Silent Anxiety

Anticipation isn't always a good thing.

That build up in your mind, your body. Where everything in your body you are able to feel tense in does. Your stomach is in knots, your head reels. Your thoughts race through every possible what-if scenario that can pan out. The good, the bad, and certainly the ugly.

You can't concentrate. Your mind wanders. You stare off into the great beyond, not at anything really, just off into the distance. At what could lay ahead.

It's nerve wracking really. The waiting game. Knowing that the state of your life, your future, rests in the hands of someone else. Decisions weighed not by your actions, but by corporate policy and political red tape.

Today I sit, awash in this feeling, my financial future a mystery. Shrouded behind closed doors and HR jargon. Dotted i's and crossed t's as I fret if tomorrow I will be at this desk, my hourly wage ticking away or if I will be joining the masses of unemployed.

I've known for months it was coming. Looming in the distance like the shadow of a massive storm cloud making its way over the countryside. All that was bright and shining, now covered slowly by darkness and all you could do was watch helplessly as it overcame everything.

It's an awful feeling to be helpless. To not have control over certain pertinent aspects of your own life. To answer to others, to have your life held in the balance because of someone else's choices.

I have certainly made my own slew of choices that have affected my life sure, but the big decisions, the whoppers have been mostly the choices of others. Those are the ones that impact the greatest. The choice of my company to end my job, the choice of my son's father to be a deadbeat. Those choices, those vital pieces of history are the hardest to overcome, because those I have the least control of.

I have another court date coming. My son's father wants a child support reduction. I almost laughed out loud at the sight of the motion when I opened it. A reduction? From the ZERO amount I have received in a year and a half? Really? Can they reduce zero? Even the greatest of mathematicians would have a hard time deducing that sum.

But getting what he owes would just barely cover the cost of Dylan's school a week, not to mention a portion of the rest of my monthly bills I can hardly afford. Not to mention the back owed support he owes me, or the cost to feed and clothe a growing 5 year old boy. Costs I have incurred entirely on my own since my son was 1 year old, since his support was never consistent.

I know they say it isn't healthy to hate, but I loathe that man with every ounce of my body for what he has done to my child. What he has put him through, the nightmares he still has. The counseling he is still in. The fact that we struggle so much and he hasn't done anything to support him.

I get anxiety at the thought of seeing him again in court. My heart races and my stomach turns. He makes me physically sick for what he's done. My restraining order is little comfort to the fact that I have to face him in front of a judge. Being in the same room as him brings back everything from that day I got the call at work to get my son from a detective, from the state. It's disgusting.

Impending joblessness, deadbeat dad, more financial hardship...

So much negative anticipation. No wonder I bleed inside.