just for those who have read here for a while, a quick update on things i have written before. my friend whose wife was threatening to kill him is still alive and well. it seems the necessity for a roof over her neice's head has induced her to sober up which in turn has reduced the death threats and made life more bearable. she still goes ballistic on him at times, but nowhere near to the same extent and no life threatening utterances have spewed forth from her recently. my other friend who had to go in for the biopsy on his lungs received mixed news. his lungs were fine, but it seems he has a tumor on his vocal chords that appears to be cancerous. he doesn't want them to perform the surgery to remove it because it would most likely leave him unable to speak. there are other reasons he doesn't want the treatment that has to do with his indian heritage, he is 1/2 cherokee indian. he tells me not to worry about it, he has his funeral all planned and it is set up and ready to go. he isn't afraid of dying. so every one that was praying for him, please keep on. he needs it. hopefully he won't be in too much pain when his time comes. i don't know.
i finally gave in and admitted that i am not as strong as i would like to think that i am. it grates on me that i had to and it eats me up that i did it. i know have a handicap thing on my car so i can park in the handicap spots at the stores. this doesn't sit well with me. i've always been too stubborn for my own good though. i've needed to walk with a cane for a long time now and i'm going to have to give into that as well. my leg just can't handle the strain that carrying me around entails. i'm just not old enough to have these things. next i'm going to have to have one of those hoverrounds for my day to day life. i already had to use one for our trip to an amusement park over the summer. there was no way i could have handled that, no matter how many canes i had or how many pain pills i had. it just wasn't gonna happen. so i rode around on that thing all day while my husband and son had fun riding all the rides without me. not the funnest day i've ever had in my life. but it was cute. my son rode one roller coaster that scared him so bad he was calling for his momma. but he loved it too. i just wish i could have been up there with him. i love roller coasters. oh well. i was talking to someone about my back and i realized that one of the most important things i have lost is holding my son. i haven't been able to pick him up since he was four years old. i missed out on a lot because of that. all of those years of picking up my son and giving him hugs. of course, now he would be too big for that stuff now, but there were a lot of years between. but i guess for a trade, i got a very caring young boy who is particularly gentle towards me unless his temper is up. i guess that he has turned out well so far is all that really matters anyway. in the end, he is what i will leave behind of myself and my husband. i think he will make a fine legacy.

today has been a bad day. although, i had a little help from a friend. she knows who she is. i told her what was going on today and she was checking on me all day. it was great. today has been a bad day for me for sixteen years. that's because when i was 15, i was raped on this day. it was a person i trusted that did it. someone i saw every day at school and had almost every class with. i didn't tell because i knew my father would say that i deserved it and probably would have beaten me for it. i would have been told i was a whore and that i had probably asked for it. so i kept my mouth shut. another part of me also blamed myself for it. if i had been a little smarter i would have stayed out of the situation. if i had payed closer attention i could have read the signs and diffused the situation before it deteriorated to the point that it did. maybe i did not say no adamantly enough. i don't know. so that is how i dealt with it. for years i either ignored that it had happened or blamed myself. i couldn't stand to be touched for a year after it happened. i just couldn't do it. if i hadn't fallen in love with a boy i doubt i would have allowed anyone to touch me for even longer. so here i am an adult still trying to deal with something done to the child. do you ever truely get over this? do you ever forget it? i never have. there are always in the back of my mind images of things done to me against my will. this was not the only time i was ever raped, but this is the one that effects me the most, maybe because it was the first and i was so young and still fairly innocent when it happened. the others happened in a daze. i remember them, but i was in such a stupor at that stage of my life they didn't touch me as much i guess. so i sit and i wonder how long will i be upset by this day. the grieving period should be over and yet it isn't. maybe getting it out some will help since keeping it all bottled up hasn't helped in the past. i guess we will have to wait and see.

sunday afternoons are always such layed back days. added to the already relaxed atmosphere today is the fact that it is cold outside and we are snug inside. the perfect day to curl up with a nice blanket and a book or a movie or even the race. whatever your pleasure may be. i even played a couple of games of darts today, for the first time in years. i saw just how rust a person can get when they don't use a skill for a very long time. i was doing good to hit the dart board and i got my butt whipped both games. but i had a good time and that is all that matters. my son has disappeared along with his little friend to see if he can spend the night. there is no school tomorrow and i am at home anyway. he might as well be here as anywhere else. at least if he is here, he will be able to keep my son occupied tomorrow instead of him being entertained by mindless video games or something. i don't have much room to talk about mindless entertainment. i read my romance novels that entertain me without my actually having to think about it while i read them. i do mix it up with novels and other genres of books so that my mind does not go stagnant. but i don't really read anything that is truely though provoking. i read things that are interesting and maybe have some mystery to them that i have to figure out. i wonder who will be the great novelist of our generation. we have a guy out there who wrote his memoirs, his life story, and now we find out that the whole thing was a hoax. he lied about it all and it was in truth a work of fiction. parts of it may have even been stolen from other author's works. am i the only one who finds this to be a horrible thing? most people find it funny because it ended up being something that blew up in oprah's face, but to me what this guy did was to perpetrate a fraud on the public, not just oprah winfrey. he stood up and said this is my life and people felt inspired by what they thought was his story, they felt sympathy for this man because of all he had been through. but it was a lie. why not just come out and say that it was a work of fiction from the beginning? if it was a good book, it would still have sold copies, fiction or non fiction. so who will be the great writer of our generation? who will be our hemmingway, our jane austen? will we have one?
well, that went way the other direction from where i was. didn't mean to go off on a tangent like that. sorry. anyway, i hope everyone has had a very relaxing wonderful sunday afternoon.

i don't know what i want to write about today. i've written about my grandfather and my great-grandfather, the two good men i had in my life as a child. i could write about my father, but that would be such a downer. he is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from my granddaddy and my pawpaw. i think tonight i will write about momma.
my momma isn't actually my birth mother. my birth mother died before i turned two years old. she was my father's third wife. six months after she died, he remarried. after the death of our mother, my father left us in the care of my grandparents. he was going to leave us there and not bring us home, even after he had moved his new wife and her daughter into the house, but she made him bring us home. my brother was seven months old at the time, he was only a month old when our mother had died. did i mention she was only 19 years old? so there she was at 19 and she was taking on raising 3 children that were not hers as well as raising her own daughter. she quickly became pregnant, because that is what my father does best. unfortunately, terry jr. didnot make it. momma wasn't able to carry a baby to full term, her daughter was a miracle because she was born three months premature and we are talking about in the early seventies. i think for momma my little brother filled the void left by the baby she lost, because he was always her favorite. he could get away with anything. he was daddy's favorite and momma's favorite, he could do no wrong even though he was a demon. i could not tell you how many times i was ready to murder him for things he did to me or to my stuff. so momma raised us as her own children, there was never any partiality shown to her own daughter over us. until my oldest sister by birth told me when i was 5 or 6 that she wasn't really my mother, i never knew different. i cried so hard when i found out she wasn't really my mother. then i struggled for years with how our birth mother could have left us with my father if she had really loved us. the only good thing we had was momma. the one good thing daddy did was give us momma to take care of us and love us, because he couldn't. they stayed married from the time i was 2 until i was 18, the divorce was final right at my birthday. happy birthday to me. my father forbid us to have any contact with her, but of course we snuck behind his back and did as we wished. it kinda hurt she never adopted us but she said she didn't because she never thought it would be an issue. daddy tried to tell us what a horrible mother she had been to us, but i knew she hadn't been. i could remember when i was sick, momma coming from the opposite end of the house at the sounds of my whimpers in the bathroom to take care of me. i remembered times when she would protect me from daddy because she knew he would probably try to kill me if he knew what i had done, so we would work out our own punishment and not let him know i was even in trouble. i remember how proud she was when i came to her when i was 17 and wanted to be put on birthcontrol pills so that i wouldn't become pregnant. of course, i did lie and say i hadn't had sex yet, but still, i was practicing safe sex and that was what she was proud of, that i was being responsible about it.. i was in a long time committed relationship. of course, when my father went prowling through my things and found them, he chewed my momma out for allowing me to have them, but never said a word to me about them. she protected us. sometimes she took the brunt of his anger on herself. she is a great woman. getting divorced from my dad took twenty years off of her and she looks great now. most people think she looks more like my sister than my mother. and the funny thing is, i look more like her than her own biological daughter does. isn't that a hoot.
to all the mothers out there!

just hoping everyone out there has had a great valentine's day. mine actually wasn't too bad, so i'm good and i hope everyone else is too.
kelli