Lost my Center

I have lost my center today, that little core of strength and hope that most days keeps me going.  I am close to tears and just feeling frustrated and overhwelmed and tired.  This feeling has come about from a variety of different things; from another site I am part of where my opinion was personally attacked and I was made to feel like a piece of shit for not agreeing with one particular woman, from another post from this particular site where I was basically told to keep my nose out of the State of Alabama's business since I don't live there, from some ongoing emails with Child Support Services regarding the nearly $12,000 my ex is behind on his child support...those things and many, many more have all piled up on me today and I just feel like it sometimes isn't worth the fight anymore.

There have  been a lot of really crappy things in my life, some due to my own poor choices, some due to the actions of others, some just random, yet every day I strive to make the world a better place.  To get up each morning and face the day with a smile or at least the desire to get up and try it again.  I have had men do terrible things to me, things that have in the past landed me and my baby (now 7)in a homeless shelter (and worse), yet I strive to teach my daughter that there are good men out there-even though I don't really believe that to be true anymore.  I strive to teach my sons the consequences of their actions, and raise them to be men who can love and be loved, even though I have not had that experience in my own life.  And in return for these four great kids who are actually contributing to the world in a positive manner, what I get are constant reminders that single parenthood is somehow my fault and that there is something inherently wrong with it.  Well, there is: men are not supposed to walk out on their families, or if they DO, they are not supposed to forget they had children, yet it happens every day and we live in a nation that sanctions this.  As a nation run by men, it is a nation FOR men.  Deadbeat dad laws don't protect the women or the children, they do not force the man to be responsible.  Yet through this, through the months when my ex's creditors cleaned out both my savings and checking accounts to the tune of $3000 and I went from being reasonably secure to not knowing how I was going to feed my kids, I somehow not only managed to take care of them but to also instill in them the lesson that if you get up every day and do the next thing in front of you, things will work out.  The thing is, none of that matters anymore, not in this world.  How, in good conscience, can I teach my kids those kinds of things when we live in a world that isn't kind or helpful to people who aren't white, heterosexual, married, and affluent people?  Mine look around at the world and see, firsthand, that only the rich are repsected; they see their friends with two parents and wonder why that isn't possible for us. How can I teach them that money doesn't matter?  This is a never-ending problem, and one that I can't even pretend I know the soluttion to.

I believe, so strongly, that we have an obligation, not just to ourselves but to our children and the poeople in our lives to pay attention, to look at what is truly there and to try and make a difference.  I pay attention to laws in other states that let the government have even more control than they already do because it is important to me on far more than a statewide level; what happens there is happening here and as a UNITED country, we have got to band together to stop the growing trend of allowing a select few people tell us how to live.  Yet today, I just don't see the point.  I wrote about the ex here, and my ranting about that isn't about the money, it is about the fact that we as a nation have made it somehow acceptable for people-generally men-to abandon their responsibilities and walk away, with no consequences.  We have allowed and even encouraged our children to believe that the workd somehow owes them something, which in turn creates yet another generation of people who don't give a shit.  And then you get a person like me, who is apparently both a bitch and a trouble-maker (actually, I think the words used to describe me this morning were 'rude and inconsiderate.'), who just want to try to change things, to make some sort of meaning out of this crazy little life if mine, and all I feel right now is just too tired to make the effort anymore.

Yet here is the crazy thing: I will do it because there are no choices.  For me, of course, because there isn't anyone there to take up the slack-it has to be done, and I am the only one here to do it.  But for my kids-because I HAVE to believe that somehow, somewhere, someone is listening, that maybe I can make one person stop and think about the world as something larger than their own little 2-mile radius.  I have to believe that I can make a difference, maybe just to my kids but maybe, just maybe, to someone else.  Otherwise, why bother?