of the ex-spouse
August = grand jury hearing, eviction threats
September = Tropical Storm Lee and flood; 20 credit semester starts
October = move into new apartment but takes 3 weeks to get online
November = pneumonia; sentencing hearing
December = lean holidays and the year finally ends

Time to forget all that crap and get our groove on. There’s a limit to how long I can do Perils of Pauline before I start to get on my own nerves. At this point, I’m ready to start moving and acting to improve my situation in every way. And I’m engaged on a project of envisioning my life as I would like it to be because I learned long ago that, in spite of how New Agey it sounds, visioning works. It has worked for me before and I am prepared to let it work for me again.

So, what’s on my agenda? Well, my J-Term class starts in another week and I’m looking forward to that. I like the professor and am looking forward to the class. Then, there will be spring semester, when I’ll anticipate a lot of fun and challenging class work and more. School is a treat for me because I like learning things and my grades are usually pretty decent ego fodder for me.

And I keep running in to people who think I’m younger than I am.

I want to be happier about my looks this year, too. That will entail losing weight but, even more so, it will entail replacing the image I have of myself (which I got from my departed ex-spouse) with something closer to reality. My daughters keep trying to convince me that I’m not really the fat, middle-aged hausfrau that I imagine myself to be. I’m beginning to believe them. This is a good thing. More visioning.

I want to begin to return to prosperity in 2012. That will mean continuing to work at the Mart of Wal for as long as I need to but it will also mean looking for funding opportunities to do research projects that can be attached to healthy grants. I want to get my blog and my newsletter going again but I’m a lot more interested in research right now because the politics and policy stuff starts to get circular and cyclical after awhile and that gets boring after awhile.

And I’m going to start dating again in 2012, even though it’s hard to envision that right this minute. I’ve been out of circulation for so long that I don’t even know what that looks like anymore. Even so, I have learned some things about myself and understand that I need to get serious about deciding what I don’t want in a relationship. I have a long history of settling for what I got because I thought that was all I deserved and all I could have. Now, it’s time to stop that. First order of business is convincing myself that I do deserve the kind of relationship with the kind of guy I want. Then I can wait for what I want instead of settling for whatever comes my way.

That’s scary for me but I expect I’ll get over that eventually. I’m lonely but I refuse to be desperate. Still more visioning required.

I guess it’s pretty clear by now that I have very high hopes for this year. The long nightmare is over. That is the first and most important part of all this. All that is left, for me and my family, is the long trek out of the darkness and toward the light. We are already well on our way so it’s easy to be optimistic at this point.

I want to take a moment to say a very special thank you to all my friends for all your love and support. You are wonderful people and I don’t know what I would have done without you these past months. Having walked with me through my personal hailstorm, I hope that you will stick around for the good stuff.

You didn’t really think I would only share the carp and not the good stuff, did you?

Happy New Year!

I’m still in school and its still running my life.

I’m got used to thinking in terms of my kids and school, so college semesters (where you cover in three and a half months what they take nine and a half months to cover) always seem to take me by surprise at the speed with which they gallop by.

I’m about a week away from Thanksgiving break. When that’s over, there will only be another two weeks of classes before finals.

I’ve got a crap-ton of work to do.

I’m taking six classes this semester. I have huge, colossal papers to write for two of them, papers we’ve kind of been working on all semester, plus another, minor paper in a third course. Fortunately, I don’t have finals in any of those courses.

I do have finals in the other three courses, though. They are things like Spanish I and Statistics, where you kind of can’t write papers. And the only reason we’re not having a paper and a final in Fundamentals of Archaeology is because my professor has been unwell and probably won’t have the energy to grade them.

All of which reduces to the fact that I’m not exactly going to be vacating during my Thanksgiving vacation.

But that doesn’t matter. I expect to be doing a lot of homework and housework during those five days but I also am very much looking forward to the holiday. Gina gets home from Ithaca on Friday. We’ll all be together for a week.

And we have more to be thankful for than we have in a long time.

I haven’t been in here in a long time.

It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say. It’s just that I’m having trouble making up my mind how much of what I have to say can be said in public.

A lot of things have changed.

As of this writing, Baker is in jail. It came out that he had abused our children — badly enough that it landed him in jail, indicted on 22 charges of varying sorts of endangering a minor and facing a 15-year jail sentence that his attorney bargained him down to.

He’s gone. I have petitioned for and obtained sole custody of my minor children and I have orders of protection where they are needed. I will keep them safe.

We moved out of his house. I now have a home, something I haven’t had for a good three or four years now.

It’s getting better.

I got a part time job at Walmart (something which I am curiously embarrassed about) and I’m still a full-time student. I’m taking 20 credits this semester, which is the maximum allowable and I’m seeing why that is. But, between the job and the school and the kids and the whole single mom thing, I don’t have much time to sit around thinking about how scared and lonely I am.

By the time I get around to really noticing, I might not be scared and lonely anymore. Who knows?

This is where I get to start all over … again. From here, it’s mostly uphill.