Keep Your Eyes on The Road, Your Hands Upon The Wheel

This disease can tear someone up. Not just the afflicted. People will use your child’s illness as an excuse for all types of behavior.

Myself, I have used it as an excuse to gain a lot of weight, quit exercising and just do the bare minimum to get by. I have also used it as an excuse to get very mad. I am very protective of this kid–all three of them, actually. Ask the woman who got a call from me on Thanksgiving Day as a result of her daughter bullying my daughter.

I am no angel. However, I have drawn the line a good while back about certain behaviours and when I entrust my son with AML to certain folks, I really expect them to tow the line. Suffice it to say, we had an incident and I have lost the remainder of my family aside from my eldest brother. It’s been a pressure cooker. It finally blew.

I’m almost glad it did. Now we can just move forward with this journey with no distractions. I don’t have to be angry anymore. I don’t have to be co-dependent. I don’t have to be involved with unhealthy relationships which make me feel like saying unhealthy things. I do not have to win.

There is an old adage: Do You Want To Be Right? Or Do You Want To Be Happy? I can’t be totally happy right now but I do not have to be right.  I don’t owe anyone anything. Eh, I probably owe my mother an apology because she doesn’t see things my way and that is purely none of my business. I can move forward, like many many other people do without a family of origin. I do not have to be right. I can endure sickening verbal abuse and retaliate verbally or I can simply not respond. I can give the assailant enough rope to hang himself. I can be the bigger person. I WILL be the bigger person.

I will focus on our journey. This will just be a chapter in Ashton’s journey to recovery. It will only be a blip, not even a chapter. He may outlive the assailant. I hope will all live until we are ready to die. I do not have to stoop to the level of anyone beneath me by responding.

I really messed up today. I refused to let somebody win. Now that the sun is going down, the thunder is starting (the real thunder outside, not in my heart), I see where my ego would not let me give up. I was so hurt, so I got so angry and I did not check myself.

(You gotta check yo’self before you wreck yo’self) <Scott Trent.

Team Ashton just got a little smaller and that’s my fault for speaking my mind first appropriately and then, inappropriately out of anger.

Team Ashton will still prevail.

Got my eye back on the BALL.