Looking up my Past

 I am realizing that what is done cannot be undone.  I lived in a world that protected me from my own mistakes at the time, but now I see them clearly.  What did I do to both kids?  What can be undone.  Nothing.  Not the mistake of Colorado, certainly not that.  I had no idea how freaked out my kids would be.  I now see clearly that their lives might have been different if we hadn’t moved.  And it was a bad move for me as well.  I saw the way the kids were treated, not then, but later.  I just blinded myself to it all.  I was so devastated about my thesis, which was badly typed up and not clarified, that I decided not to pursue teaching.  I felt like a failure, when, really, I just needed some help, somehow.  I went into safehouse work, rather than teach.  I wonder if I had had any help, would I have been able to feel better about my work in Grad school.  I knew I was a good teacher, but I really had no clue about how to protect my thesis project.  The typist was terrible.  There were so many mistakes.  But I had no time or inclination to fix it.  I was four months pregnant, and My fate was fixed another way.  I appreciate the fact that I honed into my baby and family.  I needed that and, also, they did.  I now had more money and could take the time to be more of a mother to my youngest, and not have her Exposed in the way the other kids. Had been.  I was an extremely rotten mother before, not because I was lacking, but because my time was divided by needing to work, and by my Husband’s job, in the first case, and In Colorado by again finding myself unable to Do anything about my life.  I should have had the good sense to not help Bill with his PhD.  He never loved it anyway.  

He was forced to do postdocs until he retired, and he hated it.  I Should either have stood up for myself or at least not moved. But I didn’t know all this at the time.  I was still stuck in The Grad school myth, and I had divorced myself from all the friends and people I knew.  By the time I left, seven years later, I had only a couple of friends, and not the Support I was used to.  And my brother, as he had done in Santa Cruz, moved out and then quickly became an alcoholic again.  He was near but far away, and my parents were frantic about him.  I had no friends, and I didn’t realize that I was in agony about the move, the place we lived, and the torture of seeing Gary suffer.  We flew to Maui the first Christmas we were in Colorado, and the second one to Mexico.  Hawaii was fun, but Mexico was a disaster.  We were in Mexico City a week, then Mazatlán a week.  my father’s leg was killing him, he was furious, my mother was drunk a lot, and my brother dissipated from the drinking.  When we went out to fish one day, my husband caught the only fish, because my brother had thrown the anchor overboard, and when we came back, my dad threw Bill’s fish overboard.  That was the kind of trip we had.

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