Into the New Year

Its early in the morning on the third of January.  New Year's Eve was spent with friends, and the days surrounding it have been enjoyed by the children as time off, ending on the 2nd with the girls returning to working the dogs for 4-H Agility.

I look forward to returning to the home school routine, even though I don't get to enjoy it as much as before.  I'll be adding another case worker to my collection, in my search for work.  Frankly, I'm tired of being forced into this never ending circle of hell:  forced to go to classes on how to find work, forced to answer to people for not finding work every week, forced to point out that I am doing everything that I can to find work, forced to point out that companies don't hire old, broken women.  The daily time I spend at home searching for work doesn't matter.  It only matters that I jump through these hoops.  I sense the frustration of people involved at poor school that my knee is not better and that I have not decided to completely ruin my family by accepting more debt than we could ever pay off.  I'm trying desperately to maintain a sense of ethics, even as I beg for help.

We entered the New Year, not with the same sense of hope and expectation that is marketed and expected, but with a grim sense of imminent disaster.  We can't help but be completely enveloped in a thick, freezing, fog of depression that hides every possible path, and leaves us to grope our way to a certain death.  Its through this that we try to plan a next step, and look in a different direction.

So the turn of the year isn't a jumping point of joy and hope. There is no moment of epiphany, or celebration of possibility, no expectant wondering at what the year holds for us.  It simply is.  I fear, more than I anticipate, what is in store for my family.  So for now, we'll hold onto what we can and stumble through.