#but which feel insurmountable on an equal level with what these poor kids are going through

[stainedglassthreads]

So Dungeons and Daddies Season 2 is really just taking the average coming-of-age story and making it to every horrifying extreme, huh.

It is that moment in which you realize your parents don't know what they're doing any better than you do, and people present it like it's something comforting, but it's just even more terrifying because there really, really is no right answer. It's realizing that no, love isn't enough, sometimes you love your family and it just made everything worse. Everyone who came before you fucked things up even when they were trying to make things better, and unfucking everything just seems impossible, but not even trying is such a depressing option, and one your kids will never be able to forgive you for.

I have many feelings on this.

[hiriajuu-suffering]

People Suck

If there’s anything I’ve learned so far is never put your faith or happiness in someone else, no matter how or what that looks like.

Never put your faith in your spouse. They’re fallible and human, they commit to you because you’re convenient, not because they value you for what you are. Every single person can destroy what they claim to love most in the world when they have to respond to enough pressure. I have seen instances where two people would willingly give everything for each other, but no one would ever think I’m worth that kind of commitment. Marriage in our society has been a hollow vow historically entrenched in us by institutionalized religion, now that a human’s ability to communicate reaches beyond moral conveniences in the digital age, people are seeing past that narrative. For better or for worse, I did that. Through sickness and health, I did that. For rich or poor, I did that. To love and cherish, I never stopped doing that. With the instructions set forth by the Sunnah, I did that when she never knew what that meant. In honesty and sincerity, I could never break on that front. I guess that’s why I started thinking polyamory had more truth in it, it’s been difficult for me to believe anyone can earnestly swear to unyielding loyalty, regardless of love’s condition, since I became an adult and I let myself believe otherwise these past years.

Never put faith in your parent or child. Both a parent and child’s understanding of the world are limited to their times. When they clash, it creates immovable conflicts which ripple beyond the scope of the family. A parent putting everything on their child to fulfill their desires imparts all their prior prejudices and hardships onto their child, and the child’s free will is destroyed in that monocle of unhealthy parenting. A child valuing their relationship with their parent stifles them from developing genuine relationships that make better on the limited perspective of their parents; I’ve suffered on both, on the inside and outside of that dynamic. A parent ought to love unconditionally as a child is forced to, yet, when the parent is pushed hard enough, you’ll find that’s never the case. A child ought to be able to follow their free will without pressure, but that’s never made to be the case. I can’t even fathom coming to the conclusion my entire life was forged by my parents with all the opposition I’ve given them, but when I look plainly at the facts, the resistance I’ve given to their absolute vision has been minimal at best. Even though I believe I’ve resisted far greater than a vast majority of people ever could, I know it’s still insignificant.

Never put faith in a holy person. Every purveyor of the divine will be operating under a label which exclusivizes them against contrasting labels. Interreligious convocation is just invalid to them. Frankly, the religious label I was born with I only still use because of societal pressure because I saw this a long time ago. As much as I believe the Aga Khan is wise and has a deeper understanding of life than an insurmountable majority of humans in history could ever have, that undermines as opposed to uplifts his level of respect to those outside of his followers. Instead, some random sheikh who commits visibly greater sin than the Aga Khan has more legitimacy to the greater Ummah (Muslim Community). If these labels are means by which prejudice is enacted, these labels cannot be means for good. Truly, I am Muslim first and Ismaili second but the label holds anyone on the outside back from seeing that.

I can’t love my spouse at maximum because both of us run the risk of losing loyalty, I can’t put everything into my kids lest I unintentionally override their free will from the pressure, I can’t put all my faith into the spirit because this world channels its practice through labels that cause division more than pluralism. Humans can’t be genuinely and unconditionally kind when inconvenienced, never expect anything real out of an imperfect being.

If living for anyone else’s sake is a fallacy, does that mean life itself is selfish? Seeking happiness in a relationship with another, that’s selfish. Making your kids actions be the determiner of your own happiness, that’s selfish. Believing the label you use to describe your beliefs is more correct than anyone else’s, that’s selfish. The claim every person was put on this world to be tested to do a good is wrong if we’re required to be selfish enough to make all of our decisions based on temporal desires, familial pressures, and religious alignment.

The real test in life is a violation of those interests to do good. It requires far more virtue to act outside the realm of what’s convenient to you, what your family wants you to be, and what your religion forces upon you. That’s why I hate doing any of those things even when I’m still doing them because I’m often not given the option to act outside of them. I always found myself to be a metaphysical compatibilist for this reason, an illusion of free will exists which we can act in accordance with but are never presented with the option to.

Knowing this, I can’t believe in any person. Nor can I rightfully: marry, have children, or ascribe to a religion without a serious violation of conveniences. I’ve fought for that belief all my life, I fought hard. I’ve invested when I ever saw someone or something which could’ve agreed with my position in convenience being a restriction on free will. The potential I acted on always failed: making it in the music industry, speech/debate, my relationships. “I thought maybe I had it this time, but it slipped away”. While it’s still a remote possibility for that potential to return, everything has to be put into doubt when it’s not because that’s the default state of the world.

I want to believe in the idealism allowing me to access my free will, that’s why I’m not an incompatibilist. The people in this world are soul-crushing. There’s some person that will always find a way from enacting your own free will: a lover, a parent, a cleric. I want to believe in that dream, but the more I try, the more it fades, and the more it feels like I lost.

Do I break from this? Do I finally give in and be what I sought not to be, a human whose needs are granted in convenience? I don’t want to, but what’s left of my heart may not leave me a choice: it takes resolve to fight and I can’t even tell how much I have left in me with the last piece of potential I believed in still hanging in the balance. I’m willing to do everything to prove to her she is that because I put so much of myself into that belief. Everything I truly am is what breaks those boundaries: convincing her it’s worth the struggle, convincing her mother our souls are equal and reach the same place in acts of faith, convincing the world telling two can’t become one for something affected by anything other than their free will is wrong. If I’m incapable of breaking those boundaries, I don’t know what my free will is anymore. It’s something I feel but could never act on.

Maybe she wasn’t who I thought she was. Maybe she didn’t think marriage outweighs every other decision you can make in your life combined on account of its affect on the soul. Maybe she was just a puppet of her mother and her culture cloaked by a need to be superficially happy. Maybe she couldn’t be happier long-term with someone who pushes her to think to be her best self instead of someone who falls in line with her expectations of convenience. Maybe I was wrong in seeing her potential, but that doesn’t make being disappointed hurt any less because it’s so draining to undo a belief so strong.

I still believe in the person I knew, someone who wanted to get as much of her free will out in the open as possible and chose me as a part of that. I don’t know if that person is gone for good. If she is, I think my idealism has to leave with her and I must live in a life I hadn’t believed in up until this point. A life where no mortal deserves absolute trust. A life where the only things to live for are what’s made convenient to you. In which case, I renounce my ability to believe in free will. I’ll want my offspring to have it, but I’ll unintentionally find a way to oppress it out of them like every parent does. It’s because I have no control. I surrendered to her all of it in faith she would still be the person I knew. If that person was never real, I don’t know what I have left to believe in because I find there’s no point in beliefs without free will.

Nothing in life is forever, but the bond of marriage is eternal. We’re not married yet, so she hasn’t committed herself to me hereafter yet either. The lack of convenience is outweighing what I am to her, that’s why we’re not moving forward. There’s nothing I can say to convince her anymore we’re worth the lack of convenience, the decision is in her hands now. I’ve felt powerless from a sense of belief too many times in my life, this is the time my beliefs will be shown their validity. I have to accept it’s my flaws that caused me to believe in her willingness to overcome convenience, making me as much of a slave to convenience as any other person.

Tl;dr: people suck. I’m a person, I’m no exception to the rule unless someone I chose completely of my own free will and she hath chosen me completely of her own free will shows me differently. I don’t think I’m going to have the resilience to choose like that again.

[yes-dal456]

Can I Blame My Mental Illness For My Lousy Behavior?

Content Notice: eating disorder

Seven-and-a-half years ago, on the night of my 35th birthday, I told my husband that I wanted a divorce.

It was 2 AM. Maybe we’d been arguing, I can’t remember. I can’t remember a lot from that period, except the embarrassment. I remember the embarrassment with incredible accuracy.

Earlier that evening, we’d gone to dinner with my grandparents to a local Italian place. I can’t remember the name of the place; it’s not there anymore. It was replaced first by a Japanese place that served sushi that was only barely decent. Then by a Chinese place. Then a place that served Pho. Now I think it’s a Mexican food place.

I had Carbonara, which I also remember. It was surprisingly good for a place that would be out of business in 6 months. We had a bottle of red wine, probably Cabernet. I didn’t love wine yet, but I drank it because it seemed like the grown-up adult thing to do when you’re 35.

We went home and put the kids to bed; they were 14, 11 and nine then.

And at 2 AM, when he asked what was wrong with me, I told him I wanted a divorce.

He asked me to reconsider, pleaded the way only someone who has known you 20 years, who has seen you through every awful thing that has happened to you since you were 14, can.

I didn’t reconsider.

I feel the deepest level of shame, shame to my very core, that I walked away from my children. That 2 AM seemed like a good time to leave my kids and the only family they’d even known, to create a new family that they never asked for. I have bipolar disorder. And this is what unmedicated mental illness looks like for me.

The next day, we sent the kids to school and decided how to tell them. Maybe it was me who thought it would be a good idea to take them to pizza after telling them their lives were about to be ripped apart. Another poor choice in a long list of poor choices.

He told me if I wanted to split up our family, I’d have to leave. So I left.

I left my children there, the people I made in my body. The people who meant more to me than anything, I left at home.

Before I left, my 14-year-old gave me something she’d made with Perler beads, a little boy playing soccer. I kept him in the bag I took when I left, right up until last week.

When I took the figure out of the overnight bag, the black one with cherries on it, that I still use and still hate, I broke his foot off, and I cried. The foot can probably be ironed back on, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I broke him, and them.   

In the year before I left my family, I left myself.

My body wasted, worn down and broken from an eating disorder I denied. I stocked and stashed laxatives around the house. I ran until I fractured my leg and then ran on it still, even though it was excruciating until I broke it all the way.

And even then, I went to the gym and spent an hour a day on the elliptical on the broken leg. The elliptical is a low impact machine, or that’s what I told myself. In my broken brain, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable alternative to running on the road.

I lost ⅔ of my body weight in six months.

I bought handbags costly enough to feed a small nation, a drawer full of yoga pants from Lululemon, running shorts, dozens of new bras, thousands of dollars of new clothes. Every pound I lost deserved a reward, and I gave them to myself.

Despite barely hanging on to our ballooned mortgage, I shopped. At J. Crew, Gap, Macy’s. Nowhere too expensive. I must have figured no one would notice. Until the debt piled up and refused to be hidden.

The day after I told my husband I wanted a divorce, I packed my bag with my Perler-bead boy, two pairs of overpriced Lulu shorts, two sports bras, underwear, two sundresses, two bras with matching panties that I’d bought the week before, and my toothbrush. I went to my grandparent’s house.

I went there — I guess because it was the closest place, three blocks from my house, in a tiny town where everyone lives no more than a few miles away from each other. My grandmother gave me a room with a giant bed covered in an equally giant comforter which was in turn covered with roses. That night I drove around, with regret, but also a bizarre mix of conviction and pride, sure I’d made the right choice.

One day after that, I left my grandparents’ house to visit my sister three hours away. Fourteen years younger than me, she was in college at the time, pursuing the degree I never got, but she was away for the weekend. Instead of waiting for her, I bypassed the campus and drove to the Bay Area where I met my (now) husband.

We spent two nights and days together.

I’ve never written this. I’ve scarcely repeated this story to anyone outside a very tight-knit circle.

I am ashamed.

I’m not ashamed about the love I feel for my husband and the two babies we went on to make. I’m not embarrassed by the strength and struggle of what most would call a rebound marriage and the blended family, both beautiful and disastrous, that goes with it.

I feel the deepest level of shame, shame to my very core, that I walked away from my children. That 2 AM seemed like a good time to leave my kids and the only family they’d even known, to create a new family that they never asked for.

I have bipolar disorder. And this is what unmedicated mental illness looks like for me.

When the fog of a long season of depression lifts, and the manic energy arrives, bringing with it a bunch of irrational decisions, it’s easy to flush your meds — which is exactly what I did — right down the 50-year-old pink toilet, in the first house I ever owned.

I quite literally flushed all my meds because exercise and diet had restored my sanity. Or at least fooled me into thinking my sanity had been restored.

And with that “cure” came insurmountable debt, an eating disorder that leached the calcium from my bones, a delinquent mortgage, and a black overnight bag with cherries on it, filled with two days of clothes, a toothbrush, and a tiny beaded figure that my 14-year-old thought would give me comfort while I was gone.

My grandmother came into the spare bathroom situated across from the spare bedroom I was sleeping, but not really ever sleeping in, without knocking. The sight of my wasted body, the protruding collar bones, the sagging skin, must have alarmed her.

I was too busy thinking about the 10 more pounds I needed to lose to notice or acknowledge her reaction or when she said she was going to the kitchen to make me the mashed potatoes and gravy I’d take two bites of and then rinse into the sink.

When I came back from the Bay Area and the two days that I had sought to make me forget the mess I had left, I borrowed $1,200 from my grandparents and rented a tiny two-bedroom apartment.

In that apartment, I’d make spaghetti for my kids, and we’d eat it off of a wicker patio table that had, the week before, been next to my grandmother’s pool. They would go to sleep on small twin-size air mattresses I bought at Target. I would lay awake on the queen size version. Because I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and also because mania robs you of sleep, making you believe two hours is sufficient.

I had only a few things my ex let me have, a few things that I had charged on a credit card that wasn’t entirely maxed out, a fluffy floral sofa and a patio table that my grandmother gave me. And my mania and my shame.

I listened to the song “Lucky” on repeat, singing along, crying and learning the chords so I could play it on the acoustic guitar my dad had given me on the birthday I celebrated before I left everything behind for a new life.

I was so lucky to have a new life and a new person to love, who loved me.

And I was on a manic cloud that made it all seem so perfectly idyllic.

That’s what mania did to me.

But I can’t blame it. Not because it wasn’t there, but because that’s a bullshit excuse. I wish I could say that every mistake I’ve made, every lousy decision, is all a manifestation of my faulty brain chemistry.

But the truth is, even if it was the mania, I still have to sleep with the image of my kids crying over pizza the night I told them that I’d never share that house, the first one we’d bought, scrimped and saved for, again.

Four years after the wicker patio table and that hideous sofa, I saw the psychiatrist who would finally officially diagnose me over a bag of Sunchips and a Starbucks latte. The man that would medicate me, adjusting formulations over and over, until a year after that, I was at last, after 20 years, stable.

I haven’t had a single suicidal thought in nine months. I haven’t had a manic episode in much longer than that. I can’t remember a lot of words or phone numbers and addresses I had memorized for 20 years — because that’s what Lamictal does while it keeps me from buying useless shit instead of paying my mortgage.

My mouth is dry, and I gained 15 pounds — because that’s what Zoloft does while it keeps my OCD and eating disorder at an arm’s distance and my depression suffocated.

For a while, I was on one medication that made me fall asleep sitting up. I can’t remember what it’s called because I was asleep, and also because of Lamictal stealing my words.

But I take them every day, eight of them, along with a colorful handful of supplemental horse pills that I hope do something to counteract what the pharmaceuticals are doing to my liver. Every morning with breakfast, over coffee with the man I adore. Every night at the bathroom sink, right before I shea butter my hands and spoon to sleep with that same guy.

And I sleep. Mostly restful. At least five hours usually, always striving for seven. Our two littles sneak into our king-size bed and kick me in the face. Sometimes I end up on the bottom 5 percent of that giant mattress. And it makes me angry because no one likes to get kicked in the face by a six-year-old, but then I wake up, and I love them even more than the day before.

I am still ashamed. But despite that, or in spite of that, my life is beautiful.

I have all I need and most of what I want. When I can’t sleep, I can write at 1 AM, and in the morning I will have coffee that is made just how I like it, by a man who is my match, paired with my pharmacy of meds, and probably two fried eggs that we collected from our backyard hens the day before.

My big kids, two of whom are adults now, are fantastic. The two kids Matt and I made, that united our family around a common love, are people I can’t imagine living without. My life is as perfect as I could ever ask for or deserve.

And the Perler bead soccer guy is on my dresser. A reminder of why I swallow a dozen pills every day.

This article first appeared on ravishly.com. Read more from Joni here.

Also at ravishly:

Why Do You Hate Your Body?

13 Things My 4-Year-Old Needs To Discuss at 4 A.M.

Follow Joni on instagram and Facebook.

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[imreviewblog]

Can I Blame My Mental Illness For My Lousy Behavior?

Content Notice: eating disorder

Seven-and-a-half years ago, on the night of my 35th birthday, I told my husband that I wanted a divorce.

It was 2 AM. Maybe we’d been arguing, I can’t remember. I can’t remember a lot from that period, except the embarrassment. I remember the embarrassment with incredible accuracy.

Earlier that evening, we’d gone to dinner with my grandparents to a local Italian place. I can’t remember the name of the place; it’s not there anymore. It was replaced first by a Japanese place that served sushi that was only barely decent. Then by a Chinese place. Then a place that served Pho. Now I think it’s a Mexican food place.

I had Carbonara, which I also remember. It was surprisingly good for a place that would be out of business in 6 months. We had a bottle of red wine, probably Cabernet. I didn’t love wine yet, but I drank it because it seemed like the grown-up adult thing to do when you’re 35.

We went home and put the kids to bed; they were 14, 11 and nine then.

And at 2 AM, when he asked what was wrong with me, I told him I wanted a divorce.

He asked me to reconsider, pleaded the way only someone who has known you 20 years, who has seen you through every awful thing that has happened to you since you were 14, can.

I didn’t reconsider.

I feel the deepest level of shame, shame to my very core, that I walked away from my children. That 2 AM seemed like a good time to leave my kids and the only family they’d even known, to create a new family that they never asked for. I have bipolar disorder. And this is what unmedicated mental illness looks like for me.

The next day, we sent the kids to school and decided how to tell them. Maybe it was me who thought it would be a good idea to take them to pizza after telling them their lives were about to be ripped apart. Another poor choice in a long list of poor choices.

He told me if I wanted to split up our family, I’d have to leave. So I left.

I left my children there, the people I made in my body. The people who meant more to me than anything, I left at home.

Before I left, my 14-year-old gave me something she’d made with Perler beads, a little boy playing soccer. I kept him in the bag I took when I left, right up until last week.

When I took the figure out of the overnight bag, the black one with cherries on it, that I still use and still hate, I broke his foot off, and I cried. The foot can probably be ironed back on, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I broke him, and them.   

In the year before I left my family, I left myself.

My body wasted, worn down and broken from an eating disorder I denied. I stocked and stashed laxatives around the house. I ran until I fractured my leg and then ran on it still, even though it was excruciating until I broke it all the way.

And even then, I went to the gym and spent an hour a day on the elliptical on the broken leg. The elliptical is a low impact machine, or that’s what I told myself. In my broken brain, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable alternative to running on the road.

I lost ⅔ of my body weight in six months.

I bought handbags costly enough to feed a small nation, a drawer full of yoga pants from Lululemon, running shorts, dozens of new bras, thousands of dollars of new clothes. Every pound I lost deserved a reward, and I gave them to myself.

Despite barely hanging on to our ballooned mortgage, I shopped. At J. Crew, Gap, Macy’s. Nowhere too expensive. I must have figured no one would notice. Until the debt piled up and refused to be hidden.

The day after I told my husband I wanted a divorce, I packed my bag with my Perler-bead boy, two pairs of overpriced Lulu shorts, two sports bras, underwear, two sundresses, two bras with matching panties that I’d bought the week before, and my toothbrush. I went to my grandparent’s house.

I went there — I guess because it was the closest place, three blocks from my house, in a tiny town where everyone lives no more than a few miles away from each other. My grandmother gave me a room with a giant bed covered in an equally giant comforter which was in turn covered with roses. That night I drove around, with regret, but also a bizarre mix of conviction and pride, sure I’d made the right choice.

One day after that, I left my grandparents’ house to visit my sister three hours away. Fourteen years younger than me, she was in college at the time, pursuing the degree I never got, but she was away for the weekend. Instead of waiting for her, I bypassed the campus and drove to the Bay Area where I met my (now) husband.

We spent two nights and days together.

I’ve never written this. I’ve scarcely repeated this story to anyone outside a very tight-knit circle.

I am ashamed.

I’m not ashamed about the love I feel for my husband and the two babies we went on to make. I’m not embarrassed by the strength and struggle of what most would call a rebound marriage and the blended family, both beautiful and disastrous, that goes with it.

I feel the deepest level of shame, shame to my very core, that I walked away from my children. That 2 AM seemed like a good time to leave my kids and the only family they’d even known, to create a new family that they never asked for.

I have bipolar disorder. And this is what unmedicated mental illness looks like for me.

When the fog of a long season of depression lifts, and the manic energy arrives, bringing with it a bunch of irrational decisions, it’s easy to flush your meds — which is exactly what I did — right down the 50-year-old pink toilet, in the first house I ever owned.

I quite literally flushed all my meds because exercise and diet had restored my sanity. Or at least fooled me into thinking my sanity had been restored.

And with that “cure” came insurmountable debt, an eating disorder that leached the calcium from my bones, a delinquent mortgage, and a black overnight bag with cherries on it, filled with two days of clothes, a toothbrush, and a tiny beaded figure that my 14-year-old thought would give me comfort while I was gone.

My grandmother came into the spare bathroom situated across from the spare bedroom I was sleeping, but not really ever sleeping in, without knocking. The sight of my wasted body, the protruding collar bones, the sagging skin, must have alarmed her.

I was too busy thinking about the 10 more pounds I needed to lose to notice or acknowledge her reaction or when she said she was going to the kitchen to make me the mashed potatoes and gravy I’d take two bites of and then rinse into the sink.

When I came back from the Bay Area and the two days that I had sought to make me forget the mess I had left, I borrowed $1,200 from my grandparents and rented a tiny two-bedroom apartment.

In that apartment, I’d make spaghetti for my kids, and we’d eat it off of a wicker patio table that had, the week before, been next to my grandmother’s pool. They would go to sleep on small twin-size air mattresses I bought at Target. I would lay awake on the queen size version. Because I wasn’t sure what I was doing, and also because mania robs you of sleep, making you believe two hours is sufficient.

I had only a few things my ex let me have, a few things that I had charged on a credit card that wasn’t entirely maxed out, a fluffy floral sofa and a patio table that my grandmother gave me. And my mania and my shame.

I listened to the song “Lucky” on repeat, singing along, crying and learning the chords so I could play it on the acoustic guitar my dad had given me on the birthday I celebrated before I left everything behind for a new life.

I was so lucky to have a new life and a new person to love, who loved me.

And I was on a manic cloud that made it all seem so perfectly idyllic.

That’s what mania did to me.

But I can’t blame it. Not because it wasn’t there, but because that’s a bullshit excuse. I wish I could say that every mistake I’ve made, every lousy decision, is all a manifestation of my faulty brain chemistry.

But the truth is, even if it was the mania, I still have to sleep with the image of my kids crying over pizza the night I told them that I’d never share that house, the first one we’d bought, scrimped and saved for, again.

Four years after the wicker patio table and that hideous sofa, I saw the psychiatrist who would finally officially diagnose me over a bag of Sunchips and a Starbucks latte. The man that would medicate me, adjusting formulations over and over, until a year after that, I was at last, after 20 years, stable.

I haven’t had a single suicidal thought in nine months. I haven’t had a manic episode in much longer than that. I can’t remember a lot of words or phone numbers and addresses I had memorized for 20 years — because that’s what Lamictal does while it keeps me from buying useless shit instead of paying my mortgage.

My mouth is dry, and I gained 15 pounds — because that’s what Zoloft does while it keeps my OCD and eating disorder at an arm’s distance and my depression suffocated.

For a while, I was on one medication that made me fall asleep sitting up. I can’t remember what it’s called because I was asleep, and also because of Lamictal stealing my words.

But I take them every day, eight of them, along with a colorful handful of supplemental horse pills that I hope do something to counteract what the pharmaceuticals are doing to my liver. Every morning with breakfast, over coffee with the man I adore. Every night at the bathroom sink, right before I shea butter my hands and spoon to sleep with that same guy.

And I sleep. Mostly restful. At least five hours usually, always striving for seven. Our two littles sneak into our king-size bed and kick me in the face. Sometimes I end up on the bottom 5 percent of that giant mattress. And it makes me angry because no one likes to get kicked in the face by a six-year-old, but then I wake up, and I love them even more than the day before.

I am still ashamed. But despite that, or in spite of that, my life is beautiful.

I have all I need and most of what I want. When I can’t sleep, I can write at 1 AM, and in the morning I will have coffee that is made just how I like it, by a man who is my match, paired with my pharmacy of meds, and probably two fried eggs that we collected from our backyard hens the day before.

My big kids, two of whom are adults now, are fantastic. The two kids Matt and I made, that united our family around a common love, are people I can’t imagine living without. My life is as perfect as I could ever ask for or deserve.

And the Perler bead soccer guy is on my dresser. A reminder of why I swallow a dozen pills every day.

This article first appeared on ravishly.com. Read more from Joni here.

Also at ravishly:

Why Do You Hate Your Body?

13 Things My 4-Year-Old Needs To Discuss at 4 A.M.

Follow Joni on instagram and Facebook.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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