You could learn a lot from a dummy

I am a crash test dummy.

I know you wouldn’t have guessed it from all the pictures you have seen, but yes…I am a crash test dummy. You could learn a lot from me.

I read your blogs. During the process of reading your blogs I have found I yell one phrase out over and over again and I swear If I yell out, “I’ve been there!” one more time and someone doesn’t throw me a dime, I am going to get pissed.

I talk about a lot of things here, but the one thing I don’t talk about is my marriage to Dan, or the ickiness that happened after we, or I, ended it. That would be just opening up at a whole other level. I have wrote about it. I had to write about it or I would have exploded. I said once: “It seems like when you’re trying to find that person that you know you can be, you stumble across the person that is the complete opposite that has been an ugly part of your life that you would like to forget.”

That person, the ugly one…she hit a lot of walls. No, *I* hit a lot of walls. I totally own up to that time in my life. I like to say, “I was a different person then.” but if I am being honest I am still that person, I’m just a lot smarter now, or at least I think I am.
No, i’m not any smarter, I just hit that wall and lived to tell the story. I can only hope I won’t ever be that lost within myself and scared to death that I make choices that aren’t exactly the smartest ones.

My daughter asked me, “Do you have any regrets?”
Talk about a loaded question.
I have a million, but when you have kids you have to ask yourself, ‘would I change anything if it means I wouldn’t have my kids?‘
I look back sometimes and I think about that time. I hate to though, it’s like remembering a horrible car accident or the death of someone very close to you. The pain hurts so much your whole body aches.
I remember a night at my sister’s house when I was in the thick of the ache and I was outside talking to her and she had to go inside to get a soda. I couldn’t stand to be alone for a second. I couldn’t be in my own skin. I panicked thinking I would never feel normal again. I would never be able to sit alone with myself without wanting to rip my hair out to get the things in my head to stop haunting me.
The ghosts of guilt.

This side of me is still there. I think it sticks around to remind me to be grateful that I survived it or to stand as a reminder that I shouldn’t be so cocky to think that something like that would never happen to me. That I should be humble and understanding. I am not perfect and I never will be.

Let it be noted; I have things to say about the man that I spent many years with, sometimes they are not good things, but for the most part he was and remains a very big part of my life. The ghosts that I live with are subsided because of the friendship that Dan and I have. We make choices that we might not have made in our everyday life because of this friendship we keep for the girls sake. It’s a give and take. Sometimes I feel like I give more than I take, but i’m sure if he had a blog he would say the same. (Of course he would have to figure out how to string a sentence together without my help to do that – ZING! Oh shut up, if you knew him, he would laugh and come back with something even worse to zing me with!)

So anyway…

When I say I am a crash test dummy, I mean it.