Today was a weird day at Thrive. The first three hours I had a conversation with each of my clients and told them how I was leaving Thrive and that we had to figure out what that meant for the future of our meetings. I did not give any explanation. I sort of made promises that felt too early to know if I’d be able to keep. I have not signed on or started onboarding with this other group practice but I was presenting this like it would be a potential option, even if one not available at the current time.

And then I had to meet with the supervisor after that to further discuss this email that I sent to him and the sudden change of plans. I didn’t really feel like I had anything more to tell him and when I tried he said I was being very vague. He said he can’t read my mind and if I was needing more time from him in terms of professional guidance and willingness to be available for questions, then we just had to schedule it. I said it’s just you and me here. He said so you’re wanting a bigger team?

All of this was happening while he was on hold with an insurance company to remove a therapist who is transferring sites to go somewhere else. I tried to tell him there were things about the way he did things that were different than how many people say we’re supposed to do them. At one point he told me he had never in his entire time doing this had an experience like this where he was met with what seemed like so much entitlement. I wondered if I had a blind spot he was showing to me.

Well anyway. In all of this I have tried to make it work because there’s still that part of me that feels in some way that I’m supposed to be in this person’s life for some reason. I have no interest in breaking rules with this person or keeping myself tied to there because of some faulty belief system on my part.

We’ve reached the time of year where people are always at camp. The other day I was walking Zorro and down at the beach there were people swimming. They had two unleashed dogs. I thought, well, here goes nothing. So we walked past the people and Zorro and another dog stood nose to nose. The other dog’s owner said the collar had just died. Nobody barked. She took the other dog’s collar and gently moved him/her back and Zorro and I eventually kept walking over to the beach step path.

I knew who the people were. Sometimes I get jealous of the people who get to swim here. Is that not just the most nonsensical thing? I have to readjust to sharing. And I wonder if they ever feel a tad bit guilty, like, oh yeah, we just show up where this person lives and use their space. One of the kids tried to come into our house at 7:11 in the morning. I opened the door and he literally was trying to come in by walking in. I said the boys are getting ready for school. I didn’t want him coming in then.

The boys have broken their gaming habit. I’ve not observed for myself, but I have gotten reports that the oldest one has, if not completely given it up, then has at least significantly cut back. I’m not about to let that back into my house again. They are still in their chess phase and Laura also knows how to play now. I gave the boys a talk and said that is not what my house is for and that I don’t want to be a bad person. We had a good supper with everyone and it was fun to have the whole table.

“Mom, now we just need our entire house to look like this”, he said. After all these years, I think the boys are finally catching on to my vision. Why couldn’t the entire house be completely clutter free and peaceful? It’s too big of a dream to happen all at one time. It happens in bits and pieces, in fits and starts (is that the saying?). I know they all would love the order. But it is what it is and we do what we can in little bites. I tell them they will see it someday when they come back home to visit.

As I was clearing off the table, I found two pictures from the Ark Encounter. Josh’s dad took us and paid for all of us to go. We need to go back again now that everyone would be able to read and remember the…what do they even call those things with the words on them explaining the history and giving the facts? I tucked them into the homeschool scrapbooks that I have lingering hopes to make. It could all be gone tomorrow. I jumped at the text request to order more running shoes.

I decided it was time to forgive my sister for not taking me to the Eras tour concert several years ago. She took her best friend from college instead. She had told someone else about the previous concert we had gone to together, which did not end up being fun experience in terms of togetherness and enjoying our time there. So there was that too. I called her not to tell her I forgave her, but to say I was thinking of her and that concert. One of the boys vacuumed around the trim while I watched.

I’ve been obsessed with this Matthew Perry book for the past several days. The algorithm started showing me old clips of the show Friends, and one day I kid you not, it must’ve have been a Sunday, I watched Friends rerun clips for probably two hours. I didn’t make supper. I didn’t join in with whatever show the rest of the family was watching. I laughed in bed for two hours watching Friends. I’d never really watched the show much before, and definitely wasn’t watching when it was famous.

So of course I had to read Matthew’s memoir about his life and rise to fame and terrible struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. The way I look at addicts has changed. I would’ve never understood them before, and still I wouldn’t say I truly do understand them. They want love and all these things but keep on pushing it away because they cannot part with their substance. I really do think that anytime a hardcore addict or alcoholic gets sober its because a miracle happened.

But the rest of the day, most of it, was spent getting Ethan and Laura’s room ready downstairs. I paid Elianna and Miles $80 each to paint the room which we’d all completely forgotten about from earlier in the week. Dad packed bins into the storage room after cleaning mouse droppings off the shelves. I tried to get the boys to throw more away but one of them said to me, “Mom, we have to have some cool junk.” There’s still a little more to do. But overall we worked together and got it done.

It was a full week of I’m not even sure what. We had a staff meeting in the morning where we talked about things that had come up in the previous meeting. The major thing was counselor pay rates and what could be done to get the counselors raises with the recent inflation and cost of living increases. I guess it’s been four years since anyone has had a raise. The financial position of the organization was described as “very healthy” and it was believed possible to ask for more money.

I don’t have much of an opinion on all of it. The words the director kept using were “valued” and “important” in terms of the counselors needing to feel those things and that the rate of pay was linked to those feelings. The situation does concern me, but it’s not from a stand point of not feeling valued. As I thought about it more it had more to do with not making mathematical sense. You can be there for seven hours one day and only get paid for three if you end up with two cancellations.

The other hours were lunch and supervision. But anyway I know every job has its problems. I would still rather be doing this than getting paid for every hour I was there at my nursing job working, plus every hour I’d be paid staying extra. In other words it’s much less stressful and I enjoy the work more, including the hours. I came home and rested before it was time for me to pack a bag and head out for our overnight time at the Inn again. I packed light and used my track mom bag again.

If my daughter hadn’t come into the room to talk to me, I probably would’ve written more last night. The fact is that I was so fed up, I don’t think I have ever reached a breaking point so strong. Right now I feel annoyed about the whole darn thing, I truly mean it when I say I would not care if we never talked again. Whatever his issues were, however they were clashing, it was not my job to be staying there to be with it. I have never been so relieved to be done with a place.

Two things can be true at once, and even more than two things. Yesterday in couple’s therapy was one of those day’s that keeps you working. I can’t tell yet if it is comforting or disturbing that you’ve got about three different story lines, and they play out over and over. I’d like to think it’s the first one. So I’ve got some news, and I think it is good. The deal is you’re are not alone in this, for as much as I can say it yet, “I see this all the time”. The bad news is it won’t go away unless you change it.

I think swallowing your pride is one of the hardest things for people to do. On some days I’d say it is harder for men, but yesterday I’d definitely said it was women. The woman I said I wasn’t going to see again came back today and our meeting was civil. I don’t think either one of us truly wanted it to end but we also weren’t able to come to any, that I thought, greater understanding of each other. In the end we simply agreed to disagree and made a plan to try to keep moving forward.

I don’t know what it was that came over me but in some kind of lightning bolt moment of clarity, I all of a sudden decided today that I don’t want to be at Thrive anymore. I reached out to another supervisor that I’d interviewed with and asked if it would even be possible to do something with her group practice where I was only working there one day a week. She wrote me back within a few hours and said yes. I wrote my Thrive supervisor an email this evening telling him I was moving on.

So I still need to have that conversation with the people I am seeing there. Whether I see them at Hope, or if they come with me over to the other place, or it’s decided we’re not working out anymore, I need to be somewhere without the nagging, ongoing sense that something is off or isn’t quite right. I just could not get over the awkwardness and the inability to truly be comfortable and fully come out of my shell. It did not go away. It did not get better. I am over trying to deal with it.

I’m not even second guessing or wondering if this was sabotage or impulse (at least not very much). I am grateful for my time there and was not mean about any of it.

A guy from staff carpet came to measure the basement floor. I was hoping to have that done before Ethan and Laura moved back, but in my inexperience with home renovations, I didn’t realize that carpet people are usually booked 6-8 weeks out for installation. So that’s not going to happen until the end of June at the soonest. I did go visit them sometime last week thinking maybe it could happen in 2-3 weeks. So that was an adjustment but I’m just glad to be on track for new carpet.

My hip has been hurting me for a couple of months. It had been intermittent but lately the past month or so it has been almost constant. It effects my sleep to where there is no position or side that I can lay on where I feel relief. I had googled this at one point and found a funny name with several therapy exercises involving your leg. For a while it went away. But now it is back so I googled it over again to try and find the funny name. 9 out of 10 cases can be relieved with wearing looser clothing around the waist and with weight loss.

I have had trouble with this hip for a long time, the earliest memory being the popping sound when we’d walk to the track for PE. Then it was the numb spot the size of a quarter that appeared on the side of my leg in my 20’s. It takes up most of the side of my leg now. I would have burning in that leg at times while standing at the med card, which is when I had started googling the first time. It’s one of those thing that’s forcing me to find something, to get moving again because I really need to now.

We were back at PORTA for the last regular season track meet. These seasons go so fast that I wouldn’t mind a couple more meets. Sectionals isn’t this week but is next week for the boys. Their 4×4 team still has not run the qualifying time but came within a second or so tonight and beat the favored home team in quite the upset. I actually felt bad for the other team’s anchor who stayed with our anchor the entire time until the final stretch. He gave it everything he had to stay with him.

Miles rode with us along with Elianna and our youngest. I walked from the bathroom to our room in a bathrobe and saw that he was outside the house by the raised beds. He was there in the morning to help Elianna in the camp kitchen. She was cooking lunch for a school group. I wish our house was cleaner but it was it is with him and our house I feel at this point. The other evening when Elianna was here for I asked if they had any kind of timeline they are talking about as far as marriage goes.

They’ve been together for over three years, and when you come from a family like ours, marriage when you’re 19 or 20 is just something you start to talk about. When it gets to be that long too you start to want to have some kind of assurance that they’re on some kind of path and my daughter isn’t wasting her time or life. I guess they have talked about it but are not necessarily in any rush. They had talked about this summer but married student housing has a waiting list two years long.

“Come here”,” he said. I wasn’t really wanting to make a fuss or wake either one of us up anymore than I already was. I’d woken up and first thing I did was look at the clock. 12:30. Immediately I was hit with the agony of there still being 1 1/2 hours of after prom left. Why they make us do this or why they put us through this…no one has ever asked me to be on an after prom committee and this is my third time having a junior student in this school. Not that I would actually want to be on one.

He was out on the couch so he could wait up for our son. He scooted back to make room for me. I finally gave in and went over there after standing lost in the living room, not knowing if I wanted a drink or someone to hear me or if I would even be able to go back to sleep knowing he was out there somewhere, with the bounce houses and basketball tournaments and whatever else they were supposed to be doing less than fifteen minutes away at the rented venue called The Gym.

“What would you say to your clients if they were you?” I’d already been thinking about that and chapter 5 in the book Codependent No More titled “Detachment”. Obviously I was letting my psychological and emotional state be way too determined by something that was completely out of my control, namely, the physical safety of another person who I was no longer responsible for watching over in the same way. I didn’t say that. “I’m having this flashback to some school event back in Hoyleton.”

I was standing with Karis in the hallway between the locker rooms and the cafeteria. We were there volunteering for a school function, without our babies. But it had been a couple of hours, and that had been long enough. Our bodies felt the separation. “Don’t you think this is the way God meant it to be?”, she asked. I knew exactly what she meant. She was talking about the need to be with them and the desire to not be away from them for too long. I said all of this instead of the chapter thing.

And the tears and the sniffles came. They’re coming now again as I’m typing this out. I reached out my hand and pet the cat who was sleeping on the ottoman next to me. The words of another son’s poem came to mind, “Oreo, I love him so” before we knew Oreo wasn’t a boy. I don’t remember how long I laid there. By the time I went back to bed I think the clock said at least 1:08AM and I felt that at least felt more endurable, like I could go back to sleep now. I barely, just barely, heard him come in.