Hi MIP family! It's been a while.

I've enjoyed my day today. Not that anything went especially right, but I enjoyed it anyway.

For starters, it has been school holidays (again). Daughter was to spend this week at her fathers (she wanted to go), and she's been emailing me every day to tell me she's bored, and every night she's been emailing me relentlessly from 8:30PM onwards because that's when they decree she should go to bed and she finds that very hard to adjust to as we are not early retirees at home. So I've been painfully aware all week that she was not enjoying herself and last night she called me from her step-mothers phone begging me to come and get her early. She was rude and angry when I explained I couldn't come early. In fact she hung up on me. Anyway I thought about it afterwards and realised that if step-mother allowed her to call me from her phone things might be going sideways. So this morning I sent face-ache's wife a message asking if it would be convenient to collect my offspring early and I swear she replied before I had even SENT the text with "YES WHAT TIME CAN YOU COME".  So I cancelled all of my plans and spent the day sitting on the train, in the warm spring sunshine reading a book and drinking coffee. When I arrived, stepmother and young children and daughter all looked miserable and angry and my jolly 'hello, isn't it a beautiful day" was met with frowns, even from the little kids. I laughed a little inside. Daughter was rude and grumpy but I had come prepared with the book I know she has been reading and I handed her that and continued reading my book all the way home again. Ha. What a day. Almost a little vacation really. Call me simple, but I like to read on the train. It's very relaxing.

I gleaned from daughter that nothing significant had been wrong, her dad had just been working every day and her stepmother had been in a bad mood and tired and not enjoying the delights of mothering her small children this week and everything was boring and no-one bought her anything or treated her like a princess and life was terribly terribly unfair and ordinary. Oh well. Onwards and upwards, kid. Here, have a book! Read on the train! It's great! She was super-thrilled with this suggestion, as you can imagine. Lol. I felt good about it because daughter is always rude and angry when I collect her from her visits to her father and usually I get very upset about it. Not today. Today I had remembered to pack myself a thermos full of serenity.

I've had a good sort of a week really. I quit that delivery job last week as the 3rd and final time I did it, there was so much material that it took 2 car trips to bring it all home and it took me 2 full days of really heavy lifting to get it done and I earned a whopping $55 for my trouble (good grief). I don't mind a bit of hard work but this was absurd; I was actually crying a lot of the time because the job was so overwhelming and ridiculous the last time and I hurt my back, and the pay was approximately 1/6 of the minimum legal wage. It was kind of a nightmare.

So there is no immediate replacement work around and I decided to think outside the box. Currently, I spend quite a lot on takeaway and convenience food because i'm just so freaking tired and busy. It doesn't make a lot of sense to work for 2 days and earn enough to buy 2 pizzas does it? I waste about $120 a week on takeaway food. Also I've been paying a guy $60 to mow my lawn...it takes him an hour. Come on, this isn't logical. So this week I went out and spent some money on a food processor, a blender, a juicer, a yoghurt maker and a spiraliser. Yes I'm laughing as I am writing this. It sounds absurd but it isn't really. I can spend a couple of afternoons each week pre-making healthy meals  while I listen to my online lectures. I think this is better than crying while I work and then spending the money on pizza and then crying because I can't do up my jeans the next day. lol. So this week I had some free time and spent it clearing out the kitchen and turning it into a nice work area. Pre-motherhood I actually worked for about 10 years as a sous chef and I used to love to cook and then over the years I just stopped enjoying cooking and started to resent it. It feels like progress, another step out of the darkness or something.  This might all sound trivial, or like very silly logic perhaps but ...I used to cook professionally and I study nutritional medicine as a large part of my course. I spent years cooking my heart out for Abf every night (and half the time he literally threw it at me) and trying to look after his health. I cook a nutritious tasty meal for my daughter each night (when we don't succumb to gluten free pizza or fish n chips). I make sure everyone else enjoys their food and receives carefully thought out nutrition. And for me, a cheese sandwich or a fried egg on toast. It has been this way for years. So I feel pleased to suddenly have an enthusiasm for feeding myself properly. It means something. In the past week I've made my own peanut butter, a vegetarian pasta-free lasagne (lol), coconut milk yoghurt, a bunch of surprisingly delicious raw-vegan meals and a few hundred smoothies. I think I could get used to eating well again. I think this is a good result after a bad working experience. I'll buy a mower too, next week, and mow the lawn myself and over the next couple of months it'll all average out a lot better than the way I was trying to do it, earning a few $$ an hour and then paying for stuff I don't need. Much more sensible.

In other news, A has spent some time here this week, while daughter was away. I've driven him to a few job interviews and he's helped me fix up some things around the house. He's been mostly really nice and then a couple of times drunk and stupid. I've enjoyed his company for the most part, and been reminded of why we cannot live together as well. When he is drunk I can't stand him. The droning; the nonsense. But I haven't felt annoyed with him for drinking because that's what he does and I still wanted to see him so, it is what it is. The rest of the time he really has been pretty lovely to be with and I'm glad I can enjoy the good parts of him now without being blinded by fury over the parts I don't like. We went for a night out (my first night out in literally years) and had a really nice meal, afterwards we went to play pool and after a few really fun hours he got horribly drunk and I ended up dragging him away from a fight  and when we arrived home he puked and peed all over the laundry and passed out in the yard. Once again, great reminders of why we can't live together. In the morning I was struck by the fact that I didn't feel the need to tell him what he had said and done; I had no urge to make him feel bad, I just handed him a mop and pointed out the places where he had defiled the house and was grateful that we don't have carpet here, just tiles and floorboards, and that was it. He mopped the whole house quite thoroughly when he was done with the laundry. We had breakfast, and enjoyed a lazy Sunday. It was nice. I don't pretend to know if it's good or bad that we are still having this part time relationship that can't become live-in but for the moment I'm quite happy to enjoy the parts of him that I enjoy and not have to live with any of the nightmare bits. Another night he drank and ended up in the bath. I felt like i couldn't go to sleep as he has seizures when he drinks and the thought of him having a seizure when he is in the water is terrifying. So i had to keep checking he was alive and he eventually passed out in there and I was awake all night checking that he wasn't drowning. A few times he was passed out with his face underwater. How does this guy stay alive when i am not supervising? It's an interesting question really.... The crap i used to live with...thinking I must be constantly vigilant, like a full-time case-worker and nurse. Wow. It's intense and so stressful. I can't and won't live with it again, mostly because of the way I react. Yet the rest of the time was so nice. He's also gambling again and a few times he tried to start a fight about it because "i suppose you have a problem with me gambling but let me tell you...." but I don't have a problem with it, I truly don't. This week he paid me the last installment of the money he had owed me for 8 years.....in full. I'm happy and grateful that he has finally respected me enough to repay me those $$$thousands. I've put them to good use.  He now doesn't owe me money and our finances aren't tied together in any way now so, why should it worry me if he is gambling? I couldn't give a pickled fig. Break the bank, honey.

Anyway, good or bad, I like the fact that I can enjoy the good parts of him without expectations of anything else. I still don't know what it means for the long term. Perhaps I'm still quite immature and un-recovered and I like a relationship where there are no expectations on me at all. I don't know. It's workable for me, for now, anyway. I'm happy with where I am at. It's a lot better than it was 12 months ago. And probably a lot less better than it will be in another 12 months.

In still other news, I am gunning through my uni work and I've found a teacher that has become a mentor of sorts. I first got into natural medicine because I witnessed myself and my siblings suffer really bad effects from pharmaceutical drugs meant for anxiety and depression. Not to criticise the drugs, mind you, they can be great for some folk, but they don't work for everyone and my long term goal has always been to specialise in mood disorders and alternative treatments. Anyway after a few years of study and feeling really quite alien from the teachers and students, I've happened across a teacher who really understands and supports the direction I want to take with my study and eventual practice. So I've been feeling very enthused by her encouragement and I have taken on even more subjects online for now, and on campus for summer school which begins in 2 months...it's a huge undertaking. But I'm finally moving through it and there is light at the end of the tunnel. I'm starting to think I will actually be a qualified professional one of these days, doing an actual job and making an actual difference. I can almost touch it...