Not my wedding

So my little (if you can call 6'4" little) brother is getting married. He's getting married in September. He has known for nearly a year that our wedding was scheduled for October. So when he and his sweety that I'd never heard of before got engaged a month or so ago, they chose September.

Granted, he is my step-brother so we only share certain relatives, but they wouldn't want to travel twice in as many months for weddings. Nevermind mine has now been, shall we say, rearranged. He didn't know that then. Dude. I'm happy and all, he's a great guy and whoever gets him is lucky, butyou just don't do that to people.

On the flip side, all of those deposits my parents put down and are wigging out about us paying back, most of them are willing to transfer the money to this wedding. Which is nice.

What wedding?

As of this morning we have officially cancelled all wedding plans. We didn't have a fight or a difference of opinion. My mother happened.

I originally had three bridemaids and three groomsmen until I felt the urge to eject one of the girls from my wedding party (very long other story). Despite months of my insistance that I did not need to replace her, my mother called last week to say she had found me another bridesmaid, a person I didn't even know. So I said thanks, but no.

So she said, well, then we're not going to pay for anything else to do with your wedding and if you cancel, you will have to pay us back the deposits we've lost.

No.

You see, for as often as I stand my ground with pretty much everyone else on earth, I've never stood up to her. So now she's bad-mouthing my fiancee, because this 'sudden personality change' is 'entirely due to him'.

Again, no.

The ball is now rolling... straight into pandora's box...

So the hothead in me got an alert from the kind little company who charges me twenty bucks a month to tell me if my credit information gets any worse. This time it was a new address in Virginia I supposedly lived at, which I have so obviously not. I started doing some research and finally got fed up with all of this 'they're military so we won't help' but 'it's a civilian matter and not our problem' bs and typed up a letter. I'm good at letters.

In this delightful little (page long) letter I have listed the family's names, approximate birth years, children's specific medical issues, his enlisment and where he was stationed last, and in what deparment, along with an outline of why I will not rest until they are in jail.

I then sent it to every email and fax number I could find related to the US Navy on the eastern seaboard.

Nope, not obsessed. Want some !^*&ing justice once and for all. Am tired of not being able to get jobs, bank accounts, basic utilites or other services, and loans in my name. Am pissed that I can't get a credit card if I wanted to because of them. Hope the Navy took my hint that newspapers and public forums online will be next to get that letter.

They are so going down, don't care how long it takes and who else has to go down with them. And god willing, those children will be put in foster care.

A rambling start

Seven years. A lifetime. Had someone told me then that my life would lead me here someday, I doubt I would have believed them. Back then I was a small town girl, everything beyond the city limits was imaginary. Places such as Florida and England were just beyond comprehension.

I'd like to think I was happy as a child. I had peers and family that kept me busy. I was in all of the typical activities of a girl my age. Our lives revolved around things typical of a small town; church, school, family, and neighbors. In times of need it would be these institutions we would turn to and more often than not, it would be these that left us out in the cold.

I was raised fairly religious, in the same narrow-minded church my mother had grown up in and as much as it hurt, I learned that in the end, they simply could not be trusted. Schools were no better. Their disinterest left me floundering within myself, unable to communicate or relate to others.

Family and friends quickly faded instead of rising up and helping us out. People I had been taught to trust as a child soon proved to be unwilling or unable to provide the security that had been promised.

I'm not sure when the world changed. When parents could not be trusted and home was no longer safe. When the order of everything became inverted and the innocent child became the one who everyone else began leaning on. The one that was supposed to have it all together. It's not meant to be that way.

Nothing used to bother me, I was ready to take on the world, and I do still have some of that in me. Now it's a different story, the thought of placing a simple phone call or initiating a conversation has become stressful. It has become easier to simply not ask questions or speak up at all.

Real Education

“When the student is ready, the master appears." ~ Buddhist Proverb

I have learned much about who I am and what I am capable of through education. It seems that we as a society have moved to a place where education, especially higher education, is something to be gotten over with, a means to an end, instead of a journey and an experience in its own right. For me, when the time came to continue my education, I was doing it to please others, but by the time I finished, I was doing it to please me.

From start to finish, I have been under the instruction of over six dozen teachers. Most of which were burnt out school-marmish women who had long since tired of their professions and were holding out for retirement. This was not the reflection of a certain particular school or area, by my high school graduation I had attended eight different schools in four different school districts and with each move it became easier to just slip through the cracks and give a minimal performance.

Early on, teachers seemed to be aware of my potential. I was given various tests and provided with outside resources meant for gifted children and that was all fun until I was booted out of the program in middle school. After that it became comfortable being able to exert little to no effort and make a minimally passing grade.

I left the mandatory public education system lost. I didn't know who I was or where my life was going. I had managed to leave school without having any friends or any form of network to rely on. Which left me very much alone.

Four years after leaving high school, I entered college. On paper it doesn't sound like a great length of time, but in reality, I was being sized up against my peers from high school who were at the same time graduating with their bachelor degrees. I was, according to my mother, behind the game and needed to put in the extra effort to catch back up. I started with all of the normal classes and continued my tradition of just doing enough to get by and most of the time it seemed to work. I also continued with making as little contact with everyone else as possible.

It was at this point in my education I began to learn about myself. I began to discover who I really was and how unhappy I had been.

Danish

I come from a large extended family. Each generation before mine had a half dozen kids or more and shared a similarity in heritage. I am both fourth and fifth generation Danish-American which doesn't sound like much really, but to me it's something. From Denmark, each family settled in Wisconsin and Minnesota which is still predominantly Danish. I have been there once or twice and it seems so natural to be in these areas where I blend in and people share a certain culture even if they don't understand why.

On Her Birthday

It's my mother's birthday today. I know because she texted me earlier reminding me. I'm not a horrible daughter, I did send a card as I do every year, mailed it with my brother's two weeks ago.

I saw a picture of her recently, in the new church directory and realized that it's the first time there has been a formal picture taken of her with no kids in very nearly 25 years. The two boys were off at work or doing whatever it is they do and S and I were in our own picture on another page. At first I totally missed the picture. I had to go back through and search for it. It seemed a bit odd like that, just the two of them.

And then it began to sink in that maybe she noticed too and just maybe this is some of the problem recently. In a couple months time I will turn 25 and 4 months after that I'll be married. It's a bit scary to think about.