Permission to Speak Freely

I started blogging around 1998 when I heard about an online entity called Open Diary. My blog was called Emiliasdance and was mainly a place to write my thoughts and feelings and rants about the very painful divorce that I was going through. As you can imagine it was a pretty dark and angry place. But I needed a place to work through all of those emotions away from the eyes and ears of my children. Once my divorce was final the purpose of the diary was to record the heartbreak that I felt over losing my home and my family and seeing the awful things my ex-husbands betrayal and desertion were doing to my children. The diary remained a dark windowless prison of anger. I was surprised that anyone ever read it, but I did have followers.

Then 9/11 happened and the world cracked apart. My oldest son became a paramedic and moved out, that was natural. But my middle child became a roaring patriot and I was not able to stop him from leaving school, joining the service and be sent immediately to the middle east. That year was possibly harder than the previous 4 years combined had been. My diary became a chronicle of my fear and anxiety. But more than that, it became the place where I wrote about the first symptoms of the cancer that was growing in my body. It was pretty bleak. That year was where the title of this diary came from. That year I began to feel like it was just God and Mollie and Me.

At the beginning of 2004 my diary very briefly became a happier place with my son's return home from war. But two months later my world split apart again. I was a single mom of an 11 year old and I was told that I had a very aggressive form of breast cancer and my doctors were certain that the cancer had already spread throughout my body. Emiliasdance became the record of illness and treatment and pain and sadness and fear and resolve and the compassion of others. Having little else to do, I poured my heart out in those posts.

In October of 2004, just slightly more than a month before my treatments ended Open Diary was hacked and Emiliasdance was deleted along with thousands of other diaries. I'm sure those posts still exist, but I can't retrieve them.

I stayed briefly with Open Diary but then switched over to another platform on AOL.The AOL platform was chunkier than Open Diary, and didn't have nearly the amount of authors. I tried a few other diary hosts but just didn't find one that I liked. I left pieces of blogs all over the web. During that time Emiliasdance was retired and I started writing The Pink Tee Shirt.

In 2006 I found Blogger and have written here ever sense.  The Pink Tee Shirt took on a lot of other themes like my failing health and life raising an overachieving teen, and the additions of daughter in laws and grandchildren to my family. But the theme of my fear of my cancer returning wove through it. For a brief time I changed the name of the blog, but then changed it back.

This month as I wrote about here  I put The Pink Tee Shirt away and picked this blog up. I have been as sad about closing it as I was about losing Emiliasdance. It still exists, but it will be a while before I feel okay about opening back up. I have begun to realize a positive to changing blogs. Though my family never read Emiliasdance, they did The Pink Tee Shirt. For that reason there were some things that I could not write about, truths I could not tell. They don't know about Just God and Mollie and Me, and won't unless I tell them about it. I don't think that I will. I have things that I'd like to say. I know that it is better to not talk about people behind their backs, and those aren't the kind of truths I want to talk about. I have several family members whom I have to walk on egg shells around. And now those egg shells aren't there any more. I can express more freely my feelings about some of the things that I write about anyway. I no longer have to keep it neutral.

This long history of my blog is to start here saying the things that I really feel. My ex called earlier today. Mollie had left her phone in a rental car and someone found it. The called my ex to find out how to get the phone back to her. My ex called me to ask if I wanted the phone sent to me or Mollie. Why would he think that it would be better to send the phone to me? Oh yeah, I'd have to give him my address so he could drop by to inspect where I'm living. I realize that he had the right to know where I was raising the child he walked out on. But Mollie doesn't live with me anymore. She hasn't in two years. Now my ex has no reason to care where I live, yet he does. It has been driving him crazy that nobody will tell him. I don't think that is the real reason that he called. I think he called because he wants someone to care about what he is going through.

My ex left me for a woman with a lot of mental problems. I'm not saying that out of spite. She actually has diagnoses, and they are major ones. But over the years I have noticed a pattern that she thinks the world revolves around what is going on with her and doesn't try to consider the struggles of others. So when ex developed plural effusions and almost died, she didn't even go to the hospital. She was more concerned about her comfort zones than being concerned that he really needed someone there for him. He and I were best friends 2 years before we started dating. Then we were married for 22 years before we were divorced. He knows that I am a caring person, that I often put the needs of others before my own.  When he wants someone to care he reaches out to me.

Today things aren't working out well for him. He's unhappy in yet another job and doesn't want to see it through. He is also getting buried in medical bills. His insurance isn't very good. He has a $50 copay for things that I pay a co-insurance of $2.45 for. While he was talking to me I was sitting there thinking "you are an idiot". If he was married to me, he would have had someone at the hospital with him and he would be on my insurance and wouldn't have these problems today. Things have definitely  not been a picnic here, but...

The part of the conversation that disturbed me the most was he started talking almost incoherently about OCD and Attention Deficit Disorder. I got the feeling that he was talking about those tendencies in himself. I have known that he has depression for more than 30 years, but I never would have considered him OCD or Attention Deficit. I wonder where that came from. My sister is the picture of OCD, I know what it looks like. I know that he is stubborn and he wants things done his way or the highway. He also he has commitment issues, thus his job situation. But I wouldn't tag him OCD.

I wouldn't have been able to say what I have said above with the family members reading it. I guess I could say it, but I'd take a lot of flack for it. And it feels really good to be able to process those thoughts here.