Well folks ~ I know I haven't written or been on in a long time. I apologize to my friends here. It has been pretty painful lately.

My stepDad passed away quietly on November 30th. He had become unresponsive 2-3 days before, and it became obvious that continuing treatment was just torturing him, so we brought in Hospice to make him as comfortable as possible. He went peacefully ~ just slipped away.

The situation here is very hard to deal with, especially since it's affecting my depression. We're living with my mom (we were moving in when he had the stroke) because we're going through foreclosure on our home. Now there's only 1/2 the income coming in that there was because he's gone and everything he had was tied up in this house.

So not only is my whole family going through this horrendous grieving process, we're once AGAIN looking at losing our home ~ only this time, it's the house I grew up in, and it's my Mom's.

I'm going for a job interview tomorrow with a local grocery store for a cashiering position, and hopefully they'll hire me and let me start asap. I started my son in daycare last week so that I could find a job full-time.

I promised him that I would take care of my Mom…and I'll be damned if I don't do as best I can to prevent her from losing her home as well.

I feel so angry sometimes ~ so angry at my stepDad for not having life insurance, or a mortgage/life policy, and for leaving us all in this mess.

I feel angry because I feel like when he died, I lost my Mom too in so many ways. He was her life, and now he's gone and she's so lost and I can't ease her pain.

I'm angry because my husband doesn't understand what it's like to lose a parent, or even someone close to him. He cannot deal with emotions, a reoccuring theme that goes back to my rape counseling days and my severe post-partum depression. Instead he just gets angry and resentful.

Then there's my little 2 yr old boy. Still almost every day he asks about his grandpa, missing him terribly and not understanding why he hasn't come home.

And then to top it all off ~ our pet duck, Duke (so named by my stepDad), was killed by otters and left to rot in our pond. The worst part was they had tangled him up in the pond weed at the bottom, so I couldn't get to him until he began to decompose pretty bad. My son and all of our family were really attached to that duck. And to have pull him out of the pond after he'd been missing for a week and then bury him 2 days before X-mas was just wonderful.

And today my friends, is my stepDad's birthday. It's like the holidays never stop hitting, not even for one moment.

Next month will be Valentine's Day (which will be terrible for my Mom), but even worse, their wedding anniversary. It would have been their "first" together, because they got married on February 29th (Leap Year).

I'm so busy trying to keep my Mom in one piece, and my son happy and busy, and find a job and ignore my husband's ugliness and blatant disregard of my feelings that I haven't really had time to grieve properly.

It all sucks.