Life in the last year and my new journey with essential oils and everything else!

Here we are, almost a year later, and I have failed to keep this blog updated. A LOT has happened in this time frame. We've moved, my brother moved out, we gained an extra dog for a bit, there have been some hospitalizations, and the hubby has changed jobs twice so far at his new assignment location. Oh, and I have ventured into the world of doTERRA essential oils in an effort to come off some medication.

We moved last May from Texas and arrived in Virginia on the first of June. This is where the hubby’s assignment landed us and I miss Texas like you wouldn't believe! I think when we’re officially done; we’re going to try to get back there. I had to experience my first winter in I don’t even know how long and it was not pleasant in any way, shape, or form. I’m looking forward to summer because at least that will partially give me a part of Texas back. I definitely got odd looks from the people when we arrived here last year because it was 80 some odd degrees and I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt because I was cold. Sorry, but I was used to 110 – 130 degrees during the daytime and 80 was cold to me! Winter in Texas was 60-70 degree weather with the rare drop down to maybe 30 for a day and that was it.

We had a family situation arise that devastated and angered us so much that my brother moved back to our home to help “deal” with the situation at hand. He had to leave his dog behind until he can get a place of his own, plus there were other dogs there that he didn't trust with his dog. Understandable, his dog was severely abused and is just now learning she can trust to not be hurt. It’s a long, slow process to rehabilitate a dog after enduring the amount of abuse they did, but we’re working on it every day. She has her pack here and the more she sees that they are all taken care of and cared for properly, the more she acclimates to her surroundings. I do miss my brother though. He came back to get the rest of his belongings and before he left he commented that if he didn't HAVE to go back, he’d just stay. Gah, I miss him!

Our youngest daughter has had a few hospitalizations to help her where we can’t and even her therapist couldn't. She’s getting better though, slowly, but surely. She just has to keep putting one foot in front of the other. She’s taking a couple honor classes in her school schedule which is keeping her busy, otherwise; she’s doing okay. I've had a couple stays myself, one for a mini stroke and the other for an accidental overdose. Turns out that one medication and another medication are the same shape, size, color, and have similar markings on them, as well as the bottles being the same size with the same lid and I wound up taking them incorrectly, which landed me in the ICU for a week. My best friend wound up driving here to see me because she was just that worried. I was so glad and shocked to see her, but I’m glad I got to spend some time with her, minus the circumstances behind it. I feel like a fool for that last hospital stay. I know better, but it was an honest mistake and I have since thrown out one of the medications just so it doesn't happen again, plus I can’t take any kind of Tylenol for a month, so there is that too which had me toss the medicine. Next time I have to fill it, I’m going to buy some colored duct tape and put a piece of tape on the lid so I know exactly which medicine I’m taking so we don’t have a repeat of this last week.

I can’t tell you exactly what the hubby does or where he is at, but he’s had a couple different jobs since arriving, with at least one or two more changes before he leaves again. I hate that he has to commute, but he’s just happy to be working.

My sister-in-law, Sara, introduced me to essential oils this last year with great success. It’s doTERRA essential oils which are certified pure, therapeutic grade oils and they do work. I use them to help with pain and inflammation mostly, but I've used it for cuts, burns, bruises, sore muscles, allergies, addiction issues and pretty much everything else you could think of. I've shared my success and have managed to enroll several others as well. My website is this: http://www.mydoterra.com/deidrabunch and if you have any questions feel free to ask me! I can send you samples to try and we can go from there. If you do enroll then you get 25% off your orders based on the retail cost and you can sign up for the loyalty rewards program which lets you choose the day of the month you would be billed and your order would be shipped and with that you accrue points and you can use those points to get free product (minus the $3 fee the company charges for using your points, plus shipping), but essentially your product is free. Go on, give it a chance…who knows…it may end up helping you where other things have not! 

Putting one foot in front of the other and keep moving foward

After my experience yesterday and taking some time to just sleep on things, it has helped to clear my head a little bit. Lord knows I can use some free space up there. However; it wasn’t until a friend of mine shared this link with me (http://www.oafnation.com/musings-of-a-grey-man/2014/4/21/hammers-and-nails) and I read it. Actually, I read it a couple of times because the second time around I read every word carefully. It was a reminder that I needed.

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Simple. Right? Well, no…not exactly. I know not the author, but I know the lessons he speaks of, and some of them I know very personally. It made me stop for a moment and take stock in a few things. The things I have survived, the things I have lost, and the many blessings I have now. Let’s list a few (because I like making lists).

Things I have survived:

Birth – there’s a story that’s almost unbelievable, however; it did happen. My mother had extremely high blood pressure, so labor was induced – which is normal, but let’s remember this was 1976 (a lifetime ago for some). I don’t know what happened exactly but I have been told that I was “drowning in the womb”…think about that…you’re not even out of your mother yet and you’re drowning. One emergency caesarean section later and viola, I was alive. They told my mother I had red hair and she said, “God anything but red.” Maybe not the best way to come into and be welcomed into the world, but this is my life and that’s how it happened. I firmly believe that this entrance into this great big, wide world is the largest contributor to the fact that I would choose to die in any fashion as long as it doesn’t involve me not being able to breathe, whether its suffocation, drowning, etc., makes no difference. I want to breathe freely until my last breath.

Sexual abuse – It’s my first memory and a hell of a lot of memories I don’t want, but alas, they are there and for now, they are compartmentalized into a bazillion different places within my head, safely locked away for the most part because I am emotionally not ready to “deal” with it. I could almost easily say it was for a complete decade of my very young life, but let’s give or take a year or so, just to be closer to accurate. Three different abusers, that I can recall, and I’m hoping that there aren’t more that my brain dredges up one day and makes me more ill.

Suicide – I attempted suicide seven different times…7…and only mostly succeeded one of those times. There are STILL moments today when my head gets the most of me and screams, “Sheesh…what a LOSER! You couldn’t even kill yourself correctly!” I’ll be even more blunt and say that even as an adult, I have had to make a call to a friend and have them talk me off the ledge, because I was so very, very close to just ending it all. Hell, as an adult, I have a bevy of things available to me now that would do the job efficiently. However; after a good, long cry and some really wonderful best friends, I managed to be able to see past what was dragging me down and, at least for that moment, I could deal just enough to push through and keep going.

Drugs – Snort a little cocaine here and there as a teenager, just make you forget whatever the heck it was you wanted forgotten. Drop some acid with some friends and NOT have a good trip on the first try will make you never do it again. I know this. I watched my nose jump off my face, run into traffic, and down the road. All the while, I’m screaming with my hands covering my face, my friends keeping me from running into traffic after it…it was not a good thing. Never did it again. A little weed here and there just to take the edge off and make you mellow. I blame that one for my divorce later on, but we’ll get to that. As an adult, prescription pain pill abuse. Oh my, how I love a really good narcotic. It was the greatest high of all. No pain, just mellow out, sleep a little…or a lot, and wake up when it was time for another…but take 2 or maybe 3 to make sure you weren’t in ANY pain.

Alcohol – Oh there is my poison of choice, right next to the narcotic pain killers. I’d take the pills WITH the alcohol, just to make the buzz higher and greater. Forget the warning label on the bottle of pills…what did they know? I did them together and was just fine. I’d drink from the time I got up until the time I went to bed. I just made sure to never wake up before Noon, because if you drank before noon then you were an alcoholic, and I was not alcoholic because I didn’t have a problem with it. I was not a mean drunk. I am that “WOO! LET’S DO SOMETHING FUN” drunk OR when drinking at home alone, I was the mellow “I don’t give one rat’s ass what you do” drunk. I preferred drinking at home, alone, at night, after everyone went to bed. I hid the bottles so nobody knew how much was in the house and I would EASILY clear a bottle of Crown and half a bottle of Rum before I passed out in bed. I always made that last run for alcohol on Saturday before I was completely wasted because on Sunday you can’t get the good stuff. God only knows the number of times I drove drunk, the number of blackouts I had but still did things with people. I’ve been told the things I have done and I didn’t believe them because I have NO memory of it. So I don’t even know what all I’ve done.

Domestic Abuse – Oh, my former husband, he was an expert at that. It starts out with small things like belittling me for something I liked. Then it was a smack on the leg or on the hand. Then a smack to the face. All open handed. Then it was closed fisted hits. I’ve been hit so hard in the head that I have seen stars flash. I’ve been hit with chairs, a hammer, a car, and any other object he could get his hands on. I’ve been choked until I passed out. I’ve been in the courtroom begging for restraining orders and then having them revoked because of whatever. Spit on, thrown through a wall, head smashed into whatever was available. I became an EXPERT on SURVIVING. I could take a beating better than any man…and I might crawl away, but damnit, I lived one more day. I said earlier that I blamed the weed for the subsequent divorce from this monster. Here’s why. The day he showed up on my parent’s doorstep to ask me out, I was in my bedroom lighting up, and I just thought it was the coolest thing to have a football player be interested in me. As I look back, I kind of wish I hadn’t smoked that day, but I wouldn’t have my girls if I didn’t. At least something good came out of it and that’s all I can say.

Death – I buried a fiancé at the ripe age of 26. I relate to those that have lost a significant other. I know their pain on a very personal level. I, at least, was given the opportunity to be with mine when he said his last word before he slipped into a coma, when he took his last breath before they brought in the machine, and I was BLESSED enough to hold his hand as his heart beat for the last time, I FELT his soul leave. You want to talk about being leveled and having your teeth kicked in, there it was for me. I watched, almost as if it was an out of body experience, as they attempted to resuscitate him and I was there when they called the time of death. My mother was at the hospital that night, she was with my daughters as they slept in the waiting room on cots they brought for them. She was in front of the doors to the waiting room as I turned and walked out of the ICU. It was her who caught me as my knees gave and I fell to the floor. I don’t know what all she did, but it was her that held me as I cried like no other time before. I can put it into words now how that emotion felt, but at the time it was just a void. Now, I say this: Imagine the largest, strongest person on the planet has walked up to you and punched you as hard as they can straight in your gut, and as you’re bent over gasping for air, they reach inside and RIP EVERYTHING OUT, leaving nothing but a gaping wound that you don’t know how to close. Then they just turn and walk away leaving you a shell of your former self. You operate on auto pilot and you crave routine and you stay in that routine for however long you need until you can start to learn how to live again.  

I’ve lost a lot of things over the years. Friends mostly, but I’ll own my part of the blame on that front. I’ve lost children and I’ve lost pets. I’ve lost family members dear to my heart. I’ve lost trust, respect, honor, integrity…I’ve lost everything. I’ve had NOTHING. But I lived.

The BLESSINGS in my life:

My daughters, biological and non-biological. Some have strayed, as a couple are now, but we got one back alive and well and we are loving it. She’s living her life as well as she can and that’s all we can ask.

My family – as dysfunctional as we are – I still love them. Even when we don’t speak.

My husband – He is my anchor. I think we saved each other, slowly over time, when we met. His story is his own to tell. I will just say that it was 15 months after I buried James, he had just returned from a deployment in Iraq, and he was going through a divorce. Not that we forget what we went through, but I truly think we saved each other. We learned how to smile and how to laugh again. We learned how to live again.

There really are too many blessings in my life to even begin to count. I just have a tendency to dwell in the negativity surrounding events coming up and allow it to suck me in and keep me there. I’ve allowed other people to live rent free in my head because of grudges kept and it’s time to just let it go. I’ll never forget what was done, but for my own sanity, I have to move forward.

Because it’s what I have always done…sometimes against my will…I always, ALWAYS just keep moving forward. One foot in front of the other and just keep pushing through. There is an end to the crushing pain of whatever, you just have to push through it. I’ve learned to take things one day at a time, or if that was too much, take it one hour at a time, or a minute at a time and EVEN just one second at a time, one breath at a time…whatever you have to do to just keep moving in a forward motion. I don’t quit on things easily, it’s just not in me to do so, but sometimes we have to quit to save ourselves. And that’s okay. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Because sometimes the quitting IS your step forward.

My name is Dee. I’m alcoholic and an addict. And I am 23 months and 7 days SOBER.

That’s my story for today.

Thank you Bryan for sharing that link with me. It helped more than you know. 

I really need some help - Advice GREATLY WELCOMED

I absolutely have to figure out a way to forgive and I sincerely do not know how to go about doing so. Almost a year ago, I saw the person who had wronged not only me, but my child as well, it was in a public place and I approached the person and asked if they cared to just step over and away from people (we were outside) so that I could ask them something. They agreed and I just asked why they had said what they did to so many people, because I had trusted them, it was an extremely delicate situation and I had only shared it with those I trusted the most. I wanted to know…why? I was met with the answer that they had not said anything and I told them that was not true, that they were lying to me, that I had been approached (ironically enough) in the exact same store we were currently at by a person within a group that I was in, again…with other people I trusted, and repeated exactly what was said to me. When they asked me who said that and I told her who they were (there was more than one person and on separate occasions it happened), the person just stood there. Them knowing they were caught in a lie and I knowing they were lying. I’m sure it was an awkward moment for them, but I just wanted to know. Why?

I never got an answer.

Fast forward to tonight. I make an appearance at the group where I started my journey to sobriety and walk in, where I was met with the appearance of this person. I have made it a point that if I see this person in public that I turn so that I don’t see them and just ignore them. I know they’ll never answer my question, the trust I had in them is completely gone, and the friendship ended a long time ago. I have nothing to say to them anymore, so why bother acknowledging them? Anyway, back to what I was saying. This person approached me in the room, in front of everyone, and very loudly said to me, “I owe you an amends. What I did was a cry for help and I realized that. Okay.”

I didn’t say a single word. Not one. In my head though, I was thinking that what just happened was not an amends. It was a show. A farce. It was nothing more than this person using the opportunity at hand to try to make peace with me. Maybe it’s just me, but I have always thought that amends were to be made directly to the person in a more private setting. Not said loudly in front of a group of people. Maybe I’m the one thinking wrong, but anytime that I have had to apologize or make an amends, I have done so in a more discreet way. Even if it was where more people were around, I have approached the person and asked if we could speak privately, before saying anything else.

Am I wrong in my thinking? Was that ACTUALLY an amends? Because it didn’t feel that way to me. Maybe someone, who has worked the program longer than myself, can tell me. Was that proper?

I don’t expect the moon, but an apology would have been great to hear. It would at least put me in a more proper frame of mind to start the process of forgiving. Instead, all it has done is cause me more grief. If I know anything at all, it is that IF the process of making the amends would cause harm to either person, harm in any way, it is not to be done.

At this point, I would rather they have just stayed where they were and never approached me at all.

OCD, finances and reaching a goal.

Lately, I have had nothing but finances on the brain. Every day, I check our account balances to see what bills finally came through and, if there is something new, then I check to see what the remaining balance is on what payment processed. Essentially, it’s another way that my OCD is playing out right now, but this is a good thing. After we were side-swiped on our home loan application in January I have made it my mission to repair what damage was done. It essentially forced me to sit down, do some reading on personal finances, and put a plan in place. Having done that and utilizing a couple new tools online with our bank we’ve already seen a significant drop in balances owed and I was able to raise Pat’s credit score by 35 points in one month.

I’m getting us there. I know it’s not an overnight thing to make happen, but the progress I have made so far is pretty good. Our bank has a debt management program that I used the first month and then it dawned on me that it was making me crazy by taking so long to pay off the FIRST thing. Then I understood that it was prioritizing debt payment based on interest rate from highest to lowest. Yeah, that didn’t work for me. So I decided to use the debt snowball system talked about by Dave Ramsey and Clark Howard. Once I made the switch, which threw our banks program for a complete loop, I have paid off one credit card, another one will be paid off at the next payday and a third one will be paid in full in April. Using the debt snowball system, I figured up today that by the 1^st of September, we’ll be responsible for the car payments, student loans and our largest credit card. Take that bank program! I will have 7 things paid off while your program didn’t have a SINGLE thing paid off until June. KAPOW!

It will be nice to be able to put a good amount into the savings account each month AND make a sizable dent in the last credit card. I’m not worried about the student loans because they really are small amounts left and the interest rate is so low, that I’m okay with taking a couple more years to pay them off. I may be able to have mine forgiven once I get the disability paperwork filled out by my doctor and turned back in. If that happens then that’s two more payments we won’t have to worry about. It’ll just be nice to have some breathing room financially since we’re a one income household. I really wish I had sat down and done this before now, but everything happens in its own time. It just needs a catalyst to get it started and that home loan application was my wake up. Not knocking my husband in any way, but he doesn’t pay the household bills, so he has no clue. With one of the other tools we found, he can now see what bills are coming out and for what amount, in a section of our bank information.

No more keeping anyone in the dark about anything. It’s all plugged in there. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s just really nice to see bills disappear and know that it is gone. As we said recently, we’d like to do just two more moves and be done. The next one is our PCS, with the goal of renting for a max time of 2 more years, and then buy a place and just settle down. We’re getting older and we’re both tired, he more so than I. I have a goal in sight and I am going for it full gusto! Somehow, someway…we will make this happen. 

Everybody loses, we all got bruises

I went to bed last night in tears over a situation that I have no control over. As the saying goes, “I have no dog in the race.” And that fact alone drove me to absolute insanity, anger and ultimately tears. The tears weren’t from the anger, the tears were because I genuinely care for this person and worry about their well-being. Now, I’m not the only one upset over the situation, but it felt as if I was the only one stating my feelings.

I understand the mindset the other person has. When you have two Type A personalities who like control, organization and just overall justice and it seems like the world or the system is against you at every turn, you get angry. The difference is that no matter what the odds, even if they are stacked against me, I will fight to my last breath for what is right, what is good and what should be. Even if I lose, I will know that I gave it my all. And when the time is right I will fight again until an acceptable outcome has been reached. EVEN if the losses far outweigh the wins.

The song I just listened to had these lyrics in it, Everybody loses – We all got bruises. And I think it’s appropriate right now. The good Lord knows I have plenty of bruises, but it’s about fighting for what you want. You have to put effort into something in order to PROVE that you have the best interest in your mind, heart and soul. Nothing in our lives that is worth fighting for comes easily.

And while nothing worth having comes easy, prayer sure does. As I was lying in bed last night drifting off to sleep and the tears were falling onto my pillow, I prayed the most sincere and heartbroken prayer I have in a while. The last thing I remember praying about was to keep them safe and away from harm, to wrap them in a protective cocoon and to guide me in the way I should go in this. To give me the courage to do what needs to be done, even if it means for me to personally step aside. I don’t remember a single thing after that except this weird dream where it was just shapes morphing into other shapes, so on and so forth. Then I woke up.

I think there is a lot more to the dream than I am willing to analyze at this point. Truth be told though, I won’t analyze it. I’ll accept it for what it was and just sit back and see what all goes down the next few months.