Yes, well, I struggle with depression. And I come from probably one of the sickest families there ever was. And yet I still survive. Ha. The thing is I am becoming less tolerant of other people in my life and any sort of influence they might have. I feel more and more isolated. Others can’t relate to the way I see things and my life on any meaningful level. Family and friends I have valued for my entire life can’t and never had understood. Even therapists and I become at odds. Although, I am trying a new psychologist next week. My best friend wants me to go to Al-anon. She goes because of her husband’s alcoholism. She doesn’t want me to come to the meetings she goes to, though. So I am going to take my big pregnant belly and sit down among strangers and listen to them complain about their lives and give them my support and then when it is my turn to share listen to them give me some formulaic answer because honestly there is no way for them to understand anything about me. How could they? They can only see me through their own personal experiences and egos which makes the whole process pointless for me because I do not trust other’s personal experiences and egos to be able to do anything other than guess at anything that exists outside the scope of their experiences.

So last night my eight year old spent the night with my MIL without his older brother and as I lie in bed trying very hard to feel positive and send out good intentions to the universe I suddenly began to have an anxiety attack where I began to think of all the horrible things that could happen to him while he was there. I was fearful that my mother in law would take her meds and pass out and that her husband would drink and go to bed and that my husband’s uncle ( a grown man staying with them who lost his wife to cancer and then pretty much everything else in his life) might I don't know what! And then there is the grown man's son who was living there and who had some sort of settlement coming for a back  injury who had a falling out with the family and left; I imagined he might come back, break into the house and steal my child. I then went so far as to imagine that a complete stranger might break in and steal him. I got up and talked to my eleven year old son about the safety of the house itself and the details of their routine and then called them at midnight. There was no answer. Early this morning I imagined the phone rang and ran to answer it. I misread the caller id thinking they called and called them back three times in a row. Finally after no answer my MIL called me to tell me he was still asleep. I apologized and waited for him to call me. He finally did and he told me he he'd had a bad dream but that he didn't want to talk about it because it was hard to describe.

Blech. I feel exhausted. I didn’t sleep well because of all the worrying. I ended up over sleeping and waking up with really strong Braxton-Hicks. I walked into the living room where my brother was (he recently was kicked out of his girlfriend’s house of three years) and he explained to me he was fired this morning from one of his new jobs for not being a fast enough learner! This after 7 days of work with no training. This is a problem because he was supposed to give me the fifty dollars I loaned him this week back so that I could keep our bank account temporarily in the black until my husband's next payday, next Friday. However, he still got paid some money and of course put it all into his girlfriend's account so that she could take care of her monthly expenses before she goes out of town to see her dying grandfather. I can appreciate this because she does work full time herself and has two daughters, but she also gets child-support. So really I feel like the fifty should have been put back into this household. Did I mention that she is seeing someone else online and that she plans to rendezvous with said person during this trip? Or that she spent six hundred on the tickets. My brother has promised to support her for the next six months so that he can continue to drive the suburban that she owns but has let him use. He needs this so that he can drive to work. He has also decided to keep paying on an engagement ring that he feels he owes her. I guess this is so that he can feel like he has done the right thing after all even though according to her, it is too late.

These are the sorts of daily dramas I wake up to and go to sleep thinking about. They exhaust me and are actually not that much to get upset over. My mood is currently okay. Two days ago it wasn't; part of yesterday it wasn't.

My eighteen year old son lives with us now also after experiencing a terrible run of self destructive intermittent drug use and so I have his daily dramas also. He is always on the phone trying to get a ride to work or trying to get someone to cover his shifts or hanging out outside smoking pot with "friends" or telling me about some dangerous drug deal that he got himself involved in.

Did I mention my husband and I don't have a car? This was on purpose. We got ourselves in over our heads with car payments and insurance. I lost my primary source of income last September due to my inability to cope with my high stress job as a teacher at a very dysfunctional public middle-school. We also moved back "home" from a bigger more expensive city to a smaller more impoverished city last month. Needless to say the public transportation system here is nothing like it was there.

Also since we have been back my oldest son was assaulted by a man twice his age who shot him up with methamphetamines and then had unprotected sex with him. We filed a police report at the hospital but the detectives said that we didn't have a case because my son didn't try to escape the situation even though we explained that after he shot him up the first time he was too high to make rational decisions and that none of it was consensual. The man continued to shoot him up and have unprotected sex with him over 24 hours even though my son told him he was afraid and didn't want to. But I suppose that because we are currently living in the Bible belt and that this same sex we are talking about that the system sees it as, I don't know, his fault? My son is also bi-polar and was diagnosed at age 7. He is undedicated at the moment. I believe that this is a consequence of his illness and his emotional immaturity and his inability to judge the potential danger of people and situations that he is constantly getting himself into. Now there is the potential that he has been infected with HIV. His father was also bi-polar and accidentally (or was it on purpose?) shot himself and died when my son was still a baby. My mother is also bi-polar and an alcoholic and has made several suicide attempts throughout his life. His other grandmother is also an alcoholic and began using illegal drugs within the last ten years. His paternal grandfather is deceased from Hepatitis (I’m sure he contracted this from illegal drug use while he was overseas). My biological-father is in prison (for the third time in LA) and has paranoid-schizophrenia and is also a very heavy illegal drug user. And then there is my step-father who is addicted to oxycodeine and runs around town so stoned that he is very likely to total his truck or call over here to say he is sending the police to drug test my son because he is missing his pills. (He found those pills in the freezer an hour or so later but not before my lovely mother called to scream at me over my son stealing them and hang up on me-or did I hang up on her? Who cares?)

Even though I try to be accepting and rationalize everything my body still reponds with physical pain and this is my Achilles heel. This is what puts me over the edge and causes me to get irritated. Being pregnant does not help. This is what makes me cranky and so I have to have some sort of physical indulgence to feel balanced again.