Why is starting something often the most difficult part of a job?  Maybe there are blessed creatures out there who spring to consciousness every morning and bounce their way from task to task, tra la la-ing along the way, but I am wary of those folk.  They have some mutant strain in their DNA or such enabling them to move determinedly from one job to the next with alacrity.  

Not me, not any more.  A long, long time ago, in a different dimension I rushed from thing to thing, but not with cheer.  Nope.  I was fueled by bitter coffee, overdue bills, shrieking children and the belief that maybe, if I were very lucky I'd get everything done before two a.m. and I could sleep a straight four hours before rising up to do it all again.  It was a rare, magical time when that happened.  I can count those long sleeps on one hand.  Being the Mom to five children, six years of that time a single Mom, and then Mom to six kids, aged 18 to newborn, takes a lot of energy, an outrageous belief that willpower gets things done, and an inexhaustible supply of humor, especially of the self-deprecating variety. 

I wore out my ability to fit seventy-nine billion things into 21 hours a day somewhere around the time my brain grew an aneurysm and then slow-leaked that thing all over my poor brain.  BOOM!  Somehow I survived the craniotomy and clipping, came out of the coma and eventually learned how to be something other than a drug-fueled zombie.  I do have brain damage.  We had a LOT of fun the first few years making jokes about that:  "Oh, don't mind my Mom, she's brain damaged!"  sorts of things.  Keeping a sense of humor is essential.

None of this is what this blog is going to be about though.  I'm just bad at starting things like this...then I do, and I become an incoherent, rambling train-wreck of a communicator.  

It's the brain damage.  *nudge wink*

I started a blog because I'm going to a Parole Board Hearing in March to tell the board members why I do not want them to let the man who raped me out of prison after just 4 years.  Four years isn't enough time.  Not for me to heal.  Not for him to cool off enough to decide it's better for him to go live his own life and stay away from mine.  It's definitely not enough time for my 12 year old daughter, who is afraid he's going to come after me, or come for her.  She would know, he's her father.  She knows exactly what he is like.  

I left him in May of 2011, moved an hour away and refused to have any contact with him at all besides handing our daughter back and forth on visitation days.  He harassed me for months, then finally got a girlfriend, got mad I wasn't jealous, harassed me some more, worried our daughter to death asking personal questions about me, then after 10 months seemed to back off a bit.  Until he heard I might have a boyfriend.  So almost exactly one year to the day I left him, he attacked me.

And now he has a chance to be freed.  I can't let that happen.  This blog is my discussion with myself on how to keep that from happening.  It's my way of communicating something other than internally.  It's also an invitation if anyone has any ideas, experience, suggestions, about how to talk to this Board.  

I was his victim for a long time.  I'm a survivor now, and I'm not going back.