Changes....

September is a month of changes. It’s a month of anniversaries for me that do not necessarily harbor the greatest memories. Dates that changed my life forever and have left permanent marks on the way I live my life, not always for the better.

It’s amazing to think that one month could have wrought so many feelings. There are so many emotions and changes. Like the changing seasons that happen so quickly, you wake up one day to notice the plush greenery you had grown so accustomed to now replaced with reds and gold’s, like scenery on fire. As if the world exploded overnight. The warm air replaced with a chill. It’s almost telling.

5 years ago I gave birth to my amazing little boy. I went from a singular being to a mother. I was no longer just concerned for myself, but now living my life entirely for someone else. I learned that love at first sight existed. Even through a hellish pregnancy, a horrible relationship (if you could even call it that) and a traumatizing labor, that this little person, this mini-me could be so perfect and calming. That my son could make me feel so overwhelmed and yet so amazed at the same time. I was yet a single mother, alone from the start.

3 years ago I suffered the death of my father. It was so sudden, so shocking. Like having the literal rug pulled out from underneath me. Driving blindly to the hospital to meet the ambulance. A bat out of Hell. Collapsing to the floor when the doctor came towards us with the news. Not believing. It was a bad dream. It had to be. My dad couldn't be gone. He was the Rock. The one who fixed everything, made everything ok. There was no way his big heart gave out. A man larger than life. Not in stature maybe, but in spirit. Boisterous and loud, funny without trying. And now he was silenced.

1 year ago, my son’s world turned upside down. A scene you imagine only in movies witnessed by an almost 4 year old boy in the back seat of his father's car. Undercover police, drug busts, guns blazing. A whirlwind of state custody and court battles. Restraining orders and nightmares; both his and mine. Fear of everything. What happens now? Such a long road ahead, just the two of us. My son now seemingly fatherless, so young and confused. Aware of what happened, yet so unsure by his age and his devotion.

Now a chance for a new beginning. Able to move into a new place. A place whose walls haven't heard the cries after the funeral of my father. Who's paint doesn't echo the sounds of the screams of a child who wakes in the night with terrors of all he's seen and climbs into his mother's bed for comfort. Perhaps more peaceful.

And yet still scary. As I enter the cusp of this new month, pending back injury....pending cervical cancer biopsy I enter it with fear. Will I need surgery on my spine? Could it be debilitating? Will my second biopsy show more pre-cancerous cells? Will it affect my work? My income? Can I do it alone? I stress, I cry, I recluse myself from the world. I hide.

The person who could calm me is gone, the child support that could ease my financial burdens hasn't come in a year. I get anxious, saddened that no one understands. That even as I write an explanation, I am lost in my own interpretation of my emotions. Caged in my fears and anxieties.

I stare off at my invisible to-do lists. The daunting tasks of packing up my life into boxes and bins and transferring memories from one house to another. Will bad karma follow me yet again? Is it fixed in my possessions like a cursed talisman or is it within me? Fated to follow me like a black cat in the shadows of every move I make?

Everything from failed relationships to failed vehicular inspections. The serious to the minute. It all seems to plague me. It gets harder and harder to bear to me. And I feel I often suffer it in silence, afraid that its only magnified in my own delusions. That opening my mouth about my fears will cast me out farther like a pariah among those who already think I am one. Or think I exaggerate or over-react to what others may think is a nothing situation.

Perhaps it is, but nothing is all I seem to have left, so I hold on, whole heartedly. Misinterpreted, maybe. Misunderstood, most likely. All that I am is all that I know. I can not change it, But I fear the fall, the Autumnal season that is now upon me....full of the unknown and most definitely full of changes.