Birthday Shoes

Monday..I turn 37. Ten years ago, when I was 27, I became a single mom.

I remember 27 very vividly, there was alot of hardship there..and I guess this birthday marks sort of a ten year anniversary, and my soul is on the floor.

My children were small. I would drop them off at 5 am at daycare so I could get to work as a waitresss for the breakfast crowd. This job was extremly physical, and exausting, and Im sure lead to my three back surgeries six years later.
After one of the wait staff slipped and broke her arm we were told that we had to get "Skid resistant shoes" by Saturday or we could not work the weekend shift.

To finacially survive I had to work the weekend shift.

Friday night I went to get the shoes..I wear size 9, and all they had left was 8 and below. I got the eight lf...I had to work. I did not have the gas money after paying for forty dollar shoes to go some place else..so this..is what I got.

Saturday was a brutal 12 hour shift..brutal. When I finally was cut off the floor, right after I got out the front door I had to take my shoes off. I peeled them off as the flesh on the back of my heels from the blisters wanted to tear off..and I had bruises all over.

I was in tears. My feet hurt so bad. What was worse was the next day, when I had to put them on again...and work 8 hours in agony.

When I went home that evening both of my front toenails were black from being compressed in a space to small. I soaked my feet in cold water all night.

My son wanted to see if his cars would float in the bucket with my feet. My daughter was hungry, and my other son was having a tantrum..so I just sat there silently and cried. Later I lost my toenails..it was gross.

That same year I got mono and tore my rotator cuff. I continued to lift trays, and I would come home and sleep with ice around my shoulder. Looking back I dont know how I did it.

This...this is what single moms do.We wake up in the mornings with 102 fever and get the kids off to school when they are little..because that is what you have to do. You miss feild trips and forgo soccer team..because there is no money, and going to a feild trip would mean missing time off work.

Now it is ten years later..the kids dad has dissappeared out of their lives,when he was present here and there it meant the world to them. It's left a big hole in their heart and has done some emotional damage that I cannot undo.

I am 37 the kids are no longer small.

My daughter was in an accident last year, and she has to go to a special school now because she missed so much time and could not graduate..or go to prom. The friends she had abandoned her, which can be a lonely place as a teen.

My middle son struggles with anger, ocd...mostly just an angry teen boy who breaks my heart on a daily basis...and whom I struggle to get to go to his therapist. He is too big to just put in the back seat and buckle up and make him go.

My youngest son is screwing up in school...and grades are a joke.

I miss the days of the floating cars in the bucket. I miss the day when my children filled the bathtub with tadpoles and made me scream as they were laughing so hard they cried....and when my son picked up a dead squirrel and brought it home..because it was cool. I miss knowing that when I put them in bed at night..they were safe and sound, and where they belonged, instead of out in the scary world. Where I could just kiss the boo boo and make it all better.

I am today as I was ten years ago..walking in shoes that are too small, and it is painful.


So for my birthday I have been served a peice of "Feel sorry for myself pie" with a side of defeat, and try and peel my soul off the floor even though it is blistered and bruised.


~Not so Almighty Heidi