lindsey.harford
08-25-2008, 02:45 PM
single mother needs help starting over
Blog Archive
* ▼ 2008 (1)
o ▼ August (1)
+ Single with child
About Me
LINDSEY
View my complete profile
Monday, August 11, 2008
Single with child
Hi, my name is Lindsey. First let me tell you a little about myself. I'm 32 years old with a 2 year old named Alexis. She is my reason for writing this as she is the reason I exist. We just moved from NJ to CT. After my mom died I had no family left in NJ so I decided to move to cT. to be closer tot my sister. Now that I'm here and some what settled it's unclear what my next step is and so I've decided to create this blog. I'm not sure what I hope to get out of this. I suppose I hope to feel a little more connected to the world and a little less lonely. Here's my story.
I was born in Johnson City, New York. A small town in upstate NY. At that point my mom and dad were married and had another child who was five, my sister. I believe I was planned, although I think the plan was that my birth would somehow fix the rocky marriage that my parents had. Of course I probably just made it harder as children inevitably do. I may have been a bandaide though, as they held it together for 3 more years before separating. My mom and dad were hippies...well more my mom than my dad. My mother always felt like my dad married her to rebel against his prominent family. It probably didn't hurt that she was extremely attractive. She had this kind of earthy beauty. My mother's father was a janitor. They didn't have a lot of money. Whereas my father came from money. His parents, in my opinion were a bit on the snobby side. My father had long hair and he was an artist my mother at the time was a student at SUNY Binghamton. After the separation, my mother had what she refered to as a "nervous break down". She was completely broke with 2 children to care for. She moved into a furnished studio apartment with a single mattress on the floor that the three of us slept on. She had to hitch hike back and fouth to school with my sister and I. I believe it was during this time that the breakdown occured. My sister and I were sent to stay at my grandmothers house while my mother spent a month in the loony bin. To give you an idea of the amount of apathy my father has, it was then he decided to serve my mother with the divorce papers. They divorced shortly after and we moved to a bigger appartment in a two family house that my mother's best friend owned. About a year later my mother met my step-father. He was her rebound and she admitted 25 years later that she married him not out of love but out of the comfort of not being alone. The next 5 years that followed were a blur for me and the memories that I've uncovered in my aduthood I sometimes wish I could have kept locked somewhere in the back of my subconcious mind. My mother went to school and worked nights so we had a babysitter alot of the time. At some point my step father moved in. Next door to our house was an apartment building that was low income housing and pretty white trash. This is where my first babysitter lived. From my memory of him he was probably about 15 or 16. He was really nice to me I remember he use to come over and play with me even when he wasn't babysitting. He molested me. He wasn't violent how I've always thought of the "preditor" type. He was just the opposite, kind of quiet and shy, very sweet. He kind of made me feel special and loved...even when he was hurting me. At 15 a boy is almost fully developed so you can imagine how painful it would be for a 4,5 or 6 year old to be penetrated by him, but he made it seem normal like thats just what you did. He never threatened me not to tell at least not to my memory. Anyway this went on for some time and I remember showing the other little boys in the neighborhood what I had learned. It was at this point that I got the idea that it wasn't normal what we were doing. When we would play doctor and I would tell the other boys what to do with me they seemed a little too reluctant for it to be a normal activity like hide and go seek or something. I guess it was then that I developed a sense of shame about my self and started to feel somewhat damaged. It was during this time too, that I was old eough to stop taking baths and start taking showers. Im not sure at what age this actually started, like I said my memory is impaired, but at somepoint I started taking showers with my stepfather. I remember the first time I saw his penis it was different than the ones I had seen before, his was all hairy and wrinkly and conciderably larger. It was startling to me at that age that he even had one, but of course I knew what to do with it. This went on and continued, I believe, only until we moved to CT. Im not actually sure how many times it happened or if it was a regular occurance but I can remember feeling relieved that when I went to visit my father that his bathroom had no shower, I guess it had broke and he never bothered to fix it so he only had a bath tub. We moved to Avon, CT. because my stepfather had gotten a job offer at a big pharmaceutical co. We moved into a log cabin in the middle of a thousand achres of woods. To me it was heaven. I was allowed to go off on my own and explore the woods. I would make forts out of sticks and vines and leaves and call them my secret places. No one knew about them. It was my safe place and I spent as much time as I could out there. Years later my mom told me she came across one of my secret places she said she was quite impressed with the amount of detail I put into my secret village. She respected the privatness about it and didn't tell me she had found it until years later. My home life during this time became conciderably worse. My step fathers temper started to flair and my sister began her hatred for him. Until this point, he and I were friends. He would take me camping and do fun, out door things with me, however, my loyalty towards my sister was stronger than our friendship and so I too began to hate him. My step father has the type of personality that he is extremely intelligent but socially inept. He was completely calm and reasonable until the point that exploded and when he did it was frightening. His sudden bursts of anger started to occur more and more frequently. I believed at the time of course that like everything else in the world it was my fault. I remember feeling so much guilt about hating him like I was betraying my mother somehow. It was the summer before 5th grade, my grandmother signed me up for church camp. I wasn't a very religious kid but at that age I didn't have an oppinion about god. I remember one of the camp councelors there was about 16 or 17 years old and I fell in love with him...at least to what my heart was capable of at that age. He took advantage of my feelings and me with my knowledge of what boys expected, I was a good little camper. He told me to keep our relationship quiet because with our age difference obviously people wouldn't understand but he promissed me he would call me and write to me when camp was over...of course he didn't and my heart was broken. I never told anyone about the affair because I felt embarrissed that maybe I wasn't good enough and that's why he didn't call. I now realise how sick he was to have sex with a 10 year old.
We moved to NJ. the following year it was there that my grades in school started to reflect the turmoil I had in my life. I failed my first class and began to find my identidy in the fuck it all attitude. This attitude and rebellion lasted up until my daughter was born. My self esteem was painfully low and I desperately tried to feel good about my self by sleeping with random men and boys. I was as the term goes "easy". All you had to do was make me feel pretty or interesting or smart and I would sleep with you. Half the guys I was with didn't even do that but I did what I had learned what men wanted or expected of me. I also started to self medicate. The first time I got drunk was in 5th grade. I smoked my first joint in 7th and by 15 I went to my first rehab. My teens and twenties were a blur. I became a full fledged junky. Stealing and robbing to support my habit. I had several suicide attempts, hospitalisations, rehabs, detoxes, psychiatrists and more medications than I can name. My life was completely reckless and any one that tried to care about me paid the price for my misery. It wasn't until my daughter was born that things changed. She is my savior and I am eternally greatful to her for saving my life. I was homeless when I go pregnant with her. My boyfriend and I had exhausted all of our resources. We had borrowed money from everyone and anyone that would give it to us. We had lied and stolen from the people who loved us. So when we decided to have a baby you can imagine people's reluctancy in their moral support. However the one person who always believed in me was my mother. She was the one person that actually believed that I was capable of change, of being a good mother. She was going through a divorse at the time though and had alot on her plate, to say the least. Anyway she gave my boyfriend and I a place to stay well we got clean and found jobs. My pregnancy was extremely hard. I was sick throughout the pregnancy. I couldn't keep anything down and was hospitalised on several occasions for dehydration. I was also extremely anemic and weak. It was at this time that I learned I had contracted Hepatis C.(my boyfriend had it and we were sharing needles) so it wasn't a huge suprise. During a routine prenatal check up they found some abnormalities in an ultrasound. I was about 26 weeks pregnant and the doctor told me that the baby would probably be severely retarded and may not live for more than a few days. He advised me that I had a few days to abort the fetus as it would become a legal issue after 27 weeks gestation. I made the appointment for the abortion and started shooting heroin again. The morning of the appointment I decided I couln't go through with it. I started to detox my self with methadone again and at 27 weeks my water broke and I was hopitalised. For the next 2 weeks I was on bed rest while I tried to keep my daughter inside of me for as long as possible. She was born on November 3, 2006. 2 pounds 2 ounces. I got to see her for about 20 seconds before they rushed her up to the nicu. I couln't see her for 4 hours. After she was intubated and hooked up to machines, I finally saw her and instantly fell in love. She spent the next 3 months in the hospital. She almost died when she went into liver failure from an infection due to her prematuratey. That was the hardest and most frightening day of my life. I think back to it now and it's like recalling a dream. like it didn't really happen. The events are some what clear but the feelings I had, well I guess words can't describe what it feels like to look at your child and not know if that exchange of touch or eye contact will be the last. I remember how she looked as sick as she was, she was the most beautiful that I, up to that point, had ever seen her. She was calm and the look in her eyes, all though she was an infant, was one of reassurance and all knowingness. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it. but she made it.
During that time her father, who had been struggling to stay clean, was coming to the hospital less and less. He started getting high all the time. I tried every approach to try and get him to get clean, the guilt approach, if you loved me and your daughter you would get sober. I tried the unconditional love approach, I understand what youre going through. The ultimatum, you name it i tried it. Finally I left and he went crazy. I got aphone call from the landlord one night, a few days after i went to stay with my mother, saying that some neighbors saw him on the roof and they were afraid he would jump. He asked me to go to the apartment and handle the situation. My daughter was home at this point and needed around the clock care, i remember feeling like I couldn't handle another thing. I called 911 and reported him as a suicide case however I think he was so high he didn't know what he was doing. He went to the psychiatric ward of the hospital for a couple of weeks. It was long enough for him to get of the heroin, all though he went right back to it when he got out. This kind of thing went on for a while my mom bought me a car to take Lexi to her doctor appointments and he crashed it high on dope. He didn't show up to take us to the doctors. He lost money etc. It took some time but I finally gave up on trying turn him into my daughter's father. Fast foward to January of this year. I was still living with my mother at that time trying to make ends meet with the money I got from social securety disability for depression and anxiety. Jan third I woke up and got dressed. Went to an appointment in the morning, came home and was watching tv with Lexi in my room for most of the afternoon after her nap. My mother was an alcoholic and she abused prescription pills. it wasn't unusual for her to sleep all day. She was also extremely depressed. That day didn't seem much different except our dog hadn't maid a peep all day. Finally around 5 oclock i went in with my daughter to wake her and she was stiff. She had died in her sleep the night before and I didn't even think to check on her. the rest of that day and the weeks that followed are a blur.
I would like to say that my mother and I haven't done her justice throughout this story was an amazing woman. She had an incredibly painful existance but her capacity for love, understanding and forgiveness was unparralelled. I hope to write more about her in the future. She's always been my best friend and my biggest strength. I miss her everyday. She's my first thought when I awake and my last thought before I sleep. I never got to tell her how much she meant to me.
So I moved to CT. to be close to my sister so we could help each other through this. A couple of weeks into living with my sister an old boyfriend resurfaced. We had dated prior to my involvement with my daughter's father. He endored my biggest downfall when I started using heroin. I put him through hell and he's still here. I use to question his love for me, I don't any more. He's an amasing man.
Posted by LINDSEY at 9:16 AM 0 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
Blog Archive
* ▼ 2008 (1)
o ▼ August (1)
+ Single with child
About Me
LINDSEY
View my complete profile
Monday, August 11, 2008
Single with child
Hi, my name is Lindsey. First let me tell you a little about myself. I'm 32 years old with a 2 year old named Alexis. She is my reason for writing this as she is the reason I exist. We just moved from NJ to CT. After my mom died I had no family left in NJ so I decided to move to cT. to be closer tot my sister. Now that I'm here and some what settled it's unclear what my next step is and so I've decided to create this blog. I'm not sure what I hope to get out of this. I suppose I hope to feel a little more connected to the world and a little less lonely. Here's my story.
I was born in Johnson City, New York. A small town in upstate NY. At that point my mom and dad were married and had another child who was five, my sister. I believe I was planned, although I think the plan was that my birth would somehow fix the rocky marriage that my parents had. Of course I probably just made it harder as children inevitably do. I may have been a bandaide though, as they held it together for 3 more years before separating. My mom and dad were hippies...well more my mom than my dad. My mother always felt like my dad married her to rebel against his prominent family. It probably didn't hurt that she was extremely attractive. She had this kind of earthy beauty. My mother's father was a janitor. They didn't have a lot of money. Whereas my father came from money. His parents, in my opinion were a bit on the snobby side. My father had long hair and he was an artist my mother at the time was a student at SUNY Binghamton. After the separation, my mother had what she refered to as a "nervous break down". She was completely broke with 2 children to care for. She moved into a furnished studio apartment with a single mattress on the floor that the three of us slept on. She had to hitch hike back and fouth to school with my sister and I. I believe it was during this time that the breakdown occured. My sister and I were sent to stay at my grandmothers house while my mother spent a month in the loony bin. To give you an idea of the amount of apathy my father has, it was then he decided to serve my mother with the divorce papers. They divorced shortly after and we moved to a bigger appartment in a two family house that my mother's best friend owned. About a year later my mother met my step-father. He was her rebound and she admitted 25 years later that she married him not out of love but out of the comfort of not being alone. The next 5 years that followed were a blur for me and the memories that I've uncovered in my aduthood I sometimes wish I could have kept locked somewhere in the back of my subconcious mind. My mother went to school and worked nights so we had a babysitter alot of the time. At some point my step father moved in. Next door to our house was an apartment building that was low income housing and pretty white trash. This is where my first babysitter lived. From my memory of him he was probably about 15 or 16. He was really nice to me I remember he use to come over and play with me even when he wasn't babysitting. He molested me. He wasn't violent how I've always thought of the "preditor" type. He was just the opposite, kind of quiet and shy, very sweet. He kind of made me feel special and loved...even when he was hurting me. At 15 a boy is almost fully developed so you can imagine how painful it would be for a 4,5 or 6 year old to be penetrated by him, but he made it seem normal like thats just what you did. He never threatened me not to tell at least not to my memory. Anyway this went on for some time and I remember showing the other little boys in the neighborhood what I had learned. It was at this point that I got the idea that it wasn't normal what we were doing. When we would play doctor and I would tell the other boys what to do with me they seemed a little too reluctant for it to be a normal activity like hide and go seek or something. I guess it was then that I developed a sense of shame about my self and started to feel somewhat damaged. It was during this time too, that I was old eough to stop taking baths and start taking showers. Im not sure at what age this actually started, like I said my memory is impaired, but at somepoint I started taking showers with my stepfather. I remember the first time I saw his penis it was different than the ones I had seen before, his was all hairy and wrinkly and conciderably larger. It was startling to me at that age that he even had one, but of course I knew what to do with it. This went on and continued, I believe, only until we moved to CT. Im not actually sure how many times it happened or if it was a regular occurance but I can remember feeling relieved that when I went to visit my father that his bathroom had no shower, I guess it had broke and he never bothered to fix it so he only had a bath tub. We moved to Avon, CT. because my stepfather had gotten a job offer at a big pharmaceutical co. We moved into a log cabin in the middle of a thousand achres of woods. To me it was heaven. I was allowed to go off on my own and explore the woods. I would make forts out of sticks and vines and leaves and call them my secret places. No one knew about them. It was my safe place and I spent as much time as I could out there. Years later my mom told me she came across one of my secret places she said she was quite impressed with the amount of detail I put into my secret village. She respected the privatness about it and didn't tell me she had found it until years later. My home life during this time became conciderably worse. My step fathers temper started to flair and my sister began her hatred for him. Until this point, he and I were friends. He would take me camping and do fun, out door things with me, however, my loyalty towards my sister was stronger than our friendship and so I too began to hate him. My step father has the type of personality that he is extremely intelligent but socially inept. He was completely calm and reasonable until the point that exploded and when he did it was frightening. His sudden bursts of anger started to occur more and more frequently. I believed at the time of course that like everything else in the world it was my fault. I remember feeling so much guilt about hating him like I was betraying my mother somehow. It was the summer before 5th grade, my grandmother signed me up for church camp. I wasn't a very religious kid but at that age I didn't have an oppinion about god. I remember one of the camp councelors there was about 16 or 17 years old and I fell in love with him...at least to what my heart was capable of at that age. He took advantage of my feelings and me with my knowledge of what boys expected, I was a good little camper. He told me to keep our relationship quiet because with our age difference obviously people wouldn't understand but he promissed me he would call me and write to me when camp was over...of course he didn't and my heart was broken. I never told anyone about the affair because I felt embarrissed that maybe I wasn't good enough and that's why he didn't call. I now realise how sick he was to have sex with a 10 year old.
We moved to NJ. the following year it was there that my grades in school started to reflect the turmoil I had in my life. I failed my first class and began to find my identidy in the fuck it all attitude. This attitude and rebellion lasted up until my daughter was born. My self esteem was painfully low and I desperately tried to feel good about my self by sleeping with random men and boys. I was as the term goes "easy". All you had to do was make me feel pretty or interesting or smart and I would sleep with you. Half the guys I was with didn't even do that but I did what I had learned what men wanted or expected of me. I also started to self medicate. The first time I got drunk was in 5th grade. I smoked my first joint in 7th and by 15 I went to my first rehab. My teens and twenties were a blur. I became a full fledged junky. Stealing and robbing to support my habit. I had several suicide attempts, hospitalisations, rehabs, detoxes, psychiatrists and more medications than I can name. My life was completely reckless and any one that tried to care about me paid the price for my misery. It wasn't until my daughter was born that things changed. She is my savior and I am eternally greatful to her for saving my life. I was homeless when I go pregnant with her. My boyfriend and I had exhausted all of our resources. We had borrowed money from everyone and anyone that would give it to us. We had lied and stolen from the people who loved us. So when we decided to have a baby you can imagine people's reluctancy in their moral support. However the one person who always believed in me was my mother. She was the one person that actually believed that I was capable of change, of being a good mother. She was going through a divorse at the time though and had alot on her plate, to say the least. Anyway she gave my boyfriend and I a place to stay well we got clean and found jobs. My pregnancy was extremely hard. I was sick throughout the pregnancy. I couldn't keep anything down and was hospitalised on several occasions for dehydration. I was also extremely anemic and weak. It was at this time that I learned I had contracted Hepatis C.(my boyfriend had it and we were sharing needles) so it wasn't a huge suprise. During a routine prenatal check up they found some abnormalities in an ultrasound. I was about 26 weeks pregnant and the doctor told me that the baby would probably be severely retarded and may not live for more than a few days. He advised me that I had a few days to abort the fetus as it would become a legal issue after 27 weeks gestation. I made the appointment for the abortion and started shooting heroin again. The morning of the appointment I decided I couln't go through with it. I started to detox my self with methadone again and at 27 weeks my water broke and I was hopitalised. For the next 2 weeks I was on bed rest while I tried to keep my daughter inside of me for as long as possible. She was born on November 3, 2006. 2 pounds 2 ounces. I got to see her for about 20 seconds before they rushed her up to the nicu. I couln't see her for 4 hours. After she was intubated and hooked up to machines, I finally saw her and instantly fell in love. She spent the next 3 months in the hospital. She almost died when she went into liver failure from an infection due to her prematuratey. That was the hardest and most frightening day of my life. I think back to it now and it's like recalling a dream. like it didn't really happen. The events are some what clear but the feelings I had, well I guess words can't describe what it feels like to look at your child and not know if that exchange of touch or eye contact will be the last. I remember how she looked as sick as she was, she was the most beautiful that I, up to that point, had ever seen her. She was calm and the look in her eyes, all though she was an infant, was one of reassurance and all knowingness. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it. but she made it.
During that time her father, who had been struggling to stay clean, was coming to the hospital less and less. He started getting high all the time. I tried every approach to try and get him to get clean, the guilt approach, if you loved me and your daughter you would get sober. I tried the unconditional love approach, I understand what youre going through. The ultimatum, you name it i tried it. Finally I left and he went crazy. I got aphone call from the landlord one night, a few days after i went to stay with my mother, saying that some neighbors saw him on the roof and they were afraid he would jump. He asked me to go to the apartment and handle the situation. My daughter was home at this point and needed around the clock care, i remember feeling like I couldn't handle another thing. I called 911 and reported him as a suicide case however I think he was so high he didn't know what he was doing. He went to the psychiatric ward of the hospital for a couple of weeks. It was long enough for him to get of the heroin, all though he went right back to it when he got out. This kind of thing went on for a while my mom bought me a car to take Lexi to her doctor appointments and he crashed it high on dope. He didn't show up to take us to the doctors. He lost money etc. It took some time but I finally gave up on trying turn him into my daughter's father. Fast foward to January of this year. I was still living with my mother at that time trying to make ends meet with the money I got from social securety disability for depression and anxiety. Jan third I woke up and got dressed. Went to an appointment in the morning, came home and was watching tv with Lexi in my room for most of the afternoon after her nap. My mother was an alcoholic and she abused prescription pills. it wasn't unusual for her to sleep all day. She was also extremely depressed. That day didn't seem much different except our dog hadn't maid a peep all day. Finally around 5 oclock i went in with my daughter to wake her and she was stiff. She had died in her sleep the night before and I didn't even think to check on her. the rest of that day and the weeks that followed are a blur.
I would like to say that my mother and I haven't done her justice throughout this story was an amazing woman. She had an incredibly painful existance but her capacity for love, understanding and forgiveness was unparralelled. I hope to write more about her in the future. She's always been my best friend and my biggest strength. I miss her everyday. She's my first thought when I awake and my last thought before I sleep. I never got to tell her how much she meant to me.
So I moved to CT. to be close to my sister so we could help each other through this. A couple of weeks into living with my sister an old boyfriend resurfaced. We had dated prior to my involvement with my daughter's father. He endored my biggest downfall when I started using heroin. I put him through hell and he's still here. I use to question his love for me, I don't any more. He's an amasing man.
Posted by LINDSEY at 9:16 AM 0 comments
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)