I was sitting in that desk chair, and it took me a few seconds.
I was so focused on our “do-over.”
The kids and I.
Finally! Almost two years  since the divorce. Living out of ‘ole faithful Big Green, couches and spare rooms of friends, it was about to happen.
A bible study group from the church the friends we were staying with had decided to “bless” us.
God had answered our prayers and spoke to the hearts of these people to help my four kids and I get into our own apartment by giving us the money for the $1200 deposit we needed.
However, as I started to see the look of shared excitement on the leasing agents face turn to pity…I began to look around the office and notice that everyone else had that same look.
Pity.
I felt it in my fucking soul as my gut dropped to my ass and I began feeling sick.
You see, the previous apartment was taken and I now was told I’d need to wait an extra two weeks. To me that was fine and no problem. Until my “friend” lifted up the money order and said: “Why can’t it be earlier? I mean we have twelve hundred dollars right here.”
It was RIGHT at that moment the light bulb of  clueless ignorance  came on, and shined bright as fuck on every single ounce of embarrassment and shame I had had since the moment my ex husband walked out of our apartment and left the kids and I.
I began looking around and my “friends” wife had the same look of pity, the leasing agent at the desk behind ours…the guy across from there…All of them. I felt so soooo fucking small.
It was also at that very moment I realized I had nobody, literally. I felt so empty and so alone, damn.
There was NO blessing or move of God that prompted their giving at all.
It was the running mouth of my CHILDHOOD “friends” who claimed to love my children and see us as family who gossiped, whined, bitched, moaned and slandered us to these “godly” people to the point they wanted to get “us” out of their home.
NONE of these people gave two fucks my children and I just came from living out of our van. Their ONLY concern was the “sanity” of my…”friends.”
As though the kids and I didn’t clean their home, pay them what little money we had, and re-organized their entire garage in the winter so we could hang out there and not be in their way. This was a childhood friend. I had always felt like home there. And in one brief moment, it was gone. Just like everything else.
At first when it dawned on me that the “ALL GLORY TO GOD” speech I had given my children the night before was a COMPLETE fucking JOKE, I wanted to tear up that money order and throw it in their faces. But I took a breath.
Was I humiliated?
Did I feel as though the biggest cruel joke had just been played on me?
Absolutely.
But I took it. Even though it took every ounce of my dignity.
If it was just me, I would have walked out of that office and called the streets my home until the good Lord decided to call me to my true place of residence.
I’m so tired of living like a goddamn gypsy though. For real.
I can’t remember when I had my own bed, my own room..and It’s been quite awhile since I’ve felt safe or even remotely secure.
I just wanted that for my kids again. Even though I also knew that wouldn’t last forever.
Just a brief moment in our upside down universe of “WTF now…”
I’ve worked hard my whole life. But now, getting older, my disease keeps progressing and I get right at that edge of my official “do-over” and something falls apart and I slip all the way to the fucking bottom, again. It just doesn’t work. People, even godly people, are so cruel you can’t even tell the difference between the church and the world anymore. And I’m done with my struggle being an inconvenience to people. As if I’m just smooth sailing through the “WTF’s” and “what now’s…”
I’m not asking or wanting people to enable my struggle but Jesus fucking Christ at least see my effort!? Don’t fade away from the lives of my kids and I while giving off the vibe as though my struggle is contagious.
That’s how the church, as a body has made me feel.
Contagious.
As if being poor is the new leprosy among the church folk now days.
I have no idea why life always happens the way it does for me. But I’m done trying to figure out what it is that I’M doing wrong because honestly, I don’t think I am.
I have walked the thin line between faith, logic and reality my entire life man…I do right by people, I’m quick to apologize and carry the weight of most, but still, nothing. I get nowhere. maybe I’m not suppose to?
Do I still believe in God? Better yet, do I believe the church does?
No…
All FOUR of my children struggle believing today and I doubt very seriously that’s the outcome God wanted for us.
But here we are.
Here I am.
I honestly feel at this point I’ll never walk into a church building ever again. I miss the fellowship, the worship, the intimate time with God that I can’t seem to find anywhere outside of a four walled building. But I won’t ever forget that feeling I had in the pit of my stomach as I apologized to my children for that stupid speech because it was all a lie. To go back to friends after friends and pack up and move on because…Life doesn’t grant me the time it seems to grant everyone else, It’s so bizarre. I’ll never understand. But it is what it is I guess. Ya know? I’ve said it before but if it were not for my children, my grandchildren..I’d be convinced my whole life was an illusion. Including my experiences with God.
At this point all of my children are grown and out on their own…the last is about to ascend off into college, so who knows with me man!? 🙂
There isn’t anything I can plan because nothing EVER goes that way for me. I can work and work, save, get a bit ahead and then FUCKIN’ BOOM! Once again, everything, GONE.  I’M still here though man, I’m STILL alive. Always struggling  haha
But it will always be in my nature to keep looking, searching, HOPING and sometimes still praying for that Year Of Jubilee I was so sure of having in 2019.
But as this decade ends and a new one is peaking around the corner, I can only go into it with the same hopes and prayers that got me through all of the others…and just be.

Selah,
Gesuschic