The Morning After

After a stressful week with travel and work, I came home to deal with the stress of taking the oldest to the psychiatrist.  His recommendation is to pull her out of school, but not do a GED.

In research, I have found alternative ways for her to get her high school diploma.  There are two or three well known universities that have programs for distance learning for high school kids that are not being served by their schools.  Basically, home schooling with all the course work available from the university via the internet.

I’ve already discussed the issue with the Ex and based on the conversation with the Vice Principal, he is all aboard, although he wants to fight the school a tad longer to make a point of how the needs of highly gifted and emotionally stressed kids is not being met.

I now have a deadline.  I need to get a program picked, official transcripts picked up, kid withdrawn from current school and enrolled in new high school with at least two weeks of attendance by December 12th.

of parenting and other vagaries in life

The oldest child asked me if I would home school her last night.  She has been asking for the last year or so, but last night she was finally able to make her case in a way that I understood.  She is struggling to function at school - not because of the work she is tasked with, but because she is emotionally/mentally unable to deal with the sheer volume of kids - the noise level, the number of kids in each class as well as in the hall.

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Road Warrior Princess

Edited by the light of day 09/10/08 …much too morose, so please forgive me.  I had promised myself that I would speak my mind if I was going to blog and I have been.  I need to remember that sometimes, diarrhea of the mouth/hands/keyboard isn’t always the best way to attract or keep readers.  I hope my friends, however, will totally understand I’m just a little…..blue this week….

Original post is not deleted, it is, however, tucked away so that you will have to CLICK if you want some Wine.  Sorry, but the cheese plate is sold out today.  Promise to pick up more cheese soon….

Love,

Paula

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Of Writing and houses and children and ex-husbands….

A good friend of mine is at a Writer’s Conference, and each evening I am hearing a snippet of how things are going.  It is one of the scariest prospects I can think of, to put my ideas and writings out there for someone to really critique, but a part of me wants that.  I mean, I do the regular piece every month or so, but that doesn’t in any way invite critique.  I haven’t had a piece of writing truly critiqued since I wrote some fan fiction about severn or eight years ago.  She is encouraging me to go to one of the future workshops.  At times, I think I have it in me, but at other times I have absolutely no confidence in the emails I write, let alone a short story or a chapter to a novel.

Being home instead of on the road is a challenge for me, to be flat out honest.  Because I have been gone more than home, I have no semblence of a life here.  The consideration of moving has been on my radar for quite awhile, probably the last year or so, but I am feeling it a bit more lately.  I MISS home, but with 90% of  my time spent not at home, it’s just weird to be here.  I don’t know what that says about me as a person that I’d rather be in a hotel.  I feel suffocated. I am at Starbucks writing instead of being there.

I think part of it goes back to the divorce.  We moved into that house before our first anniversary and I ended up keeping it as my residence after the divorce.  At first, I tried to make it my own.  I re-did the bedroom first, did a little bit of painting here and there, etc.  It was my children’s home, and because I needed to be the “good mother” and do “what was right” for them, I fought to keep it so they wouldn’t have to move from the only home they ever knew.  As many mothers do, I sacrificed my feelings for place.

I dated and invited “The Boy” as well as “Buddy” into my home, and at times they exorcised the demons left behind of my ex-husband.  It was the site of a love-affair with a woman that turned  bad, that put me in a position of not trusting women easily, either.  Part of that changed when I took a career detour and pretty much stopped dating.    I went over a year with with my bed there being the site of nothing but sleeping alone, until “The Boy” visited this past November for a couple of different nights.  Now, with the oldest being the main occupant there, and the fact that her boyfriend half lives there, too, it just doesn’t feel like mine.

I don’t know what I’m going to do yet about it.  It’s entangled in the divorce decree still and in order to obtain the full equity I would have to sign off on the retirement of his that is mine.  And right now, that is a losing proposition.

Speaking of the ex-husband, I am wondering how much longer he is going to keep the youngest.

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