Time for a dashboard Jesus

I am not defending my behavior, but in the past three months, I’ve had a seemingly heavy load of stress. Maybe it isn’t the typical stress your average person has, but right now, my life feels like the makings of a bad country song.

I don’t want to complain because I love being a mostly happy person and I want to stay that way.

But in the past three months, I’ve been dealt the following blows…

My best friend of 25 years was diagnosed with aggressive, invasive ovarian cancer. She has a 50 percent chance of survival.

I have been through one surgery with her, and I filled out an advanced directive to be her medical power of attorney. I’ve had to step up to the plate and help her special needs daughter, who is 26 and has six kids and no baby daddy.

Why did I have to step up? Cuz said best friend has decided to do something completely insane in response to her diagnosis and allow a twice convicted sex offender to move in with her.

Sleeping with a child molester can apparently fuck up your well being as well as your life and she has set herself back health wise to a point where she cannot have the lifesaving chemotherapy that she desperately needs.

I’ve been left with the mess she’s run away from. I’m left soothing the confused and angry hearts of those she left behind or discarded in her struggle to be free, and that includes three house cats. One was 12 yrs old.

This morning I had to block her almost 80 year old ex affair partner, who started out as her MOTHER’S affair partner of 20+ years. When her mom died, he moved on to my bestie, his dead lover’s daughter. Let that sink in.

Now that she’s screwing a monster, he’s trying to move ME into the vacancy. Sorry dude, but I am not gonna be your next place to stick it so fuck the fuck off.

I could not make this shit up if I tried and truth really is stranger than fiction and that is some messed up shit right there.

But by far the biggest stressor is trying not to vomit in the face is her unshaven, smirking, snaggle toothed, baby raping boyfriend.

My dad has been a diabetic for 30 years. He is losing his eyesight and has A-fib and is retaining water from an unknown source and they’ve been through every test.

My mom is so stressed. She has an eye drop regimen that involves putting them in his eyes 12 times in a day and I’m not joking. They have been to two eye specialists to try to prolong his ability to see. Right now he can’t drive. They say his eyesight will get better with treatment but maybe not better enough to drive again. My mom is scared. It is humbling and uneasy for me to hear fear in her voice. They have been together 54 years. My dad is alpha. She’s getting their affairs in order in case they need long term care.

My normally straight A student, 16, failed two classes. Failed. Cries all the time. Isn’t motivated enough to keep up in school. Went from bummed out when a snow day was called to openly crying when the weekend is over and Monday rolls around. I’m driving her an hour to and from to see a special adolescent counselor. I’ve had to beg, cry and exhaustively wait for mental health care and I have an older daughter that attempted suicide previously, so this shit is petrifying. I’m petrified. My husband doesn’t hold me or comfort me. He does not know how to help her or me.

Last Tuesday, I asked my husband for a divorce and an exit plan agreement. I am openly spending the night on the weekends with my boyfriend while his wife vacations. I am blatantly “in your face” cheating and he’s walking around with his hands in his pocket looking anxious.

He hasn’t tried to fix or change or grow in years and we haven’t fucked in even longer. But he thinks he can make an attempt to change a few of the things that have been sticking points all this time. He showers more than once a week. He went to the dentist  and he is trying to sleep in bed with me and rub my back.  I know I have to accept his affection or hurt him tremendously. but I’m just completely void of any feelings for him besides fear and loathing.

Now I’m gonna be the bad guy for sure. He’s making a feeble, and I mean feeble, attempt by doing these two simple things. Feeble because there is no way it could even begin to bridge the physical and emotional gap spanning thirty years. I think at this point he has to have more than just an inkling that I am having sex. I’m just waiting for the day he feels he needs to confirm it and quite frankly, I’m getting tired of pretending and it’s getting hard to hide the misery.

A clear cut case, too little too late.

Add to that the fact that one daughter’s boyfriend of four years has a terminally ill mom. She’s dying of liver cancer. She was supposed to die last Christmas because she stopped chemo a while ago, but she’s still here. She’s an amazing person and she has struggled to make friends after having moved hours away from her hometown and family. Her name is B.

B’s mom is too mentally ill to acknowledge B is dying so she drinks and stays away. It’s outta sight outta mind. That’s not a Mom. Her dad follows suit.

As fate would have it, me and B fell in friend love. I call her Tinkerbell because she’s tiny and magical. We are doing the equivalent of speed dating. I adore her. She will die soon, leaving behind her 16 year old son and two girls, 7 and 9, who will be forever broken in a certain way from the crippling loss.

And me. She will leave me with an up close glimpse of my own imminent death. It makes me long for the life I don’t have with my lover, because time is moving quickly and we ain’t getting younger. We are all waiting in line to cross over and every day we are alive, we get one step closer to the front of the line. The closer you get to your turn, the more peace, comfort and love you need.

After our lover’s squabble, I laid in the dark and held R in my arms. Spending nights together is rare, a gift. To my horror, he struggled desperately to breathe and I listened to his sleep apnea rob his brain and muscles of oxygen. The pauses in breathing were so prolonged that I began to really feel panic.

I cannot bear to lose him, too.

We need to go to bed earlier so it doesn’t exhaust him to see me. I’m so scared it’s gonna get to be too much like I’ve always feared with him being older than me.

He woke up cranky and irritated and kinda disinterested in rewarding my difficult behavior.

But he did it anyway, I am hoping out of love.

To top it all off, I feel like I’m 53 years old and reaching at straws as to how I’m gonna survive the rest of my life with the choices I have made so far.

The betrayal of my lover was the blow that kicked off the whole string of bad luck. It got the ball of crap rolling and all it’s done is gain momentum.

I’d run away from the giant, rolling pile of anxiety and devastation and stark fear if I thought I could catch a break. I’d run fast and far if I thought I had a snowball’s chance in hell of actually getting far enough ahead of it to escape the destruction.

But with my luck and the way things are going, I guarantee the fucker will catch me at the top of a hill.

This seems like a good time to say it.

Fuck my life.