ahaha OMG I wannascream

ok, here I was so excited, I had three columns, and just had to play with the EDITING and lost my followers and have some thing I have NO idea what is used for at the bottom of my page!!!

;o(

I want my followers and their pics back!! I want my three columns back!! and I wanted a cute "comment" saying and box, I wanted to separate the blogs I follow into groups!

Looks like a long nite on the lap top...Any body have any ideas, and could my new friends plz follow me again ;o(

Personal "Retro Wednesday"

So many creative folks out in the land of blog. Plenty of support for those looking for recovery or for those surviving someone else's issues! It would be wonderful if I knew of away to link or call them all up with one word.

Makes me wonder if there is more addiction or more awareness. I feel there is more addiction. It hits younger and harder and most families are made of survivors that never learned or admitted they were co dependant.

I was the one that never admitted. The day I married and moved 1500 miles from family was both the best day and the most difficult day. I left my support system! but I wanted to do that, right?

Being the youngest of three daughters, and raised by a single mom, I thought the "magic" was the mother/father team. Which is sort of funny because I didn't really contemplate who I was marrying and we NEVER discussed anything, NOTHING, except the work we were both involved in. Often my niece was a topic because she lived with us at the time. Or maybe which drive in movie after I got off my shift at the private mental health hospital. (Again, I was going to save the world)

My husband started asking me out after the 4th of July , 1978. Fortunately we had grown up two houses apart since forever but I always had seen him as untouchable. He was very smart, very handsome, very weird LOL, very much from a "normal" family. Even at his 22nd birthday in August I had no idea he was thinking of asking me to marry him. So some where between August 23 and September 1 he asked. We were married September 16, 1978.

Do you know how I chose that date? I thought about my family and his required start date in his new profession. The entire thing was really going to upset my mother who would be left alone when I left. So the date had to be workable for me to calm her AFTER the wedding as well.

The only thing I truly fought for in those weeks were the words in our wedding vows. Yes, we wrote them ourselves, and they were all windows of leaving if need to. Themed in friendship, I mean lets face it we were more friends that met in late nights as lovers. The words were to encourage us to be the best we could be for each other and included a default of sorts. When we realized we were no longer the best of friend for the other it would be best for us to let go than to tear each other down and destroy who we were meant to be.

As a mother of two sons, I know that his family had to wonder what he had gotten into. I had to have this clause because I knew there was NO way a couple could stay together a life time without destroying the other...I knew this for obvious reasons but also knew I was different, I was not "normal" in the social norms. My life was to be torn up if I didn't protect myself.

Such was the beginning of a couple that started 31 years ago this September! We have four children. So far the three oldest have really pushed themselves into the realm of addiction. THANKFULLY, they seemed to have returned to a road filled with goals for their lives now. But one thing I have always always reminded them is what their own gene pool has already been imprinted with!!! Addiction! Thus started my road of co dependency as an adult.

Awareness of what is to come...

August - now comes the slow long shadows of the end of summer. Like so many times of life when we know what to expect it helps us to get prepared for the changes about to happen in our lives.

~school~ I mean I have been out of school for a very long time and I still love 3:00!, I still get excited for Friday! and I still LOVE when school is over for the summer.

There will be those people that will try to convince me that they are looking forward to the cooler weather, or looking forward to a little routine in their lives again. I think they are doing their best to accept the future they KNOW is coming. What do we do about the events in our lives that we don't know what to expect and we KNOW are coming?

My most dreaded moments through most of my sons teenage - young adult, ok hell, presently; phone calls. The phone often seemed to ring differently and my "mother gut" would tell me something was about to happen and it could be bad, real bad. Voices of police, friends, or even their own, to tell us there was trouble. It started to really mess with my psyche and pulled up familiar emotions.

Some how in my grandest imagination as a young mother I thought I could steer the kids way far away from behavior that was destructive to themselves and others. I had not lived at home for a very long time and yet the protective gear was readily available as our sons began to bring in the things that I had worked to avoid.

Materialism, sure I wanted them to be happy with life no matter their economic state. Some how I wanted to press upon them that doing what brought them "reason" was more important than money. Charitable, who doesn't want a child of theirs to be gentle hearted but safe. I even expected the drinking but wanted to press upon them the dangers, the limits, the complete and total truth that addiction was inherited, and they had a very very full gene pool of addicts.

So looking for my niche of wisdom, I found over the past summer that my experience as a child of addiction and the parent of addiction, that my acceptance of my own experience could be shared with others. I realized how many deal with addiction of loved ones and they believe they are lost not the addict! and that they do end up so lost and broken hearted.

My next few reflections~unless of course there is reason to turn the course~ will be on this. Survival for the self. Because just as we can look out in the August sun and see the shadows are getting longer and know what is about to come, we can see the shadows of our lives and what we are about to lose. I hope to share with others, acceptance of being only responsible for ourselves is what brings the peace.