The Little Things That Kill You.

Every since we've moved, I have felt so incredibly lonely. I never realized the impact my daughter was facing as well. She broke down at dinner one night, so unexpectedly. I don't know what brought it on even, she just started crying. She told me, she missed certain friends back at our old home. She cried and cried. She has no friends here except her brothers, and her youngest spends most of his time torturing her. Her older brother spends half the time trying to get away from her or finding new ways to make her cry. It sounds terrible, but he's an older brother. I knew I was lonely. At our old home, I had made at least one friend after the first month I was there. Someone who became the best friend I had there at that particular location. After five years, I didn't have a lot of friends, but I had enough friends that I felt alright with, and my kids all had friends that either matched their ages or that they grew up with. At first I shrugged it off as the fact that after five years, a place becomes home. I wasn't home anymore, so I was obviously just home sick. My kids never really experienced that feeling of going someplace they don't know before, except my son. His biggest problem was that his grandparents - two sets of them - weren't around and for the first time in his short life, he was stuck 24/7 with me. Since my last two kids were born at our last home, they didn't know that experience because they never faced it.  Maybe I was too selfishly dwelling in my own loneliness to realize that they suffered too. My oldest goes to school. He has that escape, my youngest is young enough that his sister is enough to play with. After experiencing pre-school and pre-k, my daughter here is at a loss with staying home everyday. Here they don't have those programs available for. I thought it was cute the way she missed school and "homework", and riding the bus. I explained that she would have to wait til next year to go to Kindergarten. She seemed alright with that, minus a few here-and-there reminders of how much she was really missing it. My neighbors have a daughter her age, but since they are leaving soon, they don't want to "get attached". Understandable, but my daughter hurts. So I found this group via Facebook, and someone put out there that there is a church group that happens on Tuesdays. It has Life Classes, plus it has day care. I figured this was a good way for me to meet someone, and it was an even better way for my daughter to get to play with kids her own age, and maybe make a friend or two. Not to mention, it would get me out of the house. I can not begin to express how bad I am getting with not leaving the home. It is at the point that when I get into the car to go to the shoppette, I actually get anxiety, stomach cramps, panic. I am so isolated here, and so alone. So alone. With this, I am becoming quite depressed, and I know it because I'm losing passion for anything I had. I don't work out anymore, school is so hard to focus on that it all feels like it's written in a language I don't understand, and I can't even make myself go to a church.

So when I found this, I told myself that I would make myself go today. I wouldn't back out last minute. That even if it meant stomach ache and minor panic, that I would do it for my daughter. Just so she could meet someone. I set up and messaged the people I'd meet there to help show me around, and have been looking forward all week to this event. I got up this morning, my daughter even got up early and got dressed in an adorable outfit (she too had been looking forward to this, because it meant friends for her). I was in the middle of finishing up getting ready. Everything was a green light until I hear the words, "My ride just backed out on me." Without saying it, I knew he needed the car. Immediately I felt tears in my eyes and calmly put my things down, unplugged my flat iron and told him casually to take the car. My daughter flooded into the room for me to brush my hair and I brushed her hair while it was double confirmed that he would need the car. So patiently, I explained to her that we couldn't go today. She looked at her him and her eyes glittered with tears, made larger by her thick glasses. I felt the familiar sting in my sinuses as I immediately battled my own tears. He told her he was sorry, and told her not to look at him like that. She started to cry, and I held her. She knew then that today wasn't the day she would be meeting new friends, even though she'd been waiting for today as much as I had been. I got her to get out of the room, and told him I understood. It wasn't his fault, and I wasn't mad at him. But even as I told him that, I felt my own tears rising. When he asked if I wasn't mad, then why was I crying? It made the tears fall harder. My body was crying without my permission. It made me feel pitiful.

I knew exactly it wasn't his fault. But everything I have been experiencing lately, stress, depression, it just hit me like a ton of bricks today. The fact that my daughter is experiencing the same thing, kills me. I tried to remind myself by even telling him that the meetings are every Tuesday, I'll go next week. If not next week, the whole month of February he is gone, so I have the car every week. It was no big deal. At the same time though, I know he read the hurt in my eyes, because he was mad. I didn't want to make him feel bad, and I felt like crap letting myself feel like that. I tried to let him go on a good note, offered a smile, but my daughter was still hurt, and although she hugged him, she didn't offer him any comfort in it. She was mad, and sulked for an hour after he left until her brother woke up, through which she decided to go and play. So she's playing, and I'm sitting here doing the exact same thing I do everyday. I feel so broken.