It's been one heck of a year and I'm glad to see it go!

Less than 30 minutes to the New Year and looking back, I'm glad it's finally ending even though it seems to have gone faster than ever. It was a really difficult year though, pretty much from the beginning when my adopted dad started getting worse on Natalie's birthday. He died 9 months ago, on March 31st, of lung cancer. I miss him very much and think of him often. Of course, that loss for me just made the loss of my parents (not to death but to prison due to their own extremely selfish actions) even more difficult to bear. The weather added to things with spring being delayed and then when it did come, it came with severe weather. We had a close call when the tornado sirens went off in early April but nothing came of it thankfully other than severe hail damage on the southside of town. I was very grateful that John was sent home early and he came home just before it all hit. That wasn't the case six weeks later. I had been aware that we were to get severe storms so had stayed home and had been watching the weather all day. I had this sense of dread during the afternoon, felt very anxious. Kept watching the radar and saw a storm off to the SE that looked bad. It was and this storm was heading right for my town. Warnings started popping up in the SE so I started to get things together in preparation for going down to the basement with the two girls John was still at work. When the sirens went off (late, I found out later), we all went down. This time the warning was for real. The southside of my town took a direct hit from a rain wrapped tornado. This happened just an hour or so before Joplin Missouri was hit. Thankfully, it was a fairly week tornado. If it had been the size of the one that hit Joplin, we would have taken damage and loss of life similar to theirs, I'm sure. The tornado touched down not very far from the hospital and there were numerous stories of close calls. It hit near the neighborhood I had lived in when my brother-in-law was killed so I have had a hard time dealing with that. Tornadoes have been a huge fear of mine since losing my house to a fire when I was a kid and that combined with what happened in that area back when I was living there just made it worse (ironically, while houses on either side of my old apartment took damage, the house I lived in was untouched). It was just really weird to see all the damage down there and to realize that I was less than four miles away. It could have just as easily hit where I lived. Still kind of freaks me out, in all honesty.

So those two events and some other struggles have made this a particularly difficult year and so I'm not sad to see it go. I'm really hoping that this next year is a much better year because I kind of need a break here!

As usual I've been neglecting my blog.

And since this is supposed to be the blog where I'm posting about the girls, that's kind of sad so one of my big resolutions this year is to focus more on this blog and make this the main blog I post on. It will mean a name change since it won't just be about the girls but about family life in general and other things. It will be a work in progress but I'm hoping that I'll get better at updates and pictures and all that good stuff. A lot has been going on which is to be expected with two girls and I know if I don't post and take pictures and things, things will happen that I will forget about later on. So that is my plan.

I will also be taking The Mom Pledge. You can find out what that is all about here. I want to be more positive about parenting and do what I can to be a better parent. It's not easy though and a good part of it will be figuring out what I need to do to better myself and feel better about myself because I think that is for me the biggest challenge, feeling good about myself and feeling confident and finding value in myself as well.

I was really hoping things were turning around.

But nope, they weren't. It's just me being stupid again. I had decided that I was, no matter what, going to celebrate the holidays. I was going to take the girls trick-or-treating and I did (and their dad STILL does not know I took them) and I was going to celebrate Christmas. He had actually been pretty laid back about the whole Christmas thing, keeping fairly mum on it all and I was thinking that while he wasn't going to join in, he was AT LEAST going to respect MY beliefs for once. UGH! How stupid can I be?! I should have realized something was up when he wasn't sleeping in our room at night. For the longest time we had been sleeping in separate rooms and we finally got them switched around so that the larger bed was just for us to sleep in and the girls shared their own room. Before, I was sleeping in our daughter's room on her bed and she slept in the larger room with her dad and sister. And I figured this way they would have the larger room for their toys and stuff and my husband and I would have a place to sleep together. But lately, he had been falling asleep in the room with the girls and not coming to bed. Intimacy was declining again. And now, he's back to telling me how defiant and rebellious I am. For crying out loud, it's CHRISTMAS. I'm not sleeping around on him. I'm not going out and drinking with strange men or being gone all hours of the night. He's calling me this because I went out with my sister last night to WALMART and bought CHRISTMAS presents for my oldest daughter who had a birthday two days after Christmas anyway! Seriously! I got THREE gifts that cost me less than $25. I got my younger daughter TWO gifts for about the same amount. I bought some gift wrapping stuff and things like that and because it's against HIS beliefs, because HE believes that HE will be thrown into the Lake of Fire for believing it, I am the one who is rebelling and being defiant. All I want to do is buy some presents for my kids, wrap them, and give the presents to them on Christmas Day. That's it. I have a small tree in my office. I did not buy any lights. I ended up not doing the Secret Santa thing I was part of because I ended up leaving the group I was in. The only decoration outside of my office are snowflake decals on the window that my older daughter put up. THAT IS IT. Oh and I mailed Christmas cards out. But to hear you, you'd think I was like the people down the street with the HUGE holiday display outside of their house or the people whose house I pass on the bus with all of the lights! I haven't even taken the kids to see Santa Claus (though after this, I think I just might, may as well be as rebellious as possible!).

I want to bang my head on a wall. I have tried and tried and tried and tried to make this work. I REALLY tried to give up Christmas. It was HARD. It was PAINFUL. It was DEPRESSING. I HATED IT. I HATED people who celebrated Christmas. I was becoming a Grinch about it all, seriously. I did not like myself. I did not like having to be isolated from everyone for a good four months because I didn't celebrate any of the holidays from Halloween on except for Thanksgiving. I have done SO MUCH for him and tried SO HARD to respect his beliefs only to have him ignore me and take me for granted anyway. It didn't seem to matter that I was making HUGE sacrifices for him. It was just expected because I was married to him never mind he lied to me about his beliefs to begin with.

I don't believe what he believes. It would make life (and for sure our marriage!) easier if I did but I don't. I just wish he would realize that and realize that all the crap he does just makes our marriage more unbearable for me.

So I managed to win a giveaway.

And it was to an online adult store, of all things. I have to wonder if the universe was trying to make up for the fact that all my husband got me for my birthday was a massager from Goodwill and not just any massager, a massager that probably belonged to an old lady (it kind of had an old lady smell to it), looked older than me, and was only $2.99. I mean seriously, who gives a USED, second hand massager to his wife for her birthday and wedding anniversary?! EPIC fail. That and the lack of um intimacy during the last two months I think led to karma being nice to me for once because I almost never win giveaways and definitely not giveaways for a $55 gift card. So I'm excited. I made my purchases today (took me quite a few days to figure out just what I wanted to get because I haven't gotten anything like this since my husband and I started dating and I wasn't quite so shy--yeah, funny, considering I've given birth in front of total strangers since then) and they'll be here soon. Maybe this is just what I need to get a little more action. At the very least, it will spice things up whether I'm with him or going solo.

My favorite age.

Isabelle is now reaching the point of her development where everything she does is just positively cute (even when she's getting into trouble!). She's been walking for awhile and now she's starting to talk (a little earlier than Natalie but she wasn't walking quite as early as Natalie either). She's kind of an odd one with the talking though as she's not saying words but phrases though they're not very clear. We've had a game for awhile where I would hide under the blankets and say, "Where's Mama?" She would peek under the blanket and I would respond, "Here I am!" Or I would hide her and say, "Where's Isabelle?" and when I found her, would then say, "There she is!" So now, when I do it, Isabelle says, every single time she finds me, something that sounds a lot like, "There it is!". She also says "upsy daisy", "hi" (while waving), what sounds like "bye-bye", and what John thinks sounds like "thank you". She also has this game where she'll bring you a doll to hug. I hug the doll and say, "aww" and now Isabelle does the same thing. It's absolutely cute. She'll also respond to my saying, "No, you can't!" with "Yes, I can!". I don't know where she got that one and I have a feeling that this may really come to a head when she's older! She says something (can't quite understand it) when I have something she wants and she can kind of say "banana". Yes, this little girl has quite a vocabulary at not quite 15 months old (though she still won't really say mama!)! I can only see that getting bigger as time goes on. Natalie just started talking at 15 months with her first word, "Hi" but her vocabulary just exploded after that so I'm definitely anticipating that with Isabelle as well.

She's getting more into playing with her toys (and with her sister's toys). She loves her legos though still hasn't quite figured out how to put them together. She plays with them instead, putting them into the cupboards and things in the play kitchen we have. She likes to play in the cupboards in the regular kitchen but we have to watch that because she's prone to getting into trouble. She dumped the rest of an open box of Minute Rice the other day.

She's cute though and I love this age. I really loved it when Natalie was this age and missed it when Natalie grew out of it at three. I'll need to take video this time so I can remember these days even when I'm old and erm grayer.

Feeling more lost and confused than ever.

I called over to the hospital the other day and talked to someone in the women's health department, specifically someone who is supposed to be part of the domestic violence part of this department. To be honest, I don't feel like I got a lot of good answers and if anything, I couldn't help but feel she was telling me that I'm pretty much stuck until I get a job and make enough money to move out (unless I have someone I can move in with) because my husband isn't beating me.

At the same time, I have nearly everyone else I've talked to telling me I need to get the f out NOW. Well, that would be great if I had somewhere to go! I can't go by myself, one because I don't want to abandon my children and two because I would be a failure of a mother if I abandoned my children. My one older sister tells me I can come live with her. Yeah, thing is is she's in another state and from what I'm hearing, I can't even go more than 150 miles with my kids (you know, I really have to wonder if there are economics because this stupid law and just who the f came up with such a STUPID law in the first place?!) for more than 90 days. I was told by a therapist that I could be ordered back to this state with the kids so first of all, that's going to mess them up, being in a place only to have to return here and second of all, that doesn't help me with my where the heck I'm going to go because I'll be right back where I started! And I'm sure my husband would get a HUGE kick out of that. Plus, if I have to be ordered back here, that could possibly jeopardize my getting custody. I have another older sister who suggest I just do whatever I want and not listen to what he says anymore and not do the things he wants me to do. This has everyone else concerned that he'll either try to kidnap at least our older daughter or retaliate violently.

Would someone please tell me what I can actually do?!

He called last night, starts mentioning that he probably has been in the wrong with how he's been treating me and how he probably did not plan his trip out very well (okay, who are you and what did you do with my husband?). Then it goes from there to he might be home early, doesn't really give me a full reason why just mentions something to the effects that there's been a difference of opinion and from what I got from the little he says, I think it's that he doesn't really approve of the church's teachings. This doesn't entirely surprise me, after all, the whole no shaving thing is not something the church he attends to follow. In fact, even his best friend who has left not only the church my husband has been going to but several other of the offshoots, STILL shaves so it seems to me like John may be leaving the whole Armstrong offshoots behind period. Hard to say but it's still a step in the wrong direction because he's keeping himself a prisoner of the law following these laws, he doesn't get at all that the laws no longer need to be followed but that's a discussion for another day, to be honest. So I really don't know when he will be home, could be any day now, just hoping that this whole thing doesn't totally screw up our finances because if it does, there's going to be some massive problems. Unfortunately, I think I'm just going to have to make some more phone calls, maybe even go and see someone in person because I really do not know what else to do. And I guess I'm just going to have to print off some of the stuff with the bank accounts and find out just what my options are and ask a lot of questions including what exactly can happen if I did decide to leave and go to my sister's.

At this point, I still really have no desire to stay with him. The religion is a huge problem and not one that's going to be fixed overnight, especially when he is SO disrespectful towards anyone who follows beliefs outside of his. Not to mention that our relationship has deteriorated so much, it's going to take a lot of work to get it back on track and it's not work I'm willing to do unless he makes some HUGE changes and they're changes he's not very likely willing to make (especially when he keeps saying that my asking for certain changes in order for me to stay is being manipulative). We continue to be at an impasse. And I don't see that changing ever.

I can't do it anymore.

I never went into a marriage planning to leave it. When I married my husband, it felt right. It added security to our relationship. We were friends and lovers and now partners for life. We married eight years ago today. The pictures of us at our wedding show a couple in love. I looked happy, my husband looked at me with love. We were the picture of a couple very much in love.

Eight years and two children later, I'm done. I'm miserable. I'm lonely. My husband hasn't look at me the way he looked at me in those pictures in years. I don't feel needed by him. He gets his emotional needs met through his church and through our five year old daughter. We have slept in the same bed maybe a few times in the last year. Otherwise, we sleep in separate beds, in separate rooms. Sex has gotten less and less and when it happens, it's because I not only initiate it but practically beg and harass him for it.

This, along with other issues, has finally led me to decide I can't do this anymore. As much as being alone would suck, I would at least have the ability to make choices for my life. I would be able to celebrate Christmas. I would be able to pursue my own religious beliefs. I can own Harry Potter and watch the movies. It's sad but I find more positives in being on my own (even if I didn't get custody of the girls) than I do in continuing to be married.

I'm sad though. I'm broken hearted and once again, I wonder what's wrong with me. It just seems like many of the people in my life either don't seem to really love me at all or stop loving me.