Todays prompt is survival. Since my blog is ‘sixty, single and surviving’, I feel obligated to explain myself.
In all honesty, to say that I am just surviving is an insult to a vast population of the world that are just surviving. There are millions of refugees with their homes destroyed and no place to go. Homeless, starving and run off from any place they can rest. Families with children, on the run, begging for food, this is survival.
When I started this blog I was starting a new life for myself. My old life was a wife of a beekeeper. We started out together with dreams of ‘living off the land’. Twenty-five years later we had paid off the mortgage on our house and had a pretty good business keeping bees and doing farmers markets. I helped him with beekeeping, made products from beeswax and worked the Farmers Market every Saturday morning for over twenty years.
I took night courses on marketing for small business and made beeswax lip balm, hand cream and body butter bars along with my candles. At Christmas time I made a tidy bundle of money I could call my own. This was my life: my husband, my best friend, my house, my gardens, my job.
He was emotionally and verbally abusive but I couldn’t see how bad it was because he didn’t hit me. How sad is that? It was good enough because he didn’t hit me. But his anger, yelling and insulting wore me down until I was dead inside. I couldn’t even leave because I felt I had nowhere to go. He helped me make that decision by kicking me out. It wasn’t the first time he’d try to throw me out but it was the last. On that day I lost my home, my mate and my job.
I did have a place to go; my sister’s guest room. I was broken and severely depressed. Not suicidal but wishing I didn’t have to live. Live where? Do what? I didn’t want to do any of it.
But I had to. He had to re-mortgage our home to buy me out. Considering all the work I’d put into our business, he got off cheap. My niece and her husband were selling their starter home which was just perfect for me; I now have a great home of my own.
However, bills come along with a house and that’s where survival comes in. I work part-time in a grocery store for minimum wage. Part-time is all I can muster up at this age (now 63) and still maintain my home by myself as I can’t afford to hire anyone to do anything. Housework, yard work, bill paying, car maintaining, cooking, …… I do every single thing by myself.
Sometimes when I am going into work, especially when I go in at night to clean the bakery, or The Weekend when everyone is enjoying their friends and families, I feel very sad. There are still days I go in with a lump in my throat, battling tears. This is not what I had planned, this was not what I worked for all those years.
My home is my sanctuary and I work to keep my home. As long as my health holds out, I will survive.
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