I don't know where I belong right now

Posted elsewhere on 3/12/07:

This is the only place I feel I can talk, and I'm working hard to not retreat from here. My natural instinct is to hide from everyone and everything (which I'm doing pretty well in real life) and I'm fighting myself daily to not do that here.

I've come to realize I have lots of acquaintances but no real friends in this town. My kids are great, but I'm trying to be strong for them when I see them. My mom is trying but I just can't deal with her right now. I had lots of work buddies but lost contact with them when I quit working in 2001.

My best friend Kim, whom I've known since high school, is currently in Arizona. She and her husband are retired and traveling the country in a RV. In the past we were always close no matter where we were (we've rarely been living in the same part of the country at the same time since high school) but we had started having some distance in our friendship before this happened, just our lives going different directions, and now it's even more obvious. While I've talked to her by phone a few times, there's a distance between us now. I know she and her husband care about me and the kids, and would do anything for us, but our talks aren't as easy as they used to be. I think part of it is some jealousy on my part, that she has her husband and is living her retirement dreams while I'll never have mine, and fear on her part that talking to me makes her see how easily she could lose it all.

I still post on the eBay board, but nothing personal, as it's a public business-based board. I've noticed there that anything personal I post seems to make the others uncomfortable and stops conversation, so I just don't.

I pretty much stopped posting on the Josh board while my dad was sick and never really started again. Once again, the posts I make there seem to make people feel uncomfortable and they don't know how to respond so they tend to ignore my posts. Then I feel worse than I did before, so I mostly read and not post there anymore.

I hate feeling so needy. Some days I post on all three boards and then repeatedly check back for replies. When they don't come, it just reinforces the point that others actually have lives and things to do, and makes my life feel so pointless.

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I feel so invisible now. I don't know who I am. I'm a wife with no husband. A mother with no kids. Except Shelly, who's acting more like a mother instead of a kid these days, which also makes me worry that I'm putting too much of a burden on her.

We had plans and dreams for the future. Goals set to make those dreams into reality. Now my future looks like a big black nothingness. Most days I feel if I disappeared, no one would even notice.

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Now that the raw pain of losing Rick is a bit better (not that it's better, or I feel it less, just that I'm getting more used to the idea), I feel like I've lost ME, too.

I've always been a strong person, able to take charge of any situation and do what needed to be done. I was like that as a single mother. I was that way during my 16 year marriage to my ex-husband, who had alcohol and drug addictions. I was like that as a divorced mother. I knew what needed to be done, knew I couldn't depend on anyone else, so I did what I needed to do.

Then I met Rick, and for the first time, I didn't need to work, I didn't need to be the one taking care of business and finances, I had someone who wanted to take care of me. Someone who loved me for ME, not for what I could do or provide for them.

We both had found what we were searching for, so we pretty much shut out the rest of the world. Spending time with and taking care of, each other and our family was our main focus in life. Sure, I had my friends online, and he had his work buddies, but our free time was spent with our kids, spending time alone and planning our future together when the kids were grown. We knew we wouldn't have the years together that other couples would, because we wasted so many years with the wrong people, so we wanted to be able to spend as much time together as possible.

So while shutting out the outside world now leaves me with less of a support system, I don't regret at all that we chose to live that way.

It just seems cruel of fate to have snatched away what I spent my whole life searching for after I finally found it.