People who spend more money feeding their cats than they spend feeding their own family are stupid as shit.

"Hi, how are you?" is not appropriately responded to by saying, "Where is the _______?"  IDGAF if you say your day has been shit, just show some common courtesy ffs.  Take today for example.  Sad, lonely lady responded by saying her day hadn't been going very well at all.  We had a nice chat, and I hope she felt a little better after spending some time out of her house and around other people.  I felt like exploding and crying and breaking things (and faces) for awhile today, and talking to her made me feel better, so I hope the same went for her......

Breaking Point

The snow outside is falling so quietly, melting like tears as it hits the ground.  It's going to take awhile, but the other 18 inches or so will melt in time, too.  Everything builds up to be so beautiful, and then it all just melts away...

I have the strangest dreams...  Last night, I dreamed that something was living in the vents.  J-E wouldn't let me look at it, but he told me it wasn't so bad.  "We already drank its blood, remember," he said.  I felt sick to my stomach.  What was it?  I tried to peer into the vents for a look, but J-E held me back.  I think I saw an eye looking back at me through the slits.

I feel so infected, like something is infesting my brain, taking over, and eating me alive.  I just want to tear myself to pieces, searching for it, so I can get this sickness out of me.  Every day, I find myself saying and doing things that I don't want to be saying or doing.  It just comes right out of me on its own, and because of it, I'm essentially destroying my own life.  I'm so angry that my anger has actually taken on a personality of its own.  Sometimes I feel so schizophrenic.

A lot of people like to say that if you worry about being crazy, you're obviously not.  The reasoning must be that you have enough sanity to fear that loss of control.  They're wrong.  There are plenty of people in this world who are positively insane and quite sure of it.

Sometimes I think I'm just lost in some sort of fantasy, caught up in my mind and lost in some sort of dream.  I've spent my entire life trying to get away from this feeling, because it absolutely kills me, but I've never been able to find an effective method of staying centered without masochism.

That's why I feel like I'm losing it.  I feel like half of me is subconsciously hell-bent on destroying my life, while the conscious part of me is left reeling without a clue as to how to stop everything from burning to the ground.  Any normal person would be self-aware enough to stop themselves from acting like a complete fuck.

If nothing else, the catastrophic images in my head are driving me over the edge.  I think I've reached my breaking point.

What A Joke

My job is a total joke.  I literally work with the skeeziest, most useless, most annoying, whiniest and most drug-addicted group of fucking idiots ever.  Last night, none of the servers could handle taking a single fucking table.  If you can't take 4 tables of 2-4 people each at one time, you are literally a waste of hot air.  Every single time I sat someone, they complained that I was "over-seating" and begged for help.  STFU...  >.>  It was Wednesday fucking night!  It should NEVER be that hard on a Wednesday!!  So after two hours of listening to nothing but whining and complaining, I told the other hostess I was working with that one of our servers was being a bitch and the other was being snarky whenever I sat her.  Snarky-Face overheard me and was all like, "Waaaah, I'm not snarky, blah blah blah."  =]  Later, she told the other hostess that I should "be careful who I mess with."  Bitch, I am not about to tangle with your stupid ass at work.  Go the fuck on, and while you're out there, learn how to do your menial ass job.

I am sick and tired of doing everything for that restaurant and getting nothing in return.  If they had bothered to give me a chance I could show them how a server should wait on tables.  Hell, I could do their retarded ass serve pro job and sprinkle minced parsley on all the food, too, but instead of letting me do it when they were looking for someone to take that on full-time, they are letting some scruffy ass cook do the job.  You know, another thing is, if they could hire some cooks who could actually cook a steak properly, they wouldn't have to have everyone leaving the kitchen for serve pro and dish shifts.  How hard is it to cook a steak to the appropriate temperature?  I haven't eaten a steak in nearly 15 years and I bet I could cook more steaks correctly than anyone working in that kitchen.

But all that's okay.  I've been looking for a new job and as soon as I get hired I'm leaving that stupid fucking restaurant for good.  And you know what?  When I leave, that place will literally crumble.  They will fall to pieces without me, and no, I am not being full of it.  I do just about everything for that restaurant.  The place has been open for less than 4 years, and after a year with 30+% growth, along with piss-poor management and a complete joke for staff, it is sinking fast.  No joke.  The GM is in the restaurant like twice a week, and they have been sending in rescue managers left and right.  But nobody can get to the simple and obvious bottom of the issue.  One, the managing partner is a total failure at managing anything.  He doesn't know when to fire people, and he literally has no clue how to manage a restaurant.  Two, the restaurant constantly hires drug addicts, never fires ANYONE, and fails to discipline tardiness or bad behavior.  I'm sorry, but if you're late to every shift, you get fired, and if you dick around in the kitchen dumping water on or spraying whipped cream at each other, you get fired.

And three, Why The Fuck Are People Getting Away With Luring People In To Fight AT THE RESTAURANT That THEY Instigate??!!??  One of the girls I work with literally scraps with someone on the premises every other week.  Just the other night, I watched her thumbs fly across her iPhone all night long until she was cut.  Not five minutes after she clocked out, she comes running into the kitchen hyperventilating, tears streaming down her face, and blood and bruises all over her throat and hands, shoes destroyed and pants filthy.  When I first saw her [I was the first to find her like that], I didn't know whether to laugh or ask her what had happened.  It looked like she had been mugged.  >.>  I should have started off with a good laugh because the dumb bitch brought all of that on herself.  What the fuck...

I was literally ->this<- close to quitting LAST NIGHT.  I wanted to just say, You know what, I am sick of doing everything and then some for next to no pay.  I am sick of you hiring new waitresses left and right when I am already here asking to do the job.  I am sick of every server constantly complaining to me that they can't handle their own tables.  I am sick of watching everyone get away with tardiness and deviant behavior.  [People literally have SEX in the parking lot.]  I am sick of every time I walk into dish, things are piled to the ceiling and the dish-bitch is whining and complaining to the manager instead of doing his damned job.  I am sick of every customer complaining about how much their food and service sucks.  It is embarrassing to work there!!

And today is my day off.  Should be a good thing, but instead, I just have to spend all morning working on bullshit paperwork for court.  The group who originally secured my temporary protective order wants to go for a permanent order.  That would be all fine and good, but I just KNOW it is a complete waste of time.  All it is going to be is a waste of $200 in gas, 20 hours in a car, and a complete embarrassment in the courtroom.  I just want to give up, but nobody will let me.  Nobody will leave me the fuck alone!  And securing a lawyer for my court date up here is a complete fucking nightmare.  I want to blow up the establishment that supposedly offers free legal services to impoverished families.  I am so fed up with the program that I can't even summon the words to write about it right now.  I am so fed up with the legal system in general.  Probably another blog for another day, but seriously...  It is so FRUSTRATING that the victims in this system are the ones put on trial, called liars and whores, and left to fend for themselves and fight for what little help may be out there for them.  There is, no bullshit, a fire smoldering in my chest.  My blood is boiling on a regular basis.  If I don't kirk the fuck out on someone soon and start a motherfucking riot, I'll honestly be amazed at my self-control.

"We Can't Be Friends"

Why won't people give up on me?  Why won't people leave me alone when I ask them to go away?  I was in a court room with my ex recently.  I didn't look at him; I stared straight at the judge the entire time trying to breathe, but I could see him in my peripheral vision no matter how much I tried to tunnel my vision.  It sucks trying to focus on court matters when someone you are deathly afraid of is sitting a few feet away from you just staring you down.  My boyfriend said he was giving me the Zoolander face the entire time, just literally begging me to take him back with his eyes.

What a fucking joke.

I hope it hurt the bastard's feelings that I wouldn't even give him the pleasure of making eye contact.  I fucking hate him and I hope he is as unhappy now as he made me feel for years.

J-E and I were talking about why he locked me up and fucked with me for so long, and I guess he was like a little boy with an ant farm and a magnifying glass.  Why are some people so fixated on beautiful things that they have to tear them to bits and destroy everything good in them?  I was the best thing he will ever have his hands on, but instead of worshiping me, he didn't want anyone else to see me, and he had this disgusting, sadistic urge to destroy everything good in me.  It's so creepy.  So bone-chillingly creeeeepy to think back to what he was doing to me and my daughter.  It was like, I don't even know how to describe it, but it was almost as if he was so afraid that he would lose us, because he knew we were way too good for him, that he had to lock us away in fear that we might somehow escape.  It's almost not even human, almost like some sort of sick, primal behavior.

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Forever, I will be unable to trust anyone again.

I wish I could build a floating island and just never set foot on the face of Earth again.  It would be nice to just float above where nobody could reach me, somewhere peaceful and safe.  I always used to wish I could just grow a set of wings and fly far away from my old life.  I didn't exactly grow wings, but I certainly flew away to a new life.  Now I've realized that no matter how far you run away, your troubles are going to follow you everywhere.  Being a grown up fucking sucks...

Pretty Lame

I guess everything is pretty lame lately.  I'm so jaded with my job and court dates and the all-encompassing bullshit I deal with on a daily basis.  A lot of the aspects of my PTSD feel better, but I know it's just a fake-out.  And when I say "feel better," I mean that I don't have a massive panic attack every time I see "his" vehicle tailing me on the road, that I don't think I'm having as many nightmares as before [maybe once a week instead of every night], that I can go to work without seeing "his" shadow out of the corner of my eye multiple times every night.....  I still have a lot of pain in my throat where his thumb would dig in while he choked me out, and the pain often radiates all the way up my jaw and into my ear.  It sucks.  I wish I could just erase my past now that I've started over on a clean slate in a new place.  I'm so sick of people telling me that my past is what makes me who I am today.  I don't like the person my past created, and I think that whole past-makes-you-who-you-are lump is a load of shit.  I don't care if I wouldn't be who I am today if I hadn't been through what he put me through.  I don't want that crap in my history!  I wish I had just met J-E when I was young and innocent, naive...and when I still had a happy heart.

No matter how far away I run, no matter how long I hide, I will never escape memory.  It's been 14 months.  I've replaced my past with a new present.  Everything in my life is new besides my blood relatives and a few pieces of clothing.  I hate pretty much everyone because nobody will shut the fuck up with their stupid opinions; nobody will quit with their annoying ass suggestions; nobody will fucking stop bothering me.  "They all want to make sure I'm okay."  I just want them to shut the hell up...  I'm not going to be okay.  I was brutally abused in every way imaginable for nearly a decade.  I think it's safe to say, my head is fucked for life.  Most days, I just want to be alone...

But then there is always J-E.  He's always there for me with open arms and a warm heart.  I think he's been through enough of his own bullshit in his own life to understand me.  Miraculously, he has enough patience to put up with me through all my shit.  I never believed I could find anybody like him, but I have.  =)

And yep, that's my pretty lame post after ages of not caring to have anything to say on here.  I've been too busy with work and matters of the heart to bother with keyboards and other junk.

Year In Review

I think it's coming down to being time for me to write another year in review.  Especially with a year like I just lived, I don't think I could skip this review!

I remember the numb, empty feelings that overpowered me during those first few months after I left him.  I was so afraid, and I still found myself living in that auto-pilot mode your mind sets itself to in order to survive.  The more shut-off you are to reality, the easier it is to keep breathing when things are unbearable.  I was terrified.  I thought they would take away my child because I had no means to support and care for her myself.  Thank goodness for the Safe group I found my way to, because they found me all the resources and support I needed.  I credit them in great part to enabling me to lift myself and my daughter from the ashes of our past life of abuse.  Without them, so many of my questions would have gone unanswered, so many of our needs would have gone un-met.  They supported us, fed us, gave us a safe home to stay in.  I am eternally grateful for their generosity and kindness.

I spent the first three months of the year in a battered women's shelter with my daughter.  It was just the sobering experience I needed to keep myself grounded when all I wanted to do was shout and dance and leap for joy because I was finally FREE.  After all those years of suffocating abuse, I finally had the opportunity to make my own decisions, choose my own fate, and do what I wanted to do.  My abusive ex husband took so much from me.  This year has been all about winning my Self back.

I visited our new home-state last year in December.  And while I was here, desperately seeking an escape, peace and freedom, I couldn't help but fall in love.  Oh, how refreshing and heartwarming it is to find new love!  I loved the snow, the chill in the air, the magic of seeing horses everywhere I looked, the beautiful mountains that created the gorgeous backdrop I enjoyed every day at sunset.  And most of all, I found myself loving him.  J-E.  My knight in shining armor and not a link of chain-mail less!

January through the end of March, my daughter and I spent in the battered women's shelter.  I filed for a protective order against my husband.  He attempted to retaliate by filing for divorce, but that just did me a favor [he can have fun paying those court fees himself].  Protective order in hand, my daughter and I fled the state on April Fool's Day.  Nice prank, huh?  =]  And so began my journey to get my shit together!  I found a job, bought my own car, and began creating a home for us.  Spring definitely represented a new beginning for me this year.  I spent the Summer coasting along, trying to avoid my past and just live each day as it came.

As Fall crept up on us, there was a court hearing in which the judge allowed me to have all permanent custody decisions removed from the state my ex husband filed divorce in.  This gave me the freedom to file for custody in our new state, which eliminated a lot of traveling on my part, and protected me from any allegations of being in contempt of court for leaving a state during divorce proceedings before custody was determined.  I also enrolled my daughter in school, something she has immensely enjoyed.  She is learning so much!  She is reading a surprisingly large amount of words, and I couldn't be more proud.  Her favorite hobby is anything art-related.  She could sit down and color or paint for an entire day without budging from her seat.

I frequently struggle with my past.  You certainly don't forget about 10 years of abuse and move on overnight simply because you move a thousand miles or so away.  It's the type of thing where, if I ignore it, it only gets worse, and if I pay it too much attention, it swallows me whole.  There have been days where I was so listless and depressed that I would just sit still, silently, as the hours passed, not saying a word and often bursting into tears when spoken to.  It's tough.  I went through a lot, and I have been unable to process a lot of it.  My fears and complexes frequently interfere with my daily life, my relationships and my mood.  I can't trust anyone anymore.  I have often related myself to a head-shy stray.  I don't think anything else could describe me more accurately.  I'm jumpy, distrustful, and I've found that sometimes I bite back before thinking.  I am on constant alert trying to protect myself, even when there are many times that there is no reason for me to be so protective of myself.

This December, I made a very difficult decision that I wasn't planning on making at all.  I decided to stand up for myself to someone who had been calling herself my best friend for years.  I wish she and I could remain friends, because we have so much history together!  Unfortunately, everything is always all about her.  In my biggest year of need, her heart and interest were nowhere to be found.  I suppose these things happen to adults all the time.  We grow up, forget our childish joy in friendship, and find ourselves too busy with our own families to think about anyone else.  I realize that my friend has been going through a difficult time as well since her child was born with an obscure disorder, but that does not excuse her from the fact that friends are supposed to listen to each other and not just talk about themselves.  All I asked for was a little empathy, maybe some sympathy here or there, and most importantly, an open ear.  All I was getting was ignored.  Literally every time the subject would fall on myself or my troubles, my friend would randomly return the subject to herself.

The other night, I expressed my fears and anxieties about having court the next day.  I sent my friend TWO messages in a row about this, and she replied something entirely unrelated and all about herself!  It is so typical of her, and I had just had it with her for doing that all the time!  The next day, she didn't have anything to say to me although any other day she will start texting me at dawn.  Later in the day, a new friend of mine texted to check in on me, so I sent a subtle reminder to my old friend, mentioning how sweet I thought it was that someone who barely knew me had remembered me on a day she knew would be stressful.  Old friend texts back about her son.  WTF...  At that point, I was absolutely at wits end with her bullshit.  So, I told her how I feel about the way she treats me.

Here are the messages ::

Me to Her : I guess you forgot, but don't sweat it I guess. It's not like I don't know you have all your own worries to deal with too. This is just where life leads us sometimes... Too worried about your own problems to take one minute to read what I have to say when I need your support. I do what I can to support you when you tell me you're dealing with things, and I do my best to keep up with what you're going through. But when I try to talk about things that are worrying me or that I'm upset about, you so frequently entirely ignore me and text me back with something about yourself. Last night I sent you two texts in a row about how worried I was to be doing what I had to do today, and what do you say back? You change the subject, something you have done so often recently. I see where your interests lie - yourself. I realize that I have a whole slew of shit in my life that I keep bringing up, and
maybe you're sick of hearing about it, fine, but you call us best friends. When I need you, you turn the subject to yourself. Your narcissism has effectively destroyed our friendship. I don't even look forward to talking to you anymore because I know that no matter what I am going through or what I try to share with you, you are going to turn the subject back on yourself. Call me an asshole if that makes you feel better, tell me that I'm just as self-centered as I am calling you, do what you have to, but just know that my problems are just as big as yours. I am struggling, and this has been the worst year of my entire life. When you fret over [your daughter]'s condition, I do everything I can to let you know it deeply saddens me and that I hope the best for her. When I share my worries, you just ignore me. I need someone I can talk to, someone who will help me work through my troubles and make me
feel a little bit of love in this cruel world. I don't need one more person in my life belittling me, ignoring me and minimizing my emotions, acting like I do not matter...

Her to Me : What the hell? The last msg i have is me asking how court went/was going and that i hoped the best in finding a solid friendship in your new hometown. And sometimes, i just dont know wtf to say. Im mad i didnt go get you all those years ago and im mad all those times I told you to leave him and you ignored me and made excuses amd then now you praise the hell out of [J-E] for suggesting it, like no one else had ever said anything. I hate how much you hurt and i hate all you are having to go thru. It makes me sick to my stomach. But the worst is i cant do shit to help or make it better. So i say nothing so i can calm down and then i change the subject. Im really sorry. 

<<Bullshit.  The last message she sent asked how my day had gone, not a word about me going to court, and certainly no words of encouragement knowing where I would be that day.>>

Me to Her : 1-No, after the 2 texts I sent yesterday around 5pm, you replied that you were considering getting a job again. What part of that is not changing the subject to yourself? So go re-read your text messages and reconsider what you are saying because I have the same texts on my phone. And all your text said today was "How are things going today???" Not a word about court or my concerns about going there today. And then, you immediately changed the subject to [your son] in the same message. I never TOLD you about being abused because I was ASHAMED and TERRIFIED that he would murder me for telling. And when I finally did tell you, you acted like it was hard to believe simply because I had never mustered up the courage to tell you before. For all I know you were offended that I told [J-E] first and not you. And when I decided to move and try to be happy, you essentially told me I was in the wrong for that because "it would be unfair to other people who didn't know why my marriage ended," and that I somehow owed it to everyone else to give them time to accept the failure of MY marriage. I'm pretty sure it was at that point that our friendship was over. The last year has just been dragging it out unnecessarily because I was clinging to the idea that you might actually care about me. It is clearer to me with each passing day that nobody is capable of actually loving me, so I'll just stick it out on my own from now on. 

2-I hate to say all this, really I do. It fucking sucks. After my divorce, and aside from my parents, you are the only person from my past who I maintained contact with. I am just too hurt from feeling unwanted and feeling like it is all too clear that you don't actually give a fuck about me. I can't even talk to you anymore without getting pissed off about you changing the subject on me. I cannot count the number of times I have gotten upset by your texts and thrown my phone across the room, unable to look at it again for hours on end. I have too much hurt in my life to spend every day dealing with feeling like even my best friend doesn't care about me. At least in solitude I can go numb to all the bullshit in my pathetic fucking life.

And since those texts were exchanged, she hasn't had another word to say to me.  That's what I expected.  It hurts.  It fucking hurts like hell knowing that I didn't mean anything to the girl I poured my heart out to for something like 14 years.  I didn't expect sympathy from her.  I knew she was incapable of understanding what I had gone through and why I am hurting so much.  I just wanted a little empathy, something you should expect from any true friend, and an open ear rather than a cold shoulder to anything I wanted or needed to talk about.  But, that is the way of the world.  Some days, I feel like nobody could understand me, but J-E reminds me from time to time in his own little ways that he does.  J-E and I are definitely kindred spirits, but in an opposites attract sort of way.  He tells me all the time that I don't have to worry about being so hard and tough and that I don't have to be so worried about protecting myself all the time because he will protect me.  I have the hardest time believing anything that anyone says to me.  I lost all faith in mankind when my husband spent a decade abusing me.  If you can't trust the one person who is supposed to protect you above all others, you can't trust anyone.  I'm afraid that is a belief I'll never shake.  It's unfortunate, but naivety won't get you anywhere.

 As this year draws to a close, I find myself in higher spirits.  I have more happy days than before, and I have a little faith that I might make it someday.  When my journey began, a little over a year ago, I had no idea what things were going to look like in 3, 6, 12 months.  Now I am beginning to see that I have some small sense of control over my own life now.  And I like where it is going.  J-E and I have had many ups and downs in our first year "together."  I don't think it could feasibly be an easy task getting along with a terrified and clueless victim.  Hah!  But he has held my hand and been there for every court date, every appointment, every time I've needed him, he's been there for me.  He's a good man for sticking through this year with me, and I know that we have many happy years ahead of us as my life begins to truly settle down to some sense of normalcy.   

J-E gave me this pendant a few days ago.  The image depicts a knight in shining armor and his damsel.  When he handed it to me, I was positively thrilled!  I love it!!  I think it's perfect, because I've been calling him my knight in shining armor all this time.  <3

Here is the original image, from "Valentine and Orson" by Florence Mary Anderson.

Meet my scarf collection, something I've been building since our big move this Spring.  I absolutely love scarves!  I realized today, that after a little shopping spree for clothes yesterday, I'm finally starting to feel like I have "things" again.  I moved here with a bag of clothes and my laptop, so I practically started with nothing.  My life for the past year has been a lot like someone's life must be when there is a fire that burns down their entire home and everything inside along with it.  I often wish it really had been a fire that displaced me and my daughter from our past life.  That would have been a lot easier.  Moving on and moving forward has been no easy task for either of us, and although I respect the importance of facing what we went through and accepting it all, I still wish I could just erase it all.

I attend a domestic violence survivors support group every Thursday, and as of last week, I've started bringing my daughter with me those nights so she can take part in the children's group that is held at the same time.  I had originally been bringing her to see a psychologist earlier in the afternoon on Thursdays, but that ended up a complete disaster.  Through my daughter's school, we were referred to a sort of community outreach program who suggested a psychologist for her to see.  They told me and J-E that this psychologist was their go-to expert for victims of childhood trauma.  Unfortunately, our trust in their judgment was very poorly placed.  At her third session, following all those visits being told by the psychologist that we were not allowed to discuss the violence my daughter witnessed, J-E and I posed a few questions about the woman's approach to my daughter's treatment.  Although I had expressly insisted from the start of these meetings that J-E was to be privy to everything that went on during the appointments and that I expected him to be given every bit the same respect and rights as a biological parent would be given, the psychologist had the nerve, in front of my daughter mind you, to insist that he leave her office in the middle of the third appointment.  She went on to point directly at him, while my daughter was RIGHT THERE, and insist that he had no say-so whatsoever because he "is not a biological party to the child."  He and I both were deeply offended that she would say such a thing, especially in front of my daughter.  J-E left, and I removed my daughter from the room, telling the horrible woman that she shouldn't bother to schedule any future appointments because we would never be seeing her for a therapy visit again.

You'd better believe I am filing a grievance about this matter.  Not only did the lady spend a mere fifteen minutes with my daughter before she was trying to [very inaccurately] label her with ADHD, she refused to hear anything about WHY my daughter needed to be seeing a therapist - how do you HELP someone if you don't know WHAT they need help with?! - and bottom line, she was downright rude and unprofessional.

Today, we were reminded of the psycho-psychologist event when someone from my daughter's school called J-E's phone and insisted, yet again, that the school was refusing to listen to or divulge any information to him.  The guy's trying to help me out, so maybe they could save me a little time by letting him give them answers to questions that he knows just as well as I do.  Instead, the lady insisted upon speaking only to me.  It's like this on a regular basis - they call his phone [because my cell phone is a useless brick from home and has next to no reception] and refuse to speak to him, leaving him to have to come chase me down to answer simple, stupid questions that become just a waste of everyone's time.  Well, I called the woman back and after we handled what needed to be taken care of, I questioned her refusal to work with J-E when I have repeatedly asked everyone to keep him privy to everything.  I went on to ask what the hell I have to do to change the school's refusal to speak with J-E.  She went off on this huge tangent saying that J-E has to adopt my daughter before he can have any say-so, and started going on about her husband adopting her daughter, blah-di-freaking-blah.  And then came the ringer : she added such a nice touch when she said, "You just never know where life is going to take you."  Excuse me?  All I know for sure is what I have today, and today I have a REAL father for my child.

J-E and I phoned the school principal to discuss this matter.  She yelled at the woman over the phone for us to hear [isn't that adorably ghetto?], apologized for what had been said to us, and gave us the information we had needed all along about how to change J-E's rights to parent my daughter when it came to dealing with the school.  It was such a simple answer : have a letter notarized stating what I want him to have access to and bring it to the school to be kept in our daughter's file.  For fuck's sake, people, was that so hard?  NO!  J-E is raising my daughter as his own, and she adores him and sees him as nothing less than her only father.  If I died tomorrow, I would die knowing that J-E would watch over my little girl.  He and I both are sick and tired of society denying him the right to be a parent.  I am thankful every day that he came into our lives and has taken on the role of her father.  She deserves a real dad after being cheated out of one the first go-around.  I would never have gone around telling people that J-E was anything less than her biological father if it weren't for my need to protect her from the possibility that my ex-husband come looking for us and turn up at her school one day.  Because of that fear, I felt I had to tell them about the protective order, and because I want to see to it that all her needs are met, I had to tell the school that I recently removed her from a violent, abusive home-life.  Hopefully things start to change, because we are getting fed up with people disrespecting us just because we appear to be young and because J-E isn't my daughter's biological father.

In happier news, which is hard to come by these days, J-E rescued a dog yesterday.  J-E already has a 2-year-old American Bulldog from the same bloodline.  The breeders recently reached out to him asking for help finding a home for some of their pups.  Unfortunately, there was an accidental breeding, the owners are living in an RV, and coyotes have been circling the kennels at night, endangering the younger dogs.  After living in SoCal, I am all-too-familiar with how much of a threat coyotes pose to domestic animals.  J-E traded the breeders 2 bags of dog chow for what would have been a $1500 dog.  She's the most adorable runt of the litter named Mouse, and is almost completely white aside from a tan "mascara" marking around one eye.  I really, really love bully breeds, especially because I miss my old pitbull so much.  I raised my daughter alongside my pitbull, and she's been so sad ever since my ex-husband threw him out god-knows-where.  When we moved here, she was so thrilled that J-E had his big American Bulldog, and they've gotten along brilliantly but the dog often just ignores her.  J-E made a brilliant point about raising young victims of childhood trauma and sufferers of PTSD with puppies to help them form strong attachments.  At times, because I am dealing with my own slew of emotional issues and PTSD, I can't always be the best person for my daughter to cling to, so having a close bond with our new dog could be a deeply beneficial relationship.  [I suggest you take a look at this website J-E came across on the matter : http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/trauma_ptsd_attachment.asp].  My daughter is thrilled to have a puppy to play with!  J-E is such a sweetie, always finding ways to spin things in an effort to help us both out in our struggle to move on after so many years of abuse.  <3