We survived the youth retreat this past weekend, and I actually like teenagers!
Steve and I were youth leaders a looooong time ago, and we were horrible at it, but I’m finding out that we also had a horrible group of teenagers. They were very critical of us and our techniques, and they didn’t really participate, but we might not have sucked as much as we thought, because the group of teens this weekend actually liked us.
Go figure. I’ve been avoiding teenagers for ten years or so now, not realizing that the group of teens we had were not representative of all teenagers. Live and learn, right?
In other news, my joint pain is back. It hurts as bad as it did before I took the steroids. Apparently, the prednisone I was on is out of my system. I started hurting over the weekend and now it’s bordering on ridiculous again.
We’re not doing steroids again [maybe never, those things suck BAD] but ibuprofen isn’t doing much. Um, actually, I can’t tell that it’s doing anything. I went to the Doctor yesterday and he said that I have some kind of inflammatory joint disease, but we have no idea which one it might be because all of my blood tests are normal.
Nice.
At least he believes that there’s something not right, though. The hardest thing to deal with is when you tell someone that you hurt and they act like it’s all in your head. This may be a psychosomatic thing with me, I honestly don’t know, but the pain is real.
In a way, I’m hoping that this is just a mental thing, because if it is, then maybe it will go away, right? I don’t know. I’ve been making plans about going back to college. I’m planning to go to nursing school, and maybe I’m more nervous about it than I think.
There are a lot of issues, that’s for sure. I’m having guilt for not loving being a stay at home mom. I’ve been doing this for almost nine years, and I’ve never really enjoyed it. I did it because I felt like I had to. I felt like it was the best thing for my kids to have me at home and always available to them.
Now, I don’t know. I’m pretty miserable, which makes me grumpy, resentful, and not very nice, so maybe it wasn’t the best choice after all?
I also have some issues with agoraphobia, and the thought of getting out every day by myself is both exciting and scary.
I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m scared of going out, and I think part of it is probably from being raped. I really thought I had worked through all that crap, but now I’m realizing that it changed a lot more about me than I originally thought.
It doesn’t make sense to me that I should still be having issues because I feel like my rape wasn’t as, I don’t know, serious? as someone who was beaten, or raped by a stranger, or something.
I’m conflicted about the whole thing, because I went to the guy’s house intending to have sex with him. I didn’t know it was going to hurt as bad as it did [I was really nervous, and he wasn’t very good at helping me relax] so I made him stop, and he did. At first.
But I still wonder if he intended to ‘rape’ me, and if he didn’t, should I have reacted differently? Is my reaction to it what made it a rape? During the sex, I felt like I wasn’t in my body anymore. I remember laying there, staring at a digital clock with a red readout, wondering how long it would take for him to finish.
I could hear myself whimpering, but it was like it was happening to someone else. After it happened, I went to the bathroom and cleaned the blood off my legs, and then I went out into the living room and talked to the guy until my friend came and picked me up.
A few days later, he called me and I broke up with him. I don’t think he ever had a clue that he had done anything wrong. Hell, my best friend told me that night that what had happened to me couldn’t be called ‘rape’ because I had gone there intending to have sex.
So now, some fourteen years later [good god, has it really been that long?] I’m still thinking that maybe it wasn’t rape in the strict sense of the term, so therefore it shouldn’t still be affecting me, you know?
But I’m afraid to go out by myself [or alone with my kids] because I know I can’t protect myself, or the kids, and my biggest fear is that something will happen to them. I’m terrified when I take all three of them, because if two or three of them are walking, I can’t keep them all within arm’s reach, and someone could take one of them.
I’m terrified to take road trips to my parents’ house because if the van breaks down [it has 225,000 miles on it] something could happen to my kids, or something could happen to me and they would be all alone and vulnerable.
I never feel completely safe, except when Steve’s around [he’s a state trooper, which in police terms is a little like being a Marine in the military. He knows a lot of ways to hurt people if he has to, and he’s usually armed, too.] The rest of the time, there’s a low level of anxiety, and if I go out, it increases. A lot.
So I wonder if this joint pain is a physical manifestation of my anxiety, and if so, how the hell do I get rid of it? ‘Cause I hurt like hell.
If I Ruled the World 