14 years ago today, I had my youngest son. He is the third out of my four children and he is the one who has tested every boundary I have ever put down. His love is strong and his humor is sharp. Happy Birthday Nolan I love you!
Literally overnight, I lost my child. Her love and affection seemed suddenly and completely lost to me forever. She went to bed a sweet, loving child of ten and woke up with a period and an attitude problem. I don’t want to trivialize this. It was not just an attitude. It was awful. I was not prepared for this.
My oldest daughter didn’t menstruate until she was thirteen, just like me. I blame my youngest’s excessive diet of chicken nuggets. Silently, nature declared defeat in the battle against my nurturing.
Suddenly, smiling was only for losers. And I was Queen of the loser club, gathering recruits everywhere I went. Everything that anyone in our household did or said quickly annoyed her to no end. I tried to not get offended by her sudden spurning of me, but my heart ached for the child I knew was now gone.
I called my mother one evening and was whining to her like I tend to do on most days. I told her I didn’t remember ever having an attitude like this or having hormonal rages. She scoffed and reminded me of how I treated her real quick. She also reminded me how I cried and literally stomped my feet at fourteen after being told I had eaten enough chocolate for the night. I locked myself in the bathroom for four hours after not getting tickets to the NKOTB concert, clearing delighting my parents with a break from me.
I have come to accept this inevitable change, but every now and then, I get a glimpse of my baby girl. Even so, I know the monster is just sleeping. I also know, as the mother of a grown daughter, that she will come back to me one day.
She will suddenly find herself calling me every day and missing the things she hates about me now. That is what is keeping me from despair.
I also know that by focusing on the growing pains, I am unable to see the masterpiece that is forming right in front of me. Through this suffering, a vibrant and brilliant woman will rise up ready to change the world.
In the meantime, I still have my dogs.
Her fire, faux innocence, and obsession with cats was obsessively terrifying. We hung on as a nation to see what dumb stunt would happen next on the Netflix series. We were so transfixed that we couldn’t see it was a distraction from the virus being sprayed on us all. I think I remember hearing the planes that did it.
I know. It sounds like a stretch, but at this point, after this year, anything could have happened. Anything sounds more logical than one guy eating a bat in China that caused the whole world to get sick.
I have decided that Carol Baskin was involved. And, just like any great politician, I will stand by my theory, no matter what any doctor from the CDC says
The Warning Signs
If you watch just the first episode you can see she is clearly fighting for world domination. Now that the Tiger King is out of the way, it is only logical that she would try to take down the rest of us. She won’t stop until it is just her and the cats! Ignoring her blatant mental illness, you can see the crazy anger in her eyes as she sits with a Persian cat and wears a sweater with a cat knitted on it. She thinks of herself as a cat. When I was young, I wanted to be a red crayon, but I let that shit go, Carol! I’m an adult. I know I can’t be a red crayon
Ignore this at your own risk. I tried to warn you. She may look like a harmless, deranged aunt from Ohio, but she is not to be underestimated
Proof
Guess who doesn’t have COVID?
Cats. *drops mic and walks away*
The circumstances in which one finds themselves living is not meant to be permanent. Every chapter of our life is equivalent to a different level and to grow you must level up. There is a strength from growing and gaining financially that people who have never struggled will never understand. I think to fully understand one, you must experience the other.
Awakening your prosperity is something anybody is able to do but few actually succeed in. It requires a little, old fashioned hard work and focus, which few have anymore. Those missing qualities have helped develop and maintain the bridge between the low income and higher income earners. Anyone is able to take their piece of the pie, but working for it and making smart decisions is the only way to get there.
I hope this list will provide the stimulation someone may need to get the ball rolling on creating extra income. I will not call it passive income because passive income is generated by no work at all, such as returns from being a silent investor, etc. It is a widely overused and incorrectly used description for what I term found money.
Death came for my sister this year, turning my world upside down and my sleeping habits to ashes. I went to work every day and parented my children, but I was losing it on the inside. Maybe the unreleased grief caused insomnia or maybe it was just my age.
Everything I could have done differently was brought to the forefront of my mind when I closed my eyes. Past memories and conversations came alive again once the night descended. The rest of society would dream without the knowledge they had failed someone that day. They didn’t say goodbye or didn’t hug or didn’t appreciate it, but they were still ignorant of that fact, for the moment.
I knew this grief would pass. It was not my first experience with it. Insomnia was new for me though. It seemed that the night was just there to remind me of the things I avoided feeling or thinking during the daylight hours. Nothing internally had ever prevented my sleep before and I was shocked. My children were long past the age of keeping me up.
I would dread the night and approach the long, silent hours already defeated. As someone who has always been able to sleep for six to nineteen hours straight, this was a huge shock to my system. It was so bad that I considered it torture.
I went to the doctor. Of course, they gave me prescription pills. The pills worked too well. I didn’t wake up for work three days in a row. This didn’t surprise me as I have always been extremely sensitive to medications. If you read my article on meditation, you will know I failed at all of my many attempts to master meditation. Nonetheless, I tried it yet again will the same results. I knew then that stricter measures must be taken.
I tried an app that promoted relaxation methods. One method was mindful breathing, which is basically what it sounds like. You breathe according to the inhale/ exhale rhythm that the app tells you.
Surprisingly, it did help calm me down when I got overly anxious, but it did not put me to sleep. I am lactose intolerant so I could not try the warm milk method, but I did try hot toddies and hot tea that promoted sleepiness. I hated the tea and got drunk on the other. I didn’t go to sleep, but I had a nice night.
This bout with insomnia didn’t take long before I started feeling the effects on my body and seeing the effects on my face. As an already intolerable grump, I got even crabbier and my temper got much shorter. I tried a strict routine with the intention of trying to sleep train myself. I bought a weighted blanket, essential oils, and CBD oil. I even tried sleeping sprays, which I had never known existed before this point. But Febreeze scented for sleep does not work.
The cure came by way of advice that I normally would have politely acknowledged but immediately forgot. It was the sort of cure my southern grandmother would have recommended that seemed almost worse than the complaint. Like the remedy to drink buttermilk, which tastes like a murder charge, to ease stomach pains. I will just wait out the pains, Grandma.
This was recommended by an older person that I am friends with and she told me to rub two drops of castor oil on my eyelids. I scoffed it off, but she was extremely convincing and I was extremely desperate so the fates aligned. I bought castor oil. No, all southerners don’t keep that on hand, but I will from now on. I did my wine, bath, skin, and evening bedtime routine. Then I dabbed two drops on each eyelid and rubbed it in.
I settled down beside my husband and told him it wasn’t working. Then, I woke up. I had slept over seven hours and I was amazed. I don’t know if the castor oil did it alone, or if my brain was just ready, but I will forever be in debt to that jar of disgustingness and my friend.
My insomnia has gone away for the most part and life has moved on for all of us, however stunted. We are learning a new way of life without her in it. That is what she would want us to do.
Continue reading “Insomnia: The Home Remedy”
The COVID-19, also know as the Coronavirus, pandemic will not be forgotten by any of us any time soon. It has wrecked havoc on my life from getting my wedding venue and honeymoon cancelled the day before my wedding to ruining my son’s baseball career. That was just the beginning of the nightmare we were all about to endure. A nightmare that seems to have no ending in sight.
I will be the first to admit that I used to tease and make fun of the zombie apocalypse, end of the world obsessed people. They would all watch that violent show on AMC and then really believe that stuff would happen. Not only that, but, they believed it would happen soon. I also spared no ridicule for the doomsday preppers with their bunkers and massive collections of canned goods. I’m not laughing anymore.
I took a good and hard look at myself during this virus and found myself to be seriously lacking. My survival skills, on a scale from one to ten, were at a negative twenty. I had no stores of canned goods or bottled water. And, even worse, I had never even thought about toilet paper being the first essential item to all but disappear. I was totally unprepared. That will not be me the next time this happens.
I will be locked, loaded, and ready from now on.
The TP
When shit hit the fan, I was not surprised to see evidence of hoarding start to happen. Much like when southerners see a snowflake, the supermarkets started getting low on certain items, mainly milk and bread. That was normal. This time, instead of bread and milk, the people panicked and bought all available toilet paper. This was not normal.
Months later, I am still confused by this. I bought bottled water and canned food. My butt was the last thing on my mind at the time. You can’t eat toilet paper for survival, but you can wipe your butt across the yard.
A lesson was learned this year. During these last few months of chaos, I have had to borrow toilet paper and, once, had to drive two hours to my brother’s house to find some. I will never let my toilet paper supply dwindle down again.
Reading
There have been a few good things to come out of all of this. I have always been a book hoarder, both paper and digital, but now I can hoard them with no backtalk from my husband! He now understands we might need these to fully educate all of our offspring in the future. I hope they like Stephen King and Ken Follett.
I might be taking advantage of this situation a little, but he has also stockpiled a few unnecessary items. Nobody needs that many tree stands.
Alcohol
This might not seem essential to some. Tell me that after trying to homeschool six kids and work a full time job. Retraction: Tell me that after trying to homeschool MY six kids and work MY full time job. I will make sure plenty of wine is on hand from now on, no matter what. I will use whatever methods I can find to prevent being defeated by my life. If I have to learn how to make my own shine myself deep in the woods somewhere, then so be it. My grandfather did it and he was not the sharpest tool in the shed. Probably because of his moonshine.
Tip: some types of alcohol can also be used to make hand sanitizer supposedly.
Back to the homeschooling debacle. I can not begin to describe the trauma this home schooling stunt has caused me or the learning disabilities it has caused my kids. School is on track to reopen very soon here and I have never been more terrified to send my kids back there. It feels like I’m sending them straight to COVID.
I am leaning towards making them stay home. I would rather have them dumb, but alive. Of course, they want to go back to school and life as normal as soon as they possibly can, so I have not discussed this with them yet. I keep hoping the schools will delay things a little longer.
Gardening
I started gardening after all of this in preparation for the next global pandemic or food shortage caused by fear mongering. I know now that I need to know more survival, cooking, and gardening skills if I expect to survive the hunger games.
However, if we should actually ever drop down to a short supply of food, my husband is an expert hunter and fisherman. For those of you that are not so lucky, I would recommend starting a garden or considering taking a course on how to loot. You can just go back and watch some old episodes of CNN for the looting lesson. I wouldn’t recommend coming to my house, though.
As I work on myself and the new life that has suddenly become mine, I try to be optimistic and positive outwardly. Inside, I am patiently waiting for my life to get back to normal. Deep down, I think we all will be learning a new normal. Life from before is over.
Kylie’s Rants 