JessiesMom

I have those voices too. They are the voices of my mother telling me I am not good enough. Don't listen. You are good enough and you do have a voice. I hear you.

I have not words of advice and I hesitate to dump on your husband's behavior (although I certainly want to). You need to do what it best for you in this situation. I do not believe that trying to save the relationship is possible, unless both of you want to make it better. Have you talked with him about couple's counceling? If that is something that he is open to - it might be worth it to try it - if only for the sake of the children. However, if he is done with the relationship - I would try to find a therapist for you. Nothing that he did is your fault and it is important that you remember that. He made his choices. Remember that you are not the first person to be where you are. Women have had to figure out how to be strong and carry on for decades. You will get through this.

I have been there. Heck, I am still there some days. There are more people out there than you can imagine who feel like they are not normal. Those girls that you see on your social media are, quite frankly, the outliers. I say, screw normal. I would rather be interesting and unique any day.

My daughter turns 11 in a few weeks. She has informed me that she thinks that 11 is too old for trick or treating. When I pointed out to her that her friends who are 14 and 15 still trick or treat she replied - "That is because they are childish." She is growing up waaaaaay to fast.

It happened to me too.

That is what I believe - that the bible is a book written by man about God at a certain time and place. The people in the time of the First Testament were coming from and out of a culture dominated by pagan gods - so they could not understand God in a different paradigm. That is why the God of the First Testament appears the way that he does. It says less about God and more about the culture of the time. As the people's view of God evolved - how he was portrayed in the books they wrote changed. Again, God did not change - but they way his followers were able to see him did. I agree that religion has been misused and abused over the years. But, at least for me, it does not change my need to believe that there is something bigger than us. The suffering and turmoil in the world is, in my opinion, not something that God causes. I don't know why people get depression or children die of cancer. I don't have all the answers - and I am ok with that 😉

I think that the way we see God says more about us than it does about God. If we see him as a punishing figure - maybe we should think about why we feel the need to be punished. If we see him as vindictive and jelous - we need to look at why we see this behavior as being love. God does not change - but what we need from him and how we see him can.

@MarkintheDark - I have greatly appreciated you on this forum and I hope that you will be here for years to come. I wish there was something I could do to help.

I'm sorry that you are suffering so. My recommendation would be to be honest with your parents, so that they can get you the help that you need. High school sucks for everyone. Let me say that again........high school sucks for everyone. Whoever said that high school is the best years of your life is seriously disturbed. It is not real life and sometimes it is just something that you have to survive. I have two sons about your age. One is a junior in college and the other is starting at community college in the winter. Neither of them had girlfriends in high school and I don't think that either of them even went to a school dance. Have you tried out some school clubs to try to find your people? That helped my eldest when he went away to college and fell into a depression. Eventually he found a close group of friends who would support him. In high school, the robotics team helped out quite a bit, since the people there (although they drive him nuts) were people like him. There is so much life to have after the hell of high school and so many different kinds of people that you will meet in your life. Don't give up before you have even gotten to the fun part.

I have three children and it has been interesting to watch how they fit or do not fit the streotypes. My eldest is my 20 year old son. He is a high achieving, depressed, perfectionist. My middle is an 18 year old son. He is extremely pragmatic and takes a great deal of responsibility for his younger sister. My youngest is a 10 year old girl. She has always been more like an only - with two suplementary parents. She has always been more mature that one would expect for her age, which is a definite positive.

Over the past few years I have been increasingly convinced that Douglas Adams was some sort of prophet. Not the kind that does extreme one man theater like Ezikiel, or the kind who stands on a street corner with a sign going on and on about the end of the world - but someone who had some kind of special understanding of how the world works. For example, just now I was sitting and thinking about how much of my time I spend trying to get money and the following came into my head: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-­‐two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-­‐descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has ʹ or rather had ʹ a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever." This type of thing has happened to me before - and the thing that flashed into my mind is always something that Douglas Adams has written. I could be that I have just read the series one, or two, or three too many times. But there are other books that I have read more than twice - and it never seems to happen with them. Anyway - it is what it is. Has anything like that ever happened to you?

It's Friday - yawn.

I'm the classic eldest child. Responsible for everything - I acted like a small adult early on. Apparently I was not excited about my sister's birth when I was four. I even carved her name into a piece of furiture trying to get her in trouble. However, I forgot that she could not write yet.

So what you are saying is that metaphors are our ladders. 😉

I ran across this poem that I wrote a while back and I wanted to share it with my DF friends. Hang in there - you are not alone. I see you The pain is etched on your face The hope that once held you aloft has departed Leaving only the sinking dread And the heavy weight of the world On your shoulders Weighing you down Until your strength fails And you fall to your knees You lie….broken With your dreams scattered around you Like fallen leaves What can I do? How can I help? Take my outstreached hand Let me help you to your feet again Together we will gather the leaves Pile them up And jump in the pile, like when we were young Maybe then the light of hope will return to your eyes And you will have the strength to fight another day I will be by your side You can count on me.