I am a creature of habit. I am almost positive that I have undiagnosed OCD, and I like for my routine to be the same every day. I do things at the same times, put things in the same places.. you get the idea. This is EXTREMELY helpful when you are taking care of a baby on your own, going to college full time and working part time. It puts the chaos into a sense of order and staves off random emotional breakdowns. It’s also fucking monotonous. It’s hard to balance the need for every day to be the same, and getting bored as shit because every day is the same. I’m crazy like this. I had for the most part settled into my new life, and I desperately needed something new and exciting.

My daughter was toddling around like a pro, weaned off of bottles effortlessly, and aside from a few raging ear infections and inevitable tubes – she was the picture of perfect health and happiness. Check. My grades were decent, I was doing well at my job, the relationship with the new [ex] boyfriend was (for that period of time), going smoothly. Check. My new friendship with the neighbor chick had been blooming.. we spent many nights sitting on the picnic tables between our buildings smoking cigarettes, sharing stories and making plans. We wanted to get out of the tiny ass one bedroom apartments and into a REAL apartment, away from the annoyances of a college campus and horny skankified college kids frolicking around us like morons.

So we did. We researched, we toured places, we signed a lease and moved in together. I should have seen the red flags go up from day 1 when she demanded to have the master bedroom and I was left to share the smaller bedroom with my daughter. She made a good point at the time – I would have baby toys and “equipment” in the living and dining areas, she needed a space that was her own… blah blah. I wasn’t going to argue, I was just excited to get the fuck off of the campus and into some bigger space! The first couple months were fun: I had someone to talk to at home that did more than babble at me, we painted the walls, couldn’t afford furniture so we blew up an air mattress in the living room, cooked food.. it was glorious. Until I actually got to know her. She started complaining about weird things, “why does your boyfriend lay on the floor?” “Because we don’t have a couch.” “He could sit on the air mattress or bring the patio chair in.” “He’d rather lay on the floor…..”

She never left the living room. If I wanted “privacy” with the boyfriend, I would have to haul my kid 25 minutes down the road to his parent’s house to stay the night there. We started doing that a lot because anytime he came over, she sat with us in the living room and picked fights. Why did I ever like this crazy bitch to begin with? Then it was how many toys my daughter had, and the food I fed her for dinner, and not letting her use my food stamps to go grocery shopping, and the way I disciplined the kid, and the major I chose, and my choice to do school work late at night, and my friends when they rarely came to visit. That was the final fucking straw, we were 5 months into the roommate thing and I started mentally planning the time I would suffocate her with a pillow in the middle of the night (and that was the nice version, plan B).

She was going back to “her country” for 5 weeks over Christmas break, finally a breath of fresh air. We had gotten to the point where we barely realized each other existed, and actively avoided being near one another. So she packed her things and left, and I partied like it was 1999. The next day I couldn’t figure out why our cable and internet weren’t working.. I called the provider.. turns out the modem had been unplugged. Guess where that was located? In my roommate’s locked bedroom. So I did what any other person with a brain would do and broke in using a credit card (um, what kind of stupid bank gave my dumbass a credit card?), plugged the shit back in, locked the door and let her know that when she returned, she needed to find a new fucking place to live.

Life was better then, I struggled paying both halves of the bills on my own but I was a fucking pro at stretching a dollar by then and made it work every month. I had a big ass bedroom to myself! My daughter’s toys were strewn happily through the entire place (in an extremely organized sense of course), and I had all the private time I wanted. 

Did I mention I had turned 21 in that period of time?  Skipped all my classes on my birthday to go to bars, and sobered up just in time to go to the first of 7 required parenting classes that meant I could continue getting welfare. What a fucking blast, right? Don’t forget, being on welfare IS a full time job. I’ve been blowing through this story like a $2 hooker so someday I will revisit all the woes associated with state “assistance.” Just for fun, here I am at 11am that day:

That Spring I got adventurous, I had life figured out damnit. I was 21 years old, dominating 5 or 6 classes every semester, raising the absolutely most perfect child to ever walk the earth and had a completely easy relationship (turns out if half of the relationship has a “whatever” attitude and the other half is too busy to notice, things move along just fine). I was mending the strained relationship with my mother, seeing my family more, having friends over more often and feeling pretty fucking good about myself. I came into my own during this time, and finally caught the break I had been dreaming of.

I have to stop to say that I love this picture. Look at how skinny I was! Drinking copious amounts of beer has since screwed that shit up. And are you itching to ask me if my daughter is mixed? She is, I get that question a lot. Get the fuck over it I’m not offended. Anyway, that Spring I had to quit my job as a property & casualty insurance agent (hell yeah I was selling insurance, I didn’t want a bullshit job I had a mouth to feed!), and started a full-time internship at a non-profit agency helping dislocated homemakers find jobs. Google that because I know you’re scratching your head going uhhh dislocated who? This internship meant two things: 1- I was getting close enough to the end of my college career to have an internship YAY! And 2- I started meeting important people that helped shaped the next few years of my life and open doors that took me to places I didn’t really deserve to be.

I started figuring out how to be in the right place at the right time from this point forward.

In my personal life, this meant finding out something catastrophic, kicking the boyfriend [fiance?] to the curb… more depression.. failed classes. The last year of college was somehow harder than the first… Next up, Step 4: Closing Doors and Opening Windows