That's a GREAT idea!

In the last few weeks I've been thinking about divorce. Mine is looming large off in the distance.  I have to be honest I was not having any fun with that little nugget of knowledge. I was trying to think about how it would be civil between he and I, a win win. I didn't want to end up like my parents or my brother during their divorces. Keep it friendly............

Until I woke up one morning and realized staying married served no purpose to me. Every day for several years I've heard Walter (the soon to be Ex) criticize everything in great detail that he hates about both of his sons, his home, his life, his job, his wife. Why on earth did I want to stay married to that? Doing so, in my mind, would legitimately make me crazy!   
So I changed my medications from Prozac, Trazadone, and Ativan to Zoloft, Trazadone, and Ativan. That little cocktail of magic made all the difference. I got back into my battle gear and adopted the attitude of Bring it asshole! Yes, I've spent 20 years trying and crying. But it hasn't all been a total loss. I have two beautiful and smart sons. They can't stand their father any more which does make me sad but I've been warning Walter about this for years. They have gotten wise to his shenanigans and they have told me they aren't walking on egg shells for him any more. THAT was the wake up call I needed.  I'm done. Walter has screwed with me for the last time. He has burned all bridges with me and quite a few with his sons. This is all on him. It's not mine to fix any more. I can't tell you how happy I feel inside knowing that this problem is too big for me and that I can't fix it. I've done more than my fair share of both sabotaging and repairing.  Walter has made it more than clear that he hates having the responsibilities called wife and kids waiting for him at the end of every day. He has made it more than clear that he really has no emotional attachment to his family, that he comes first and foremost. I am not a " parasite" and neither are his kids ( they are teens and everything that is mine is theirs and so on)! I have brought more to any table than Walter could ever hope for, I have a purpose and I am important.

    I leave you with this........

My decision was made easy by his attitude alone but made etched in concrete this morning when he decided to go to Douglas with his "friend" and left NOTHING for his family to munch on in his absence. I would never allow any of my female readers to be treated like that so why would I allow MYSELF to continue to be treated like that? I  don't love him, I don't want to love him anymore because having loved him once cost me a great deal! I will survive without him because I've been doing that for the last 20 years. I will never cry because of him or for him, I'll cry happy tears when my sons and I share milestones. I almost hate to say it like this, but Walter is dead to me now. His loss, not mine.

P.S.  I think I have a divorce party when it's all over with.....yeah....that sounds like a great idea!

The darkness inside

                     The above video is a joke....the first time I heard it I laughed. 

Recently however I've begun to see just how truthful that might actually be. I spent 4 days in a crisis center because I foolishly tried to commit twice. If you've read earlier blogs you will know why. I had hoped that this crisis center would put me back together again like Humpty Dumpty but I soon realized it was only a churn and burn facility. They gave us handouts and goals for the day and we were always in some group or another. I was the only one who had tried suicide all by itself, there were others there that tried to do it while on a drunken binge, there were others who had just lost a loved one and did a handful of pain meds and booze.....there were even people that just got too drunk and fell over into a coffee table gouging an eye. we were all the same yet not the same. We were there because we had all screamed for help. And we found help in each other.  But at the end of the day the staff's goal was to send 2 home and take in 3 more. The shrink at this facility asked me two simple questions: "do you still feel suicidal? Do you want to hurt anyone else?  The answer was no to both and I went home with in the hour.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. In recent news reports I've been seeing that the country is still hotly divided by gun control vs health care for the mentally ill. The problem has now been shifted to making it harder for someone like Jerrold Loughner to get guns. Clearly he was a nut job but he was still able to legally purchase guns. So the real question should be how do we weed out the nut jobs from everyone else? I heard on one news report that a very small fraction of mental health care facilities ever report to the state or Federal agencies the people that need special watching over! The scary part for me is that if all crisis centers are over crowded and have to roll the dice on the lesser of two evils then there simply is no way to keep society safe. I used my time there to get my feet back under myself but I learned very  quickly what the right answers were, what the rules were. But just what would happen if I was a another Loughner? Just smart enough to play the game and get out but still very angry at society, at the man. Clearly this happens not just in Arizona or Connecticut or Colorado.....it is a country wide epidemic! Somehow we've missed the warning signs or worse yet we ignored the warning signs. Even more alarming is that the facilities designed to house people like Loughner are simply overwhelmed, over crowded and under staffed. So how do we handle it?

One possible solution could include the ability for police officers to obtain anyone suspected of being mentally unfit. STORY HERE   This gives the officers more freedom but also lends to more police violence like we've seen in recent years and creates a bigger mess within society. So really? What do we do about this?

 I leave you with this......

I read a book once, probably something that Stephen King wrote in where humanity had been equipped with tiny micro chips...very similar to those we inject into our favorite pets so they can never be lost or stolen. Tis micro chips contain everything about that particular human: height, age, weight, criminal background, bank account information, family members, blood type. What if we adopted something like that for our mentally unfit members of society? Since keeping them housed in an asylum someone doesn't seem to work ( refer to PennHurst, Waverly Hills etc.) then a GPS type device can better monitor the Loughnor's of this world and perhaps stop mass shootings?? Sure, it sounds like spooky, some might even think it's an "envasion of privacy" but I'd much rather have something like that in place than see another school full of 1st graders gunned down. I'd rather have that type of Science Fiction in place than see another movie theater full of movie goers gunned down.......It's just possible that society has come to this point, yes?