For the long time members, most of my story is known.
For the newer members here, a quick back story.
In 2003 my first wife, Sarah, and I lost our first and only child, Katie. Katie was stillborn. The only opportunity I had to hold Katie was after she died.
I have pictures of Sarah and I holding our precious baby, as well as our precious baby. In a display case I have the teddy bear that came with Katie's casket/vault that looked like a tiny bassinet.
Because Katie was born dead we never got a certificate of birth. We were handed a death certificate instead.
After Katie died I spent the next eighteen months trying to put Sarah back together. She blamed herself and her body for the death of our only child. I lost a bit of myself propping up Sarah to get her through it.
Around 2011 Sarah started showing psychological symptoms that couldn't be explained. She became forgetful, careless, insomniac, who stopped singing (she loved to sing and had an unstoppable soprano voice).
She almost lost her job several times for her carelessness and was referred to a psychiatrist who had our PCP set up a CT. The CT revealed a mass in her brain. An MRI confirmed it.
Between May of 2012 and September of the same year, my entire existence was to take care of Sarah.
On August 13th of '12 she went in for a surgery to remove the tumor. She never woke up.
On September 9th, 2012 I called cease treatment. Her official time of death was 3:23 am.
Flash forward to July 18th 2014. I remarried to a wonderful young woman, twenty two years my junior, named Karli. Karli is beautiful, inside and out. She has been my support since well before Sarah died. The love I feel for her is beyond words.
On September 9th, 2014 my first son, Cyrus, was born. Yes, folks you read that right: two years to the day Sarah died, Cyrus was born.
January 13th, 2017 my second son, Nicholas, was born. We'll be celebrating his first birthday next weekend.
In the past year Karli and I have separated for a total of five weeks. I have lost my current wife twice and the second time I damn near killed myself, twice. Only my sons saved my life. We are currently back together, working on us.
Throughout all this I have been a body man for thirteen years and a mechanic for twelve. I have owned my own shop twice, the first a restoration shop, the second a general repair shop, specializing in heavy computer diagnostics, engines, and transmissions. But I did anything mechanical and body related to pay the bills.
Years of doing mechanical work and iron manning myself to work circles around the best of the best has left me with tendinitis in my left shoulder that is managed with cortisone. I have epicondylitis in my left elbow that makes it hard to use my left arm for long periods of time. I am scheduled for surgery for a torn miniscus in the 22nd of this month. I have hip pain that I need taken a look at. I crab walk when the hip won't rotate and I fall down frequently.
I managed to squeeze in a hobby of preaching at neighborhood churches within the United Methodist community for a few years.
My life has been a series of flipped scripts. I had a girlfriend who told me that when she first saw me that she thought I was cute, but since I was a body man, I had to be dumber than a box of rocks.
I am well versed in classic literature, not so well versed in classical music, a voracious reader and am currently getting rid of excuses as to why I haven't finished my first novel.
There may or may not be more on the flipped script life as I go.
Many consider me intelligent. (My therapist would tell me that I need to blow my own horn and say that I am intelligent.)
I am not the man I used to be. I want to regain that man.
Once upon a time I was alpha male.
If I came into a room I commanded it. People deferred to me for almost everything.
I walked upright with swagger, confident in myself, my abilities, and my intelligence.
Karli would say I was cocky. Maybe I was. I earned every bit of it. I have excelled in everything I put my mind to.
Then...
I became manipulative. I became hateful, suspicious, jealous, envious, paranoid, and absolutely the opposite of the man I once was.
I have dreamed of murdering people and torturing others. Once I was accepting of anyone, now I see hidden agendas. I suspect people of things that aren't there.
I have dreamed of Karli coming home from work to find my brains scattered all over the bedroom and both our sons screaming for Daddy.
I am not, currently, a good man.
But I know I will be. I have a letter here penned by my hand from God's words that assure me that my sons will call me a good man.
I have no idea what the journey will be like, but the destination is assured. But that journey means that I need to pull my head out of my *** to make myself right.
I owe that to myself.
My first day of therapy was yesterday. I walked out with the daunting task of making myself right to make my world right. I wanted to give up. Later last night I fell asleep with a renewed purpose and some of my old swagger back: I got this. All of it. Tell I can't do it and watch me get it done.
I will make a comeback. I will grow, gather my strength and take on the mental illness that wants to rule my world.
I will fall along the way. I will stumble other times. But through it all, I will pick myself up and continue my journey to it's destination.
Robert.