My mothers day without my mother

I wish I could say that I got to see my mother, my sister, my best friend, or my grandmothers today for mothers day but they’re all gone. I have a good relationship with my daughter now, she is the only female left that I have any kind of relationship with anymore and I am very grateful for that because we didn’t always have the best relationship. My mom would always tell me she hoped we would have a good relationship one day.

Every female that I held dear to my heart and got most of my support from in my life are all gone and passed away except for one. My only living sister that I have left and we have never had a very good relationship. In fact I think that it was maybe a year after  our mom and my other half sister passed away, that I spoke to her last in 2012. I would see her occasionally but we never really had any deep meaningful conversations it was always in passing.

We used to fight a lot when we were growing up and she was always trying to boss me around and tell me what to do and I hated it. As we got older, I would try to spend time with her and she always felt like she had to tell me what she thought I should be doing with my life. It drove me nuts and got to a point where I just didn’t want to talk about myself around her anymore because every time I did she would think she had to give me advice. I didn’t want any advice I just wanted someone to listen and I had to even tell her that once. But my sister isn’t equipped that way, she has the personality of a drill sergeant, I am not even sure where she got that from because she wasn’t ever in the military.

As time went on I stopped talking to my sister and began just living my life. I moved away in 2016 with my oldest son to another town over an hour away from our hometown. I occasionally think about her but I never go to see her if I am in my hometown. I am not really sure what I would say to her if I do see her because we just can never manage to have that bond that me and my other sister had.  She doesn’t even have a relationship with her son and I go visit him often. She’s just really hard to get along with.

She turned my extended family against me shortly before my mom passed away in 2011 by telling them stuff about me that wasn’t true. I took a trip South right after my mom and half sister passed away, as they were right next to each other at hospice and passed away within 11 hours apart.  I was distraught over it and I didn’t know how to go on with my life after that. I just wanted to start over but it didn’t work out and I ended up having to go right back to our hometown again. But I did get the chance to find out first hand how our extended family really felt about me by wanting me and my children to stay at a shelter instead of letting us stay with them for a few days to figure out what we were going to do. We ended up staying in a hotel that my brother worked for a few days and then they paid for us to leave and told me to never come back. That really hurt my feelings a lot and I won’t ever forget it.

I’ve been struggling to get my life figured out, and having had some health problems along the way that have kept me from living the life I’ve wanted for years. After raising my kids by myself as a single parent now their basically helping take care of me. After all of the hard labor work that I had to do when they were little, led me to have back problems and chronic pain. Now I am in need of having surgery and can’t work anymore, so the rest of my family looks down on me for that as well as other things. They did the same thing to my mom when she wasn’t able to work as she was legally blind and had mental health issues. It was only after her funeral that I found out how everyone really felt about her….shame! They were ashamed of her even though it wasn’t her fault that she had health problems and didn’t have money or a husband to take care of her.

My writing is what is helping me deal with life after losing all of the people that I love & cared for most in my life. My life hasn’t been the same since they left and I don’t know why God took them home as they were all so young. Why did he have to leave me with a bunch of assholes that don’t care about me or my kids. Maybe he has something better for me but right now I couldn’t begin to imagine what that might be. I just hope and pray that I can finish my career and education, get my health taken care of once and for all and finally become the person I am meant to be. Who knows maybe when I publish my book and I tell the world just what kind of family I have, maybe they will think twice about how they treated me and my children but….I doubt it. People like that don’t ever change, they just grow more bitter and cold hearted.

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My inspiration again!

I finally had some inspiration to get back on and write again yesterday but today I am feeling it much more and have the urge to write my book again. I once had a creative writing teacher tell me to write like someone else’s life depended on it. But it’s my life that depends on it really.

There is just so much that I want to share and honestly it’s been hard to write for many different reasons. Last night I wrote on here about my depression and although it’s true that it has a big part to play in my life there are many reasons for not writing my book.

Do I want to share my story with the entire world? Would anyone really want to read what I have to say? Can I inspire someone in this life with the things that I have been through? These are all very good questions I have had to ask myself. I contemplated writing it because of my past. I haven’t ever really had too many supportive people in my life and mostly when I think about my writing I have to wonder am I good enough?

Everyone growing up in my family would always say very negative things to me and about me that I think eventually gave me a complex about who I was as a person. It’s very destructive behavior to tell someone things to make them question who they are and if they exist in the world around them….

I never really gave it a second thought for a long time as I put my life off to help take care of my mom when she needed me and then I ended up in one abusive relationship after another with guys that took my self esteem level way way down as well. I was raised with an abusive father and that caused me to later in life end up in some pretty crappy relationships. But when my mom and my sister both passed away in 2011 I realized that I had wasted so much time with this asshole that just ruined me and my kids life. So I left and never looked back.

It took me a long time to realize that I had put off a lot of my life in search of finding the right guy to help make a family with me and my kids as I have three kids by three different fathers and was tired of not having a father for them. That kind of thinking is very destructive and lead me down the paths of pretty bad relationships. I must have been vulnerable maybe even desperate to think that I could just be with anyone guy that I “thought” was right for my kids and myself. But I was wrong. I got wayyyy ahead of myself. Instead of taking time to get to know the real person that they were I jumped with both feet in and got into trouble.

Finally I realized I didn’t need a man in my life for me or my kids. I focused on just me for a while until I started to have some major health problems that were trying to keep me from doing what I really enjoy in life. Having to reevaluate what it was in my life that I wanted most. Writing is what I enjoy most and after being side tracked several times I finally realize that this is what my true passion is. Now I am just going for it. I am going to get it all out there in my book for others to see what I have gone through in my life and I am not going to hold anything back. If I can inspire just one person with the things I have gone through, then it will be all worthwhile.

The NEW and improved Lori is back and I am finally getting to the point I have always wanted to be. I am just going to jump all in feet first with this book and I hope that others will enjoy reading it eventually. If there are any believers out there….say a few prayers for me to finish my book please as this means everything to me.

Thanks for reading and God bless! ❤

I hate depression

I haven’t been writing for some time now and I think there is just too much going on for me to focus on my writing. My life is chaotic as chaotic can be, almost feels like I am being intentionally distracted. It’s been hard to focus on writing in my own personal journal these days even. Why is it that so much of what I enjoy doing most is unreachable at times? I almost thought for a moment that my writing wasn’t my passion anymore. But it is still there even if I am being so distracted. I think a lot of the distraction is my depression.

Depression seems like it doesn’t get talked about enough. Yes I said it, I am and often get depressed. That doesn’t make me a bad person it just likes to take over my life leaving me to think there is no hope for my future but that is total BULLSHIT! I don’t do well on medications for depression, I have a highly sensitivity to a lot of different types of medications making it difficult for me at times to get help. Even anesthesia has made me have weird feelings after having it for surgery. I had even been under and quit breathing before which was totally crazy and scary.

I have tried in the past to do therapy for my depression and you can’t always get the results you hope for when you talk to people. Sometimes it feels like no matter what I say there isn’t anything or anyone that can really help me. For years I have had to defeat my depression and anxiety on my own. My mother was bipolar and manic depressant. I had to help take care of her when I was growing up because she had such a severe case of depression she would stay in bed for days. Now my oldest son is bipolar and we’re trying to maintain the ability to control it with meds. Since he’s been in the 5th grade I have had to help manage it for him. He’s been on many different types of meds and talked to so many different therapists. I don’t know if he will ever be completely and entirely better but he’s a work in progress and I suppose we all are that are dealing with something.

I have been trying to get things figured out with my health and my back issues for awhile now. It’s a joke because it seems like the Dr.’s I see don’t know how to help me or want to help me because I have medicaid for insurance so they try to do as little as possible. I have had several different tests on my back for the past several years and have worsening back problems since a slipping accident on the job in 2014. Because there are more than one report/tests I have had in the past I just keep getting the runaround all the time instead of these Dr.’s comparing my results to the previous one’s or just spending more than ten minutes with me to go over things they would rather assume there is nothing wrong or that they can’t do surgery and send me on my way. I get tired of having to defend myself for the reasons why I am on meds/narcotics and the reason it makes it difficult to have any quality of life. I am going to see a neurosurgeon but have to wait until September uuhhggg as if I haven’t been waiting 4 years too long already.

This surgeon has been able to help my friend that has the same back problems I as I do therefore I really hope and pray it works out for me too. Trying to have a functional capacity test to see what I can and can’t do on the job. My Dr. seems to think that I can do things I am not capable of doing. Now I have to prove to my Dr. but I am in the process of finding someone new because she’s not helping me and I am tired of not being heard. In the meantime I wait and try to get a job that I “think” I might be capable of doing. I want to start making progress on getting things figured out with my life but it seems like because of my health my life isn’t in my control, it’s in the hands of these Dr.’s that I keep hoping and praying will help me get my life back.

But I have NO reason to be depressed, right??

Easter…not happy

I wish I could say that we have had a good and happy day but it’s anything but. I am not exactly sure why we have had to have so much bad luck in our lives but they say that bad things happen to good people and in our case we literally have to live one day at a time. We can’t ever plan on things for the future because things change weekly sometimes daily for us all the time.

My mom spent the last holiday before she passed with us on Easter and my birthday, nothing has been the same since. I miss her when it comes to holidays but Easter takes me back to that time where it seemed like it stood still for me. I sure wish that I could hear her voice one last time. It’s been almost 7 years but I miss her all the same.

We had to move a little over an hour to get things started for my son to get his rights for my granddaughter and since we’ve been here we have been through so much hell. We had to start out homeless and then ended up getting into a hotel that had bed bugs. We had to throw most of our stuff out to ensure we didn’t take any of it with us when we left. I never want to go through that experience again. It also cost a lot of money to buy bug spray, alcohol, and using the dryer to heat our clothes and bedding up.

Skip to a year later where he had started to finally get his visitation on the weekends after having had to do supervised visitation just because he had to get to know his own daughter since she was kept out of his life by her mom. Then we ended up getting visitation denied when she was supposed to come over she kept her from my son for 7 months. When she finally did bring her she asked my son for money and then we found a handprint on her butt and that is when the nightmare really began.

Fast-forward to this weekend where we had to take evidence from CPS being involved 3-4 different times, having had a man involved in my granddaughters life that had his parental rights taken away. He had domestic and sexual misconduct charges on his record so he wasn’t supposed to be around my granddaughter but she kept him in the picture. Now we have a lawyer that’s going to help my son with getting full custody but at the expense of my granddaughter possibly being molested. We were supposed to have her for Easter but she served my son with “the guy that isn’t supposed to be around” a PPO that had nothing but false allegations and this was the second time she’s done it. His lawyer had to have the first one dropped and now he’s got to do it again, it’s insane.

So we don’t get to see her for Easter either this year and we haven’t spent but only one holiday with her since we’ve been here for the past three years. Then on top of that we have been sick and had to go to urgent care to get some steroids to help the sickness go away. Our lease is up where we live and were trying to go back to our hometown while trying to find a place for my son to stay here to make it easier for him and his issues with his daughter. It’s been a little chaotic to say the least. Now were going to be commuting an hour just to get my other son work in our hometown, hopefully we won’t have to for too long. I keep praying that things go better for us and it is getting better in some situations but not for others. I have to keep remembering that everything is in GOD’s time not our own.

I keep thinking this is not the life I thought I would have when I was younger. There are so many times in my life that I struggled to take care of my children. I have been a single parent my entire life and it hasn’t been easy. It cost me my health because now from working in physical labor jobs my back is messed up. I am trying to decide if I can work and what work I can do because I have to wait for another year to appeal my SSI, I can’t afford to wait that long.

I have had to put my life off to help my son with his daughter but I wouldn’t have it any other way because he doesn’t have anyone else and either does my granddaughter. I want to go back to school to finish my Associates for General and only need one semester to work on my Bachelors for Journalism. Since all of this has been going on with my son and I had to do most of the paperwork to help get a lot of his rights, I am considering going to school to become a lawyer and intertwining the two degrees to help other people and have some decent income. I’m not sure when I will be able to start school again, hopefully not too long. The longer I wait the longer it will take for me to finish.

I don’t know why I am cursed to go through this life with all of these problems and my support from family also has been taken away. Maybe I am meant to go through these things alone, my prince charming never came. God is all I have…..but he’s enough. Today I think is a perfect reminder in my life of why I need my faith more than anything else. If Jesus went through all of that hell here on earth to have eternal life, at least I have something to look forward to….we all do. Amen

 

Failing our loved ones

You know you really have NOT lived until you have lived in the era of Prince and “purple 💜rain” as well as other songs! I’m so glad that was when I grew up was in the 80’s & 90’s.

We never thought about how we might get shot up if we go to school and we should definitely not have to worry about it now!!

My kids are grown and I don’t want to worry about my granddaughter 😣😢 and when she starts school but what has happened to these kids in our society today????

I think as the mental health community they need to do more to help kids…isnt it enough to sit here and watch our children and loved ones killed at the hands ✋🖐👋👊✊ of someone who has reached out to get help but we’re failed time and time again.

I have family that’s suffered from mental problems and this issue hits home for me. I’ve been trying to help my son and my mom who always struggled to get stable to, live productive lives.

I’m sure after this kid that shot up the school in FL, lost his mom that it had to have messed him up!! I’m not sure why the system failed him and I’m not using anything to excuse him for what he did. But he as well as other kids that do these things are crying out for help well before it gets to that point.

It’s really sad 😭😢😵 that it has to get that far before we as a community 👥👥👥 step in and help each other when our system fails our loved ones.

SNOW SUCKS!!!

I have lived in Michigan my entire life and we tried to leave to go South once before but it didn’t work out. I am getting so tired of being here, I hate winter and snow. Getting stuck in six to eight inches as the snow just keeps coming down really sucks!!!

I don’t want to live here anymore, I hate everything here. We have barely been able to get by here. We struggle year after year. I had a work injury in 2014 because of ice related to the snow and all of it melting and leaving little patches of black ice. You can’t avoid what you can’t see. Never assume that there isn’t any as you will quickly find out different.

I had my hands full, rushing to sign in at a guard shack, it was still dark outside and couldn’t see in front of me. That day changed my life. I won my case in court or rather my lawyer did, after fighting for my workers compensation. I didn’t get much out of it but it proved the point of what I needed it to and I think it’s going to help me get my social security. I am still waiting for a decision and I have not been able to work or much of anything else. I do believe I am at the point of needing surgery now. I am scared that it’s not going to turn out and it would have all been for nothing but….I don’t have any other options. It’s a very long surgery and a very long recovery time.

I don’t think me and my two boys are going to stay in Michigan. As soon as were able were planning to move someplace warmer. It might not be for a couple of years from now but still, we’ve ALL been tired of being here in Michigan and yet so hard to leave. It’s like every time we’ve tried to leave something prevents us from leaving. It’s like when you are here, you can’t leave.

Bad neighbors, bad place to live…

I just had the worst situation happen in the apartments we live in yesterday! I moved here in Eaton Rapids, Mi last year in March, so that means that our lease will just about be up soon and I cannot wait. I without a doubt will not be signing a new lease.

I thought when I moved here last year that the worst part of my life was behind me; finally I could start over and have a fresh new beginning. My son and I started out homeless in the Lansing area, moving from our hometown of Battle Creek, Mi. I came here to help my son start over and get rights to his daughter since being over an hour away, it was making it hard to get stuff done. Since we moved here it’s been one thing after another dealing with people.

First it was dealing with the people at the shelters that we stayed at. Rules….always rules when you stay in them places, that makes everything more stressful. There are certain times you are allowed in and certain times you are allowed out. They don’t allow you to keep your phones, go back out to your vehicle after you sign in, ect. But they’re not all the same. I have been in a few shelters in my life being homeless more than once has not been easy for me and definitely not anything I am proud of.

I have been trying to work and hold down a job all while struggling to take care of my kids as well as having health problems. My two sons are grown now and yet the only way we all can survive currently, is by living together, so that we can pool our money and have transportation. It seems as if it’s getting harder to make ends meet when the cost of living is still so high compared to the wages of employment.

After moving here the neighbors started to harass us that lived below us. Because we were too loud, then it was about my son’s dog having had to get rid of him because he was a pit bull after my son only had him for not even a year and he was still a pup. That was heartbreaking. The older lady that works as a caregiver for someone downstairs started to get involved with the police and my son’s baby’s mom when it wasn’t any of her concern and she didn’t know crap about what was going on. Then it was us being harassed by the police and maintenance coming here to do half ass work. They started out with two guys when I moved in and now there’s only one. He bitches and complains about his job every time he comes to do work and since he doesn’t fix it right the first time he has to keep coming back. But the latest as of yesterday is what has really sent me over the edge.

This winter they had more than once person plowing our driveway and I’ve been told their having a hard time getting/keeping someone to do the work. Not sure why when the driveways and sidewalks can’t be that difficult to do, since there aren’t even that many apartments here. I am beginning to think everyone here is just lazy and don’t want to work. We got anywhere from six to eight inches of snow on Friday. Naturally having things to do that day we had to get out and the driveway hadn’t been plowed at all. One of my other neighbor’s were trying to get out as we were leaving and got stuck. We tried to help her and she got stuck in the middle of the parking lot. My car got stuck as well but I was able to finally get out with them pushing our car. Mainly the snow was just so light and powdery that there wasn’t anything for our tires to grip onto so they just spinned and my car is all wheel drive. The traction was on but kept blinking on the dash going in and out as we sat spinning.

After coming back home I noticed they still hadn’t plowed the driveway and I wasn’t about to get stuck again so I just pulled into an open spot in the carports to wait until they plowed the driveway. But someone who “pays” for the spot that I chose at random, started bitching at my son on his way out, getting picked up for work, for us to move the car. I tried to move the car out and got stuck again, I knew that would happen which is why I parked there in the first place. This lady has a big escalade “truck” and obviously she didn’t have to worry about being stuck but here I was sitting there now in the middle of the parking lot now blocking her from getting into “her spot”!!!! She was being a bitch about it and I was trying to move my car and couldn’t all the while my oldest son, some little girl, the neighbor girl I helped earlier and this lady were all trying to tell me how to move my car and trying to push it when I kept explaining that it wasn’t moving it was stuck!! I don’t know why when you tell people something they act like they don’t hear a word out of  your mouth. I finally got pissed and walked away leaving my car there. I tried to call the emergency on call maintenance as I didn’t get ahold of anyone in our office as she hadn’t been in there all week. He said “he didn’t know what to tell me that he seen my oldest out shoveling my car out as he was pulling in and that they were coming out to plow but he didn’t know when.” I tried to go back out and was able to barely get the car from the middle of the driveway to a different open spot under the car port and left it there in disgust at all the bullshit I just had to deal with for the sake of our driveways not being plowed as if it were my fault!!

These apartments aren’t running very professionally and all they care about is the money were paying but forget about taking care of the residents needs because as long as their getting their money it don’t matter. There are people living here that have a disability as well as older people. It’s sad to see that they just don’t care. This time I am hoping after we move from here we can just get a house because I am soooooo over renting. At least if I had my own house if it didn’t get plowed I wouldn’t have anyone else to blame but me. What I want to know is…why are the people here so damn rude and demanding like their shit don’t stink? That’s what I am tired of putting up with from these people. They think they need to be in everyone else’s business and be a bitch about it as well. If that lady didn’t come off rude I wouldn’t have had to say “fuck you bitch” and it got me so angry that she was demanding me to move my stuck car from “her spot that she pays for” in the middle of a ffing snow storm while waiting for them to plow.

Finally after about seven or eight at night the guy finally decides to show up like it was the weekend and it was a Friday night. Not only did he plow people’s cars into their parking spots but he also dumped snow all over the sidewalks that had just been snow blowed and he hit a telephone poll. I ended up having to help shovel the girl out earlier, then shovel the sidewalk in front of our apartment and my parking spot that still had snow in it so I could park all the way in the spot. I have spinal stenosis and chronic pain so I shouldn’t have had to do that. I posted about the situation on their Eaton Rapids Community Facebook page, to see if I could get any help from the people in the community for contacting someone to make a complaint. I wasn’t rude at all in explaining what happened but then people were twisting and turning what I said to make the entire post about something other than what I wrote it for. Even the lady with the truck was on their and still going on and on bitching about “her paying to park” like why does that matter when she could have parked anywhere else for a little while until they plowed. She couldn’t even have some sympathy for someone who was going through a difficult time but chose to be a bitch instead.

The picture below is NOT a real picture that I took. This is just an example of someone’s car being plowed in. SUCKS!!