Searching the World Over

Alright......so this news may be new to some of you and I'll backtrack later when I don't have 104 kids running around in a feral state due to me being on the computer and them trying to escape school. And we're heading into town in about an hour so I can't really sit here doing nothing....like I presently am. But...let me preface this with the fact that for many months now we have been in limbo about where we belong. Brad felt strongly that the Lord was urging us to move on and I was supportive despite my absolute love for this place because I long to see him succeed and be wildly happy about what he does in life. I love our home here....I love living here..more than anything in the world and know that we have been incredibly, exceedingly blessed beyond all measure. So...in my tears and agony of having to leave this place I have done nothing but think on everything I do not like here and weigh out what I do want to go back to in FW.....which was not a lot. In fact.....like, maybe only 1 or 2 things so that I was vehemently refusing to even being open to going back. So, I finally fall in love with being near family again and the children actually getting to grow up with tons of cousins and I fall in love with the rain and the absence of scorpions, rattlesnakes, black widows and the absence of the overall threat to life that is present here. I fall in love with a house on 6 acres with no neighbors that have corncobs forcefully shoved up their rears as I envision myself in this house on a hill with huge picture windows and a chicken coop and a 6 stall barn and fenced and cross fenced with pipe fencing and wood floors and 4 bedrooms and a garden with rainy weather to keep it among the living. I fall in love with being near our midwife again and being near stores. All while I silently still mourn leaving the big country stars, the west TX prairie winds and the love of small town life behind. So, I emotionally detach myself from here in an effort to embrace this new part of our lives and come to terms with leaving the dream that we had here. So....I cry and cry over leaving and finally embrace the newness of returning home to FW, family and a place that I once never wanted to see again. To say that it is an emotional roller coaster doesn't quite seem to do it justice. And we've been doing this for months now. He first tested with Border Patrol and is only weeks away from being offered a job with them. But we have decided against it since he will be required to work 14 hr days 5 days a week and we will be stationed more than likely in another state for 3-5 years. Grayson is coming into an age where Brad needs to be here with him and actively train him up and raise him into the man that he will become instead of choosing this time to be gone more now than ever. So, we finally both decided that family indeed comes first before his profession. But I had to ready myself for months while we went through this process of being able to pick up and leave here with a very huge potential of living in Arizona or even as far as Calif. After we both decided it would sacrifice the family and children to much we then explored the whole going back to FW thing. There were many many different reasons for doing it. Reasons I was so entirely opposed to until I began to see his point of view and the resources we have there that do not exist here. So.....many many months of emotions and turmoil of where to go and what to do. Which leads to this week and this entry....written to a few dear friends 2 nights ago.


More to our ever evolving saga of a life journey with too many directions. Have I ever said I'm kind of sick of this crap? Cause I am. We found out today due to the mess of our last house and the awful reality of what selling it became that our mortgage credit is ruined. We knew that but since we operate debt free except for housing it didn't really matter. And we are almost to the point where we will be operating debt free where housing is concerned. Given the fact that we were going to have a little less than 1/2 of the asking price of the new house to put down we didn't dream we wouldn't be able to get financing for the remainder left. But in setting up an appt today to see the house while we're in FW on Wed we went ahead and called a mortgage company to let them know and go ahead and get preapproved. We can't even get approved!! It's written in our credit report as a "Paid Foreclosure". So..after mourning the thought of leaving here and finally saying my goodbyes emotionally and telling everyone we're moving Brad has deemed this is the "blunt no" that we have prayed for and it's the end of the line. We're staying here. What the crap???? Alright..in the last few months I have done nothing but obsess over every negative thing about this place to get my heart to let go of it. Because I have loved it here. So...I finally got really really excited about moving once we found our little dream home that we could afford and grow old in. And now this? I told him I wouldn't take just 1 mortgage company's answer as the end and to keep checking since somebody would work with us. But he is pretty sure that this is the shut door we have asked the Lord for. So....after getting so excited about living close to my sister and her crew again and being close to my midwife and stores again we're back in the boat we started in......like, we just got out of it and swam in circles and then got back in. I cried all night tonight. I was mad at him, mad at the whole situation, mad about being asked to leave, made about staying here, mad about being so emotional about all of it and just wanting to settle in permanently somewhere. I'm not quite the drifter he is and I'm tired of the whole move/stay here game. And rarely in my life have I ever been mad at him or mad about anything much in general. I remain pretty even keeled about most of life.

Sooooo......after screaming and yelling at the kids due to my emotional issues I finally came out of my room and told them.....at 9pm....to load up and we were taking off for Sonic to get away. At this point I had been on the phone with him for an hour and nobody had eaten and they were all starved....and supposed to have been in bed an hour and a half ago. So...Grayson and Evye load them all up while I put shoes and socks on me and feed Gavin. So Aubrey, Garrison, Grant and Garrett are all buckled up in their carseats for 20 or so minutes while they wait on me. I finally make my way out there and Grayson informed me that our passenger door is now broken. Now, I love the van but it has some issues. I would never gripe about it because it has been such a huge blessing to us and it was indeed a gift from God. But firstly...the arm rest swings round and round in circles on the passenger seat. Secondly, you can't unlock the passenger door or the backdoor with the key for whatever crapped out reason. Thirdly, you can't open the door to the back seats from the inside. Someone has to get out of the front passenger side and let everybody in the back out. So now....the passenger door is now broken and you can open it from the inside but not the outside. So...front passenger door opens from inside not out and back passenger door opens from outside not in. Oh my freakin gosh. The day wasn't getting any better. So Grayson, in his attempt to show me the obvious screw up, shuts the door and says, "See, you can't open it." I was irritated and told him something to the effect that I never doubted him to begin with. I instructed him to just get in and so he goes to open the door he can open and it's locked. Now granted...when we bought this piece of crap it came with 1...yes 1....only 1....key. It was not on a keychain or anything. Just a lone key that screamed it would be lost or locked within in only a matter of months....and with our life probably only weeks. So with the van running and the heater going full blast due to the last time we were in it and it is now 75 outside the 4 are locked within. I'd had it by that point and I screamed and vented and jumped up and down and basically threw an all out fit. After trying to coax Aubrey for an hour to get past the pain and lean as far up as she could to punch the lock button she failed miserably to do so and I grew even more frustrated.....if that's possible. We tried everything. I tried getting her to unbuckle her seat from the seat of the van so she could stand up with her carseat just glued to her butt but that didn't work. She got her chest piece undone but never could get her legs out from the 5 point. And yes....we did this for an hour....and they'd already been in there for 20 minutes before this escapade. By this time I was back to crying again. And by this time I was REALLY mad at Brad because I have asked him so many times to go get a copy of the key made. So I called him crying and told him he ruined the day and I was stuck here when I was ready to move home and nothing in life ever stayed the same and why does God require you to be willing to up and leave and force one to emotionally separate yourself from a thing or place only to dump you right back in it and leave you where you started and now the children were all locked in the van and I couldn't get them out. He was trying to comfort me until I got to that little part about the children and then he suddenly said, "What??????" I said crying, "Yea! They're all stuck out there and no one can get to them and it's been over an hour now." He ended up calling the water dude.....the same dude that fessed up to Brad that he wants to do me, so I now think he's the grossest thing around......and gets him to come over and bail me out. Ummmmm.....yea....thanks, honey. This is still snowballing downhill uncontrollably.....do you see that??? So the water dude works on it for another 20 minutes and finally unscrews the window where Aubrey is so that we can pull it open a little farther. I finally get my whole arm in there and press the release latch on her legs. She bails out and immediately unlocks the doors. The dude's so paranoid that I'm gonna forget the pins are out of the window and it's going to blow off while in transit that he gets into the van and starts putting the pins back in after he told me to just have Brad do it when he gets home in the morning. So...now he's inside our van and we're unloading since it's way past 10 and everything in small town Texas has been closed for over an hour. Grant's wailing that he didn't get Sonic, Aubrey's on cloud nine that she saved the day and is proclaiming her lifesaving heroic deeds to anyone and everyone that will...or will not....listen (it didn't really seem to matter to her) and it's pretty much chaos. Somewhere in there somebody shut the water dude in the van and seeing as how you can't open the door from the inside he was now stuck. I have no clue for how long. Aubrey pointed to it saying..."Oh look mom, the man's stuck in the van!!!!" I looked out to see every van door shut and since the windows are tinted you couldn't see much inside. I stared in horror as I instructed them to go set him free. Once they open the van door he 1/2 stumbled 1/2 fell out and said "Uh....Uh....look kids.....don't do that again." By this time I'm so emotionally drained that I start laughing and then I couldn't quit laughing and continued to laugh hysterically in a now sociopathic, emotionally overwrought way. Apparently he has claustrophobia issues and that didn't do much for his cause. He stammered and stuttered and said that was the last time he'd ever climb into that van and then left. I fed everybody a bowl of cereal and some choc chip cookies and sent them all to bed.

So, that's how my day ended. I'm tired, drained and depressed....though I did get a good laugh after watching him get jailed in our van and then fall out of it upon his release. I'm tired beyond all exhaustion. Tired doesn't even come close to doing it justice. I can hardly stay awake. And my heartburn is so bad I think I might puke if I don't eat the whole bottle of Tums before then.


Oh yea.......can't forget....the frig door never got locked yesterday and Garrett ate an entire 6 pk of yogurt by himself. As a result, due to his lactose intolerant digestive tract, he had diarrhea in the worst way. So I went to change his 15th crappy diaper before I put him to bed. After the change I went to roll it up and secure it a little too forcefully in my tense state, I suppose. I figured that little part out about the time green runny poop shot out of it at lightening force speeds and hit my hand and spray painted the floor.....and when the brute force was over it then just fell in green runny plops onto the wood. I guess I rolled it up a little too tight in my irritable mood. I was so mad by that point I chunked it at the floor with my unpoooped on hand and, just as forensics would have it, it then exploded into a green diarrhea bomb upon meeting up with the floor. Needless to say....I wasn't very happy.


And then to top all of this off, we finally received the final "no" from the one last shot we had at it and that mortgage dude also said it wasn't do-able to try and finance it...despite the amount of money we have going into it. Not to mention what a drastically hard time we would have selling the house we're in due to the market. He said plenty of people will want it buy it but pretty much no one can buy it. No one's getting financed right now. So....I was still mad about it. I finally laid down and just took a 2 1/2 hr nap while Brad kept the older 2 quiet and oversaw chores and the little ones all slept. I still wasn't all together with it when I woke up and in my little funk of an attitude was still moping around. Somehow I ended up tripping over the mop handle that was drooping out of the mop bucket and took a nose dive into the floor. Ummmm.....can we say graceful at its finest???? Thankfully Brad was outside when it happened and walked in just in time to see me pulling myself up off the floor. I fell shoulder first into the floor and then deflated my right boob and then took out what little is left of the right side of my brain. I think that's the thinking side so I'm relatively sure most of it was already gone anyway. My right shoulder now burns beyond all measure and my boob is trying desperately to air itself back up. As soon as Brad walked through the door he was met by 52 kids all trying to outshout each other telling him of my less than graceful catastrophe. So the rest of the day Aubrey walks around the house saying "Mom!!! Mom!!!! Why'd you just do that? Why'd you just fall like this?" as she'd throw herself violently onto the floor and make huge resounding thuds through the house. Yes, Aubrey. Thank you. I think I got that part when I personally experienced it earlier.

So, now here we are back where we started. What is that saying about how you search the world over to find yourself only to return home to find it? Yep....that's where we are. So, once again I am allowing myself to fully embrace where we are in life and fall head over heels in love again with our little home off the dirt road with the neighbors that have corncobs inconveniently misplaced within their bodies. I have embrace our stars and the night sky, the hail storms, the wind and the seldom traveled roads out here. I have fallen back in love with the Kickapoo and meandering wandering curvy drives out to the lake and the thousands of historical markers that I was mourning the loss of never reading before we left. So, here we are back where we started and I am once again in love with life and the new family and people God has so lovingly surrounded us with here.