You are braver than you think......

I have decided to begin working towards my PhD.  I love teaching at the college level.  To further my career at this level, I think a PhD will be beneficial.  I was thinking on my way to work this morning about how very difficult this task is going to be.  I have been thinking of putting it off, because the work load will be tremendous.  I am not certain I want to dedicate myself to that right now.  I recently moved to my dream house, and I have so much to do there.  Next year, both kids will be involved in sports, and shouldn't I wait until they are older?

I've come to the realization that I keep coming up with 800 million reasons why I can't do this right now because I am truly scared.  I am not afraid that I am not smart enough, I know that I am.  I have not forgotten graduate school, and that was really hard!  It was not hard because of what we had to learn, it was hard because the workload was do or die!  If you can survive this, you will get that MBA.  Of course I did.  I have never failed at a single thing I put my mind to completing.  It is a reasonable fear because there are not many people in the world that are successful at this level.  I have had all these things going through my mind, choking my reason and sanity.  Then I thought about this quote a colleague of mine got in his going away card last week (you know how I love quotes!).
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.  Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.-Vaclav Havel (1936)

I think about this and it makes me smile.  It is a good and noble thing to teach these students.  It is a great and wonderful thing to help them accomplish their dreams.  I can do this, and I can do this even better once I manage to obtain this PhD.  So, I am going to keep studying and kill this GRE.  I will get this done, because it is important to me and to the future of my family.  There is also a tiny vain part of me in there somewhere that can't wait for you all to call me Dr. Kathy!

Good day to you all, until next time.  Remember to keep hoping, because you are braver than you think.  KB

A Season for Change

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” George Bernard Shaw



Change often requires a great deal of courage.  Courage for change is something I lack.  I think of my everyday existence, and am always amazed at how very much a creature of habit that I am.  I wake up at (about) the same time everyday.  I go directly to my coffee pot & make coffee.  I stand there and stare at the machine, willing it to make the coffee just a little faster.  Of course, it never does!  I make a cup, stirring in my sweet-n-low and creamer, and take my first drink.  That is the most magical moment of my morning.  I kill the first cup quickly, and now I can grudgingly face the day.  I get ready, straighten up around the house a bit, go to work, run errands, pick up kids and go back home.  Every week day is the same, and I really like that they are the same.  As I mentioned, I am a creature of extreme habit.  I am sure that there are many of you out there a lot like that.  We all have our routines that help to manage our cozy lives.
I need to make some changes, and I dread the very thought of it.  I need to get up every morning and exercise.  At almost 35, the cheeseburgers linger on my thighs now.  Nobody likes cheeseburger thighs.  I need to drink less caffeine, eat less junk food and definitely quit smoking cigarettes.  I need to learn to face the morning with a smile, although I doubt very seriously that is ever going to happen, because I am not a morning person.
I love my coffee, cheeseburgers and even my stinky cigarettes!  I don't want to give them up.  I lack the courage of my convictions.  I am a chicken!  
The simple truth behind all of this is that I am not very likely to live to be an old grandmother if I do not kick my unhealthy habits. Like Mr. Bernard says, progress is not possible without change.  
Change is difficult in other circumstances as well.  There is a time and season for everything and everyone also.  There are times when people are relevant to your life, and then they are not anymore.  This may occur for any number of reasons, and it does not necessarily mean that you do not care for them still.  That is just how the world turns!
 Change happens, life goes on and hopefully in there somewhere, we make a little progress.

That is all I have for today.  Did I mention that I hate Mondays??  Have a great week.  KB

Her Broken Halo

So much of everything I think and feel about things in life is a reflection of my Meme.  She taught me everything.  She taught me to read, everything about God and the Bible (in the true Southern Baptist ideals of course) and that it was a good idea to follow the Ten Commandments, simply because they were all good ideas, whether we have proof of God or not.  She taught me to be a good student, to cook and to work hard, because that woman, Lord did she have a list of chores for us all!
She also taught me that no matter how wonderful a person is to us in our minds, we are all humans.  We all sin, suffer, fail and most of us are broken in some way.  It is these things about each other that we should cherish and celebrate. We should not despise or judge others for sinning differently than we do.
She was my savior also.  She took me in when my folks gave me away.  She was an angel to me.  In my coming of age years, I discovered just how really human she was, and I became very angry with her.  I will not discuss all of her mistakes because those are very private situations that need not be shared with the world.  However, to me, they were unforgivable.
I look back on so much of my life at this point and realize so much has been guided by anger.  This anger that has infected my soul for so long has become too much of a burden to carry.  Meme has always said that everything happens for a reason, and for every season there is a change.  (That is my next blog topic.) Dare I say that since my sister died, I can be so much more honest with myself.  I am not sure why this is the case.  Maybe my broken heart let loose all that grief and anger.  I can't explain it, but I am glad.  I feel as though a weight has been lifted, and I am free to love again.  I forgive so much easier, am far less quick to judge anyone (like I have any room to talk anyway) and am just grateful for my life every single day.
I have heard countless times that you pay for your raising.  I find this to be true, now, more than ever.   I was raised to love and be loved.  Thank God my for my angel with a broken halo. 

Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!

Today I read an article about all of the posts we make on social media, specifically Facebook (FB).  The lady in the article posted three pictures of herself and her family.  They were all happy and smiling together.  She went on to say that while these pictures painted a beautiful picture of her family, they were basically a lie.  The pictures did not show the fight she had gotten into with her husband earlier that day, and the other one did not show that she was deeply sad about the fact that she had been wait-listed by her adoption agency.  She said we need to stop only showing the world the positive aspects of our lives, while leaving out the negative.  I am going to have to strongly disagree.  We are not all liars, we just all do not find it necessary to air our dirty laundry on social media.

Social media is a slippery slope to begin with.  It allows people to monitor our moods, movements, accomplishments and every other aspect of our life that we choose to share.  In my hometown of Covington, TN, our beloved Fire Chief was recently forced to resign for posting his personal opinion on FB.  In my opinion, this was completely ludicrous.  An entire lifetime of work resulted in a negative ending, all due to FB.

So based on this example, I say let's keep it positive people!  If I pull up FB and see that one of my friends is always being Negative Ned or Negative Nancy, they will quickly become unfriended.  Sure, all aspects of life have negative sides.  Good and bad things happen every single day to everyone.  I think you should keep all that negative crap to yourself, because I certainly do not want to hear it.  Like my Meme always used to say, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

We Only Regret the Chances We Didn't Take

"You were given this life because you are strong enough to live it." Unknown

As usual, some catchy quote has me thinking about it's application to my existence.  As most of you who read my blog are aware, I was not raised by my birth parents.  I had the great pleasure of having my mom as a mother, and even though she is terribly flawed and drives me crazy, I am eternally grateful that I get to call her my mom.  I had the opportunity to meet my birth mother before she died last year.  She contacted me via Facebook, and I gave it some serious consideration.
When I was a small child, I had the normal thoughts of an abandoned child.  "Was I a bad kid, and that's why she didn't love me?"  "If I had been better, would she have kept me instead of giving me away?"  Now once I got older and understood the situation better, I learned that she was all kinds of troubled herself.  She had drug and alcohol problems so severe, they kept her from raising her family or having a normal life.  I justified her actions by saying to myself that I was better off anyway, no kid should be raised in that kind of environment.  I got to live in a normal house, with a somewhat normal family instead of a shitty trailer park with a loser.  I am nothing if not practical, so I talked myself up for years.  I rationalized and rationalized, because that is what I tend to do.  None of that changed the fact that I was so angry, for so long, that I did not even recognize the anger in myself anymore.
Pardon my french on this one, but fuck her!  It is an extremely difficult task to have children and raise them the best we can.  It would be the easy and cowardly thing to give our children away for others to raise.  (You see that, the anger is still there, bubbling under the surface.)  I think she was a piece of crap to choose her vices over us.  I think she is a piece of crap for saying, "they are better off without me."  So, when I got the message that she wanted to meet with me on her deathbed to explain herself, I said no.  I have no love for her.  I did not care about any stupid excuses she came up with about how why she was such a shitty parent.  I could not even believe she asked to talk to me!  The nerve of her!  Really!
Only, now I wish I would have given her the chance to explain.  Because even though there is nothing she could have said that would make it all better, she could have at least said she was sorry.

Don't live with regret.  Listen to your heart.  I know these are cliches, but they have real world application.  Don't be silly like me!

Until next time.......

In Herself, She Will Find the Strength She Needs

  “Don't let someone Else's opinion of you become your reality.”― Les Brown

I saw this quote today and it made me think.  This is something we are all guilty of doing at some point in our lives.  Perhaps, we have been in a relationship of some kind that wasn't healthy.  This could be with a friend or a lover.  I know this has been true for me.  
I have been called every bad name in the book!  Stupid, idiot, bitch, asshole, jerk and probably so many others, I can't think of them all now.  There has also been a time in my life that I believed these things.  I am just as guilty as the next person of letting the opinion of others constitute my personal feelings about me.  
I think this is a sign of immaturity, at least on my part.  I also think there have been times when I deserved to be called an asshole or worse.  However, I do not think at any point, for any reason, it is acceptable for anyone to make you feel like you are a lesser person or not good enough.  I have heard that people like to talk about others and put them down because it makes them feel better about themselves.  I call bullshit.  Making someone else feel bad about themselves, especially intentionally, is simply being a jerk.
I have been told repeatedly that I was not good enough or smart enough.  I believed it for a while, long enough to allow my self pity to help me make a ton of huge mistakes.
 I say, "NO MORE!"

I am going to keep working really hard, and I am going to do all the things that I want to do.  I am going to get my Doctorate and teach wherever I want.  I am going to write a book or ten.  I am going to be happy. “Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.” Theodore Isaac Rubin
Lord help anyone who stands in my way!

Antibiotics Cure Viruses?

I was discussing with a colleague of mine a few days ago an article that he read on the internet.  The article claimed that 60% of Americans surveyed believe that antibiotics kill viruses.  Now, for the sake of argument, we are going to assume that this is a reliable internet source and this information is accurate.

SERIOUSLY PEOPLE??? Antibiotics do not cure viruses.  Nothing cures viruses (yet).  Did you hear about the cure for the common cold?  No you did not, because there is not one!  I bring this up because this is yet another example of people being sheep.
Sheep follow the herd, without stopping to think on their own behalf.  Stop being sheep people!
I have always claimed to be a Republican because I believe in a small government.  Survival of the fittest, I say.  Everyone can make their on way, no matter their origin in life.  I am living proof of this ideal. 
Reading this article, however, makes me very glad that there is the FDA to implement the regulation requiring a prescription for Americans to get antibiotics.    
But there is a deeper problem at work here.  There is a huge chasm between the educated and uneducated in this country.  I am going to leave economic classes out of this all together.  It's simply a decision of each person whether they choose to become educated and know more than what their momma said was the right thing.
There is no excuse for deciding to stay in the masses of the uneducated, except for that Jerry Springer mentality that some have that I dislike so much.  Read a book.  Go see a play.  Get your asses off the couch and go help someone.  You may find that in doing so, you learn something.

I Am Not a Tree

I have been thinking a lot about change lately.  I love catchy quotes and the other day I read this one online.  "If you don't like where you are, then change it.  You are not a tree."  This is especially meaningful to me because there has been a lot of change in my life lately, some of it good and some of it sad. 

The death of my sister has had a lasting effect on my emotions.  I know that sounds strange, but I am not your average emotional gal.  I learned very young that pretty much everything in life is mainly out of our control and there is not a lot of point in sweating most things.  Just keep rolling.  Just keep rolling.  I am well aware that this is emotional immaturity, but it is how I am made.

Having an early childhood like mine, there are certain things that one must do to protect themselves.  I have walls and bridges and moats built around my heart.  The death of my sister broke down all of those barriers.  My heart is absolutely broken in two and I do not know if it will ever be whole again.  I feel as though part of my soul is gone away.  I wish so many things were different, but those are things that I cannot change.  
I pray every day that it will not feel so bad.  That old cliche says that time heals all wounds.  I am just wondering how much time!  I do not have a lot of patience, but I would probably have more if I could sleep!

That is enough of the sad stuff. 

We are moving this week to a house that I love!  We will have more room inside and have room to grow a garden in the back yard.  I will be able to sit outside, even if it is raining. The kids will have their own bathroom (HALLELUJAH)!  The only negative aspect is that I can't get U-Verse.  But you can't have everything, right?   I am super excited and grateful that I get the blessing of making a new home for my family.  I am going to focus on all of the positive changes and hopefully that will help this terrible heartache. 

Until next time....... :-)

Havenots or Willnots?

I dislike the Jerry Springer mentality.  I dislike classless piece of trash human beings that presume it is their right to live off of the support of the government and hard working people in this world.  I dislike the notion that it is better to have one more child, thereby increasing the amount on a welfare check, than to have one more job.  Where does this type of thinking originate?  I believe it is learned behavior.  The only answer is to unlearn it.

I believe a liberal government makes sheep by putting public policies into effect that literally make it easier to sit on your ass and draw benefits than to go out and work for your living.  I am no sheep!  Can anybody tell me whatever happened to good old American pride?  I remember being a child and one of my friend's lost their dad to Operation Desert Storm.  After the life insurance took care of the big bills, there was not much money left.  Having three daughters, the mom had to resort to government assistance in the form of food stamps.  My friend and her sisters would die of shame before they went to the store with their mom spending food stamps (and she really needed them).  How far we have fallen!   

I was born a have not.  I still do not have a lot. ( I totally just rhymed.)  What I do have is an understanding that every single thing I have ever had or will ever have is going to be mine because I worked for it.  My family doesn't give me anything.  They do not have anything to give.  Everyone is working and struggling to make their own way in life.  My family rescued me from a very uncertain future and instilled within me values and work ethic.  They also taught me about God, and I learned almost every hymn in the Southern Baptist Hymnal.

If the little girl from the trailer park can pay her own way through graduate school, have two jobs and still manage to provide for her kids, I have a really hard time understanding why everyone can't.

Of course, that's just my opinion!

Can't Get No Satisfaction

I hear that post holiday blues are normal.  I am feeling a little blue.  Considering I am anything but normal, I wonder if this applies to me.

 I wake up every morning and go to one or both of my jobs.  I have Saturdays off every week.  I make a decent living.  It is nothing to brag about, but I can maintain my family's needs.  I come home in the afternoon, figure out dinner (or more precisely where we are going for dinner!), do laundry, help with homework and bath time, read or watch TV and eventually fall asleep.  I wake up the next morning and do it all over again.  The routine is always the same unless it is ball season.  That gets a little crazy, but it is nice to have it shaken up a bit for a couple months out of the year.

If you are reading this and you are a parent, your routine is probably very similar to this one.

Last week I read a book called The Watershed Year.  In the book, Harlan, a 33 year old guy is diagnosed with terminal cancer.  He eventually dies,but during his journey he comments on how once you realize you are dying, you crave that routine.  Apparently monotony is amazing in the face of death.  I have never been and hope to never be in Harlan's shoes, so I can't say for sure.  I am not making lite of Harlan's situation either.  I am just curious.

I am a very practical person most of the time, so when I start feeling blue, I give myself little pep talks.  I say to myself, "You have nothing to complain about.  You are blessed with good health and healthy children.  You have a nice home and vehicle.  You are blessed with intelligence and good work ethic.  You have a special person that loves you very much.  You have great friends and family."

It is easy to see where I am going with this.  I don't have anything to complain about, so why am I feeling blue?  That is the much harder part to explain.

Sometimes I think it would be better to just be ignorant.  What I mean by that is to live in a world where I did not know the difference between average and better.  If all I ever strive for was getting by and not caring to be more, I would not know the difference.  Fortunately, that is just not me.

I want to make a difference and leave my mark.  I want to think critically about issues that matter in the larger scheme of things.  I want to nail the curriculum that will give our students in America a head's up over the other developed nations in the world.  I want to make a world where no child goes hungry, feels lonely, is abused or left behind.  I want it to truly be possible to work your way to success.  I want to write books.  All of these are lofty goals.  I also know that helping others and achieving them is where I can get my satisfaction.


That is all for today!  Next blog, I am cooking up a Jerry Springer show......

An Angel Literally

I always assumed that one day she would come back to me.  I was terribly wrong.

I was eleven when it became necessary to send her to a "special place".  I was so sad and lonely, even in the midst of my new family.  They were really great and loved me a lot.  I was still sad.  I was mad.  I did not understand.  I had always picked up the slack where she was concerned.  I know that she took more effort that the average child, but I was always trying to overcompensate for that.  I was good enough for the both of us, or I tried to be.

When they said she had to go away, I felt a huge amount of guilt.  Part of me was glad.  I was glad that I wouldn't have to work so hard to take care of her.  I was glad that I would not have to stand up for her all the time to all the asshole kids on the school bus and at school.  Like every other kid, I just wanted to be normal.  Then came bedtime.

I was so sad at night when it was time to lay down and go to sleep.  Then there was only time to think about missing her.  She had been such a huge part of my existence.  Taking care of her and looking after her had always kept me grounded.  Even in all the crazy upheaval of our young lives, I was hardly ever scared or sad when she was there because I was always brave and happy enough for the both of us.  Only time would make this better.

She moved to a special guardian's house that would become her caretaker for the rest of her life.  Her new guardian was wealthy and she enjoyed a private nurse, awesome vacations and endless support.  She went to a special school that would teach her to adapt to "grown up life".  When she went to live with her guardian in the early 90s, the lady was already in her early 50s.  I always assumed that one day she would get too old to take care of her, and she would eventually come back to live with me.

One weekend, her guardian went to Hot Springs and left her with a trusted friend.  The friend ran a home for disabled people and was supposedly trained in their care.  Friday evening, Patricia fell off of the deck and broke her shoulder.  She was taken to the hospital and prescribed pain killers and given a referral to her orthopedic specialists for the following Monday.  She was crying and complaining of pain so bad the following day that the "friend" decided it would be a good idea to give her the Fentanyl patch of one of the terminal cancer patients.  Patricia was 4'11" and weighed about 110 pounds.  She went to sleep that night, and never woke up again.  The EMT s were called at 9 AM Sunday morning and found her non-responsive.

The only way I can find any peace in this situation is that I know if Patricia had lived to be of an old age, she would have suffered an excruciating death.   Along with her mental disabilities, she suffered curvature of the spine and sever muscular dystrophy.  I find peace in knowing that she went to sleep and never woke up.  I hope that I was in her dreams.

I am still sad.  I am still angry!  I feel as though I were robbed.  I wanted to be there holding her hand when she left this Earth.  I always figured she would go before me, but I did not ever guess it would be this soon.  Maybe the saying that God will not put more on you than you can bear is true.  And I am sure he knows better than I do.  Now my angel is literally an angel, and that is the rest of the story.

Her Very Own Angel

There once was a woman who lived in a shitty trailer park, off of a rural country road right down the way from a very small town with exactly one stop light.  Her name was Ruth.  She had at least four children, two boys and two girls.  The oldest boy and girl were born both mentally and physically handicapped.  The Doctors said it was environmental, not genetics, that caused the physical and mental defects in the children.  The other two children were intellectually gifted, but would take very different roads in the lives that they would lead.  We will get to that later.  Back to our story.

I am not sure what the motivation was for Ruth to drink alcohol and take drugs while pregnant with her children.  Maybe it was the late 1970s and early 80s mentality.  Maybe it was the white trash breeding.  We will never know. 

As the narrator of this story, I firmly believe in God.  I believe that for every right there is a wrong.  I am a strong believer in karma, meaning that if a person sends good out into the world, good will happen for them.  For Ruth, I am not sure the reasons for her karma, but her oldest daughter was an angel on Earth.

Patricia Susan Childress was the mentally handicapped daughter of Ruth and Ernie.  Ernie was in the Navy, found out about the baby and high tailed it out of town.   Ruth was a terrible mother.  She neglected her children and eventually abandoned them to her elderly, alcoholic mother.  Soon the state workers came to take them all away in a terrible scene that included screaming and crying.  All four children had different fathers and none of them wanted the children either.  The children became custody of the state and soon found their way into the foster care system.

Patricia and her younger sister Kathy were luckily able to remain together.  Many sibling that enter the foster care system are not so lucky.  Many are split apart, never to see one another again.  Many find homes where they are abused worse than the homes they originally were taken from in the first place.  This was not the case for these two two sisters.

Being that Patricia was mentally and physically handicapped, her sister Kathy took it upon herself at a very young age to be her protector.  Kathy looked after her sister, protected her from kids that bullied her, helped her with her bath and washing her hair.  She also helped her learn to read and write.  Patricia would never mentally grow any older than 10 years old, no matter how many years she lived.  Her physical disabilities included severe muscular dystrophy, so it was incredibly hard for her to grip anything, much less learn to tie her shoes.  She was constantly knocking things over due to her bad coordination.

Patricia had nothing to fear.  Kathy would always be there for her, until they took her away.

More Nonsense Heaped Upon the Masses

I am Kathy & let us just leave it at that!  No Ms. Billings or mom for the purposes of the blog.  Lots of people call me KB which stands for Kathy Billings.  Billings is my married name (and I am divorced), so I am not sure what they will call me if I ever marry again.  I really am not sure why I am concerned about this because that is not a likely occurrence in this lifetime!  Although, one truly never knows.  I am a teacher, tutor, waitress, MBA, mom, daughter, sister girlfriend and friend.  I am also a wannabe writer.  I have ideas for about 1000 different books, so I decided to start blogging & see what happens.  Surely some seed will be planted or some idea will rise to the occasion. ;-)

I come from a small town & just like every other person (or most people) that came from a small town the only thing I ever wanted to do was leave.  So I moved fifteen minutes down the road & have yet to make it any further.  I have visited many places and will continue to do so.  Now that I am getting a little (tiny bit) older, it is not as important for me to move away anymore.  I haven't given up on the notion.  I simply feel that it's not all that bad a place to grow up & the kids are getting older and blah, blah blah......!  Anyway, one day I will have a small shack on the beach somewhere. I will divide my time between here and there and that will be just fine with  me. 

My ideas for entertaining the masses range from erotic fiction to stories about life in a small town.  Once I figure out how to combine both ideas, I am absolutely positive that I will have a best seller on my hands!  For now that is enough about me!  To be continued........    KB