FULL CIRCLE

FULL CIRCLE

In their minds, I have failed them. Taken them from the only stable home they have ever known and thrust them into an environment where they feel alienated from the world as they know it. I excluded them from the process of moving, instead, sending them to their father as I dealt with all of the emotions and self loathing associated with emptying out the home I made for my family. I didn’t want them to see the furniture being carried out piece by piece. I didn’t want them to have to stand in the middle of their empty bedrooms and cry the way I cried when I realized that my children would never set foot in them again. I didn’t want them to see that the bench we loved to sit on was now gone from the front porch, the hummingbird feeder hanging as a sad reminder that we would no longer be able to attempt to sit completely still as our little friends fed right before our eyes before disappearing in a flurried flash.

I wanted to spare them. I should have prepared them.

I should have allowed them an opportunity to say goodbye to their home. I should have given them a chance to cry. I shouldn’t have opened the door to that apartment and prayed that they wouldn’t hate it, which they did, by the way.
Who can blame them? They have never had to worry about anything and yet I expect them to understand my struggle? I expect them to just accept the fact that they are leaving a 2,000 sq ft home for an 1100 sq ft apartment in a completely different school district? I can barely accept that and I’m thirty-seven years old!

I can’t bring myself to put the key to the apartment on my key chain yet. I can’t even wrap my head around calling it home. Last night, as I was leaving work, I made a wrong turn…heading towards the house instead of the apartment on the other side of town.

It doesn’t help that my laptop was stolen as I was moving things into the apartment on the FIRST DAY! My children feel like I’ve moved them into a ghetto. They aren’t used to having to lock the door between each trip to the car as you bring in groceries. I realize the world I raised them in wasn’t the real world according to their current reality. It is indeed, a culture shock.

They don’t remember the crappy apartment we lived in when they were babies. Even then, I made it a place that felt great to come home to. They only, truly remember the two houses they were raised in, the last being the place I thought I’d grow old in. I thought I’d sit on my bench, on the porch and read Shel Silverstein poetry to my grandchildren the same way I’d done with my son and daughter.

It’s a period of adjustment for all of us. However, I want my children to understand how fortunate they are. Yes, mama lost the house, but we aren’t living with family, we aren’t living in a shelter, we aren’t going without food, shelter, or love. We’re just going without the things WE considered necessities. Things like, internet access, cable, cabinet space, and room to get away from the family that we need to be clinging to right now.

Now is the time for us to truly become a family unit that spends more quality time together as opposed to all being in separate rooms doing separate things and watching separate televisions. Now is the time to say, ‘HEY, no televisions in the bedrooms, not even mine. No eating in the living room. Lets all eat at the table together while music plays instead of NBC, ABC, and CBS being our mealtime entertainment. Let’s just be…together…making lemonade out of the lemons being pelted at us right now.’ Let’s be happy and continue to praise GOD through it all. We can handle this. As long as we believe, when we look back on this time, we will see one set of footprints in the sand instead of four…He carries us, even when we feel abandoned.

This morning, as I drove to work, I thought about the irony of my situation. At the age of nineteen, I moved into the very apartment complex that I have now left my house for. This was my first venture out on my own and as a nineteen year old, I saw that my entire life was spread in front of me just waiting to happen. God has brought me back to the beginning. He has brought me full circle. He is giving me a do-over and this time, I get to show my children how to receive the blessings that are waiting for them if they just smile and see the joy our situation.

My name is Ebony Farashuu and these have been the Random Thoughts of a Black Butterfly…