Armed with a Potato Chip

Towards the end of last year, my husband offhandedly suggested that ‘you should probably tell your followers where you have been.’

I did ponder the notion. I stared blankly at the blog screen a few times, which failed to manifest any brilliance whatsoever. I tapped out a handful of subpar sentences once or twice but quickly sent them to the place where worthless prose goes to die with a well-practiced stroke of the delete key. I even tried to summon the Force to retrieve my iPad once, sadly only proving that my Midichlorian count is pathetically nonexistent. And then I promptly gave up. Honestly, I didn’t (and don’t) know where to begin. Or if I should even share my story. Or if I even want to. Or if anyone really cares. Like a wad of old gum stuck under a park railing for too long, my motivation to write has felt increasingly icky, crusty, and flavorless over the past months, and it has been increasingly difficult to convince myself to scrape it off, shove it in my maw, and chew on it.

Where have I been? The simple answer is…it’s complicated. And probably not all that exciting either. My absenteeism is attributable to a multi-tiered conglomerate of emotions, experiences, frustrations, and life changes that seem nearly impossible to fully explain. Some of the reasons are good, some are bad, all are personal. However, if you are looking for awe-inspiring, comedic, or even mildly interesting material, you’d probably be better off closing this tab and heading over to check out the newest Netflix original. Or perhaps watch some paint dry.

For the rest of you gluttons for punishment, continuing on…

My general enthusiasm began to wane somewhere during late 2020. Since then it seems like humanity has continued to embrace a monumental shift toward the glorification of negativity and loathing. People, simply put, cannot be nice to one another. I have expended an inexorable amount of energy fighting that trend here because I believe in the impact of positivity, but if I were being truthful with you, deflecting the constant barrage of toxicity is exhausting and demoralizing. I have often protected the integrity of this community at the steep price of my own peace. I am a tough Double Tree cookie, but not wholly unaffected.

I feel like there was a distinct point where I could not share something funny, positive, or even deeply personal without at least one person (and generally multiple) feeling offended or like they needed [had the self-ordained right] to demean, attack, or openly judge me. I also don’t particularly have the time to police the comments constantly, because sadly that’s what it takes to ward off the trolls and keep the community clean and uplifting. The funny thing is, I never started this blog to appeal to individual sensitivities…I began it to be real – to share my personal experiences, for better or worse, so others didn’t feel so freaking alone on this roller coaster journey. It’s my story. No more; no less.

The key words here are ‘my’ and ‘personal’. Real is raw. I never promised some shiny, polished perfection that you could proudly display on the mantle. In fact I one-hundred percent guaranteed you glaring imperfection, fatal flaws, and a multitude of mistakes. Like every other person pitter-pattering around on this fine planet, I am filled to the brim with the fallible nature of humanity. Yup. I’m messy. But let me cue you in on a secret…so are you.

Like the dirty little voyeurs society has unwittingly groomed us to be, everyone seemed happy to ride the coattails of my experiences and be my ‘friend’…as long as it suited them and I kindly squeezed myself into their individual, neat little ideological boxes of who I’m supposed to be and what they expected me to write. But the moment I stepped out of ‘line’…wooooo! Hate by the barrel full.

The problem is there are 30k different sized, shaped, and colored boxes comprising this little community alone, and I am by no means a shapeshifter. Or a Jedi, apparently. My joints are far too old and achy to attempt to be a contortionist. I cannot (nor do I want) to fit into a box anyone else has concocted for my life. Let alone the ultimate insanity of miraculously fitting into all of them at the same time. That is a quantum feat of human fluidity beyond my finite capabilities. I just want to be…you know, me. Because despite my messiness and flaws and occasional ugly moments and undeniable propensity for mistakes, I’m still a darned good person. I think this box of mine is pretty okay and I am not afraid to own it, even when it doesn’t look like someone else’s idea of what I should be. I’d like to say I am sorry that there are people who despise my box, but I’m really not. That would be untruthful. I am sorry that people can be so…, well, sorry. To the haters, like Motley Crue so eloquently stated, “[Girl] Don’t go away mad, just go away!”

Fast forward to 2022 (insert ominous music in the background). It all played out like a low-budget psychological thriller where an unwitting female (that would be me) armed with only a potato chip (for our flick, my sense of humor) for self defense is overtaken by a determined psychotic serial killer (Life) who proceeds to tie her up and jab daggers into her soul over and over again – carefully placing each strike to inflict maximum damage without the relief of fatality to ensure the ultimate cinematic effect.

In January of said year my husband received the coveted letter. No, not his Hogwarts invitation…his acceptance to a legacy airline. For those of you who are not in the industry, it’s basically the same difference though, minus the awesomeness of owl mail – pure, long-awaited magic! However, an owl would be a nice touch, now that I think on it.

This is where it gets a little tricksy though. It is a glorious moment that my husband and I have dreamed about and striven towards for a very long time. To say I was beyond proud of him would be the greatest understatement of the decade. It is absolutely an event worthy of utmost celebration and elation. However, it also ushered in a financially and mentally crushing 18 months for our family, particularly since we had not completely financially recovered from the debacle of layoffs that was aviation during Covid a couple of short years earlier. During the transitional ‘training’ and ‘first-year-pay’ period, stress was high, bills went unpaid, tempers were short, time together was minimal, and our marriage suffered deeply. I’m not complaining or whining. I’m sharing. Please understand there is a distinct difference. I know some of you breeze through this phase with grace and ease (I love and celebrate that for you), but my circumstances aren’t yours and that simply wasn’t the trajectory of our particular story. For us, it was survival mode 101, and my well-honed potato chip proved an inefficient defense mechanism in the face of the unexpected plot twists to come. The director of this flick had an unusually morbid sense of humor, I suppose.

The daggers started coming fast and hard, slash after slash. At the end of February, my husband and I were slated to attend the wedding of close friends in the Keys. This had been in planning for months, and we knew it would be our last possible couples’ trip for a long time with the impending financial cuts and time restraints of a new, commuting Pilot. We desperately needed the time together for the health of our marriage, but alas. One week before the trip, I returned from a weekend camping trip with my son to find my year-old puppy, Artemis, looking very much like she had somehow managed to swallow an entire whiskey barrel whole. Her belly was hugely rotund and as hard as a rock and she was in obvious distress. In a panic, I rushed her to the doggie ER where things turned out to be pretty dire.

Needless to say our much needed getaway the following weekend was cancelled and a long month of thrice-weekly vet trips to drain 3-5 liters of fluid at a time from her abdomen ensued along with expensive weekly specialist appointments, an MRI, and eventually an exploratory surgery in an attempt to save her. Not that I have need to explain myself, because pets are family and she was very much my girl, but she was also a very expensive specialized working dog with a year’s worth of training already invested in her to boot, so we desperately wanted to save her if possible.

All this occurred two weeks before my husband took a 70% pay decrease, sapping any extra money we might have put aside for the lean months ahead. She deteriorated quickly and after a heart-wrenching month of specialized care and failed treatments, we were forced to put her down anyway. The vet came to the farm and I bawled my eyes out as I held her and watched the life seep from her body. Long story short, my beloved puppy apparently had a rare congenital disease that even the most experienced and expert vets in Texas had ‘never seen before’. It manifested as seven irreparable holes or ‘shunts’ in her liver causing fluid to drain uncontrolled into the abdomen. When I contacted the breeder they gave me a, ‘That’s your problem’ attitude. That pup and I were deeply bonded. She was a thousand percent my dog from the first moment I held her and it broke me, sending me into a downward emotional spiral from which recovery was not immediately possible. She left me with a void in my heart and a maxed out credit card in my pocket. The avalanche had begun.

Our AC broke ($$$$$). Our marriage faltered. Illnesses ensued. The van dropped a transmission. Cost of living rose exponentially as our income hit rock bottom. More illness ensued. Our oldest kiddo left for college (while a really good thing, it was both stressful and expensive and extremely lonely without her here) and we struggled to pay for it and worried incessantly that we would fail her. My sweet elderly dog, Belle, who had been my son’s best friend and my closest secret keeper for a decade and a half, went quickly downhill after Artemis passed, and I was no longer able to camp with my son (one of my favorite mental outlets) because she couldn’t stay with a house sitter due to her deteriorating condition. We would consequentially have to put her down a year after my pup. A friend betrayed me. I tore my plantar fascia nearly off the bone on a hike and couldn’t exercise or walk much for months. I was in a boot that held my foot at an odd angle 4-6 hours per day and was highly limited on my mobility. I missed my daughter deeply but couldn’t afford to go see her. A friend committed suicide. And on and on and on. And on.

The financial and emotional tolls kept piling up, and we were in no position to mitigate any of them. I won’t go into the gory details of the year, but it left me and my family battered, bruised, and broken.

Here’s the real kick to the teeth. After all I had poured into TPWL over the previous six years, when I needed the love and support of the community the most, I felt the least inclined to share my struggles, fears, and thoughts because the trolling and toxicity had hit an all-time high and I no longer had the extra energy to expend on it. It became easier to pull my head back into my shell and protect what was left of myself. I was jaded with people and life as a whole, and as time passed it slowly became more alluring to avoid the toxic environment that social media breeds than to pull on my muck boots and wade through the knee-high crap day after day to fight the good fight.

The longer I stayed away, the more disconnected I felt from it all, and the harder it became to come back…and STILL the few times I dared stick my little head out and post anything to test the dark and murky waters, people not only met but completely exceeded my expectations with a heaping helping of negativity and judgement. See…for over a decade I have been there when anyone needed me no matter what I was going through. But when I needed people the most, all I got was…stop whining. And hateful messages. And cruel comments. I know it’s not everyone; probably not even the majority because there really are so many beautiful and sweet-spirited people here. But when you are lying on the ground bleeding and wounded, every little kick feels like it comes from a steel-toed boot and the cold, damp fog of pain overshadows any warmth from the sun.

The outlying truth is this: I no longer felt like I could be inspirational to you because I was barely surviving life myself. I was overwhelmed with bouts of sadness and had lost nearly all motivation to write here…or anywhere. My passions were suffocating. It felt like trying to swim up out of the deep water as increasing amounts of weight were periodically added to my flailing limbs. And even when I did get the nerve to try, I got berated or attacked which left me feeling even more depressed and alone. Sinking. Drowning. So I cried myself to sleep night after night, ate a bunch of crap and gained back all the weight I had lost plus some (of course making me hate myself even more), and stopped publicly writing almost entirely. “How can I encourage others when I feel so discouraged?” That was my mindset.

But wait, there’s more! There’s always more, isn’t there?

Sometimes that light you see at the end of the tunnel ends up being the headlight of a freight train barreling down on you in the choking darkness. Earlier last year, just as the very dredges of light began to pierce the depths of the deep and we dared hoped for a more secure less stressful chapter in our story, our paths inadvertently crossed with a 16yo boy living in an emergency shelter (we had known and mentored him for over a year through an outside organization). We were asked by the state to take him into our home and become his parents. They were desperate to get him out of their care and called it ‘kinship placement’ to avoid long, time-consuming loopholes and paperwork despite the lack of blood relations because we already knew the child personally.

Despite our fears, my traveling spouse, financial depletion, the many unknowns about the child, concern for our bio kids, and our own life struggles over the past year and a half, we prayed a lot, trusted His sovereignty, said yes…and instantly became a family of five with three [very hungry] teenagers. Because what else would we do? That’s just who we are. When He knocks, we answer. But the financial and emotional burden for a child who has nothing…isn’t nothing. And despite what you might hear or what they want you to believe, the state was basically of zero help with any of that. Less than zero, honestly. When you take someone into your home like that, their demons become your demons. Their pain becomes your pain. Their darkness and brokenness seeps into every crevice of your life. It changes everything you think and everything you think you know.

There were some hard transitional and behavioral issues at first. Regardless, we stayed the course and it seemed to level out and be going remarkably well considering the circumstances for a few months. We settled into a new sort of tentative, happyish normalcy. We felt like we had made some leeway with him and he was starting to be on a pretty healthy life track. We were family. I spent countless hours helping him get missing transcripts, figuring out how to get him on a path to college, meeting with CPS agents, preparing the house for the strict regulations of adoption agencies, supplying him with the things every kid needs, making him feel welcomed and loved and equal to our other children. We had every intention of legally adopting him into our family and had completed about half of the action plan including hours of training and endless meetings necessary to do so by the beginning of this past October. We were completely emotionally invested in him and considered him without reserve our son. I loved and still do love him.

But.

Unfortunately, after about six months in our home, things suddenly imploded. To be short, despite our discussions, intervention, pleading, and his pledges, he ultimately ended up choosing his deep-rooted addictions over having a family. Therefore, he left our home suddenly and very traumatically despite our investments in him. His story is not mine to tell. However, the emotional tolls, the manipulation, the lies, and the endangerment our family experienced are immense and continue to reverberate harshly. We’ll just say CPS was never completely honest with us about his past. There was a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes with him while he was here and once we found out and tightened the parameters and allowances, he became more and more…defiant, to be nice, up to and including hiding his phone in the woods and disappearing for half days at a time and refusing to reveal his whereabouts.

His stipulation for staying with us was that we would allow him unrestricted access to his addictions of choice and he would do what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. Period. Obviously that wasn’t an option for us; so we weren’t an option for him. Trying to help him was certainly the right thing to do, but it was another heartbreaking jab, this time directly to our hearts – and perhaps the deepest cut of all.

Fastfoward.

Since 2024 rolled in, I’m thrilled to report things have slowly began to look up for our family. Though we are now finally on second year pay which has been a massive blessing, life is busy, chaotic, and full. We are still playing catch up from the devastation of the last year and a half, but we are slowly but surely catching up now. It’s nice to eat a $2 cheeseburger without feeling overwhelmingly guilty. Let me tell ya!

It took some time to find a new, new normal after the ordeal with our foster son. I struggled long and hard with the overwhelming feelings of grief, regret, betrayal, and personal failure that accompanied his leaving our home and all that it entailed, and to many degrees still do. I worry about him and feel a deep regret and sadness for the son I could not…did not…save. The kinship worker candidly told me she didn’t feel like we could have done more or better with a kid with his particular history, but my heart still feels the impact. My empathetic nature is oftentimes my downfall. It’s hard watching someone you love throw their life away when they could have it all.

To make matters worse, our bio son who is the kindest person I have ever known and whose heart is pure gold loved him like a true brother and struggled the deepest with everything that went down. So, of course, I also carry the heavy burden for having hurt him deeply in an attempt to help the other boy. It’s been a heavy price to pay.

Since the passing of my second dog a year ago, I have been able to camp with my son again. It’s bittersweet. I love, love, love camping with him. There’s healing in that for both of us. However, the paw prints left on my heart by her and Artemis’ losses have not yet faded. I still cannot look at photos of them without tearing up. Losing a pet is losing family. A couple months ago I took my male doggo, Caspian, in due to a large, worrisome mass on his right hip. I was terrified because life hasn’t proven particularly kind in that respect. The thought of losing three dogs in a year and a half was unbearable. It was, indeed, cancer. But thank goodness, the surgery was reportedly curative and he is supposedly cancer free now. That honestly felt like the first wholly good news that had come down the line in awhile.

Since then the blessings and good moments have been raining down on us with more good than bad moments. It’s not something I’m used to yet, if I were being honest. I still don’t trust Life. She tends to be a two-faced jerk, as you know. But I am hopeful.

My husband really does love his job and in great news…his upgrade is just around the corner! He starts Captain training at the end of May which is another incredible blessing and moment of celebration. That is so special and exciting! Even though we had to sacrifice a lot and hold on for dear life, it’s all been worth it in the end. I am incredibly proud of him for hanging in there and persevering over the course of our journey.

My children are doing great. My daughter is now at the end of her second year of college, maintaining a 4.0 GPA and living a full and happy life. My son is a straight-A high school sophomore who, as you know, recently earned his his Eagle Scout award. They are truly amazing humans who excel at everything they put their minds to. I don’t know why I was chosen to be their mom, but I am eternally grateful for it. There’s a unique, unfathomable joy in seeing your children succeed.

Maybe all of this means the tides have finally turned for the better? Perhaps the light at the end of the tunnel really is the actual sun shining down on us this time… I sure do hope so, because we deserve a period of healing and peace in our lives. If trials give you character…we certainly have it in droves.

I’ve decided to try to write again. I think the best way to begin is by telling you the truth about the last couple of years, so here it is for worse and worser. Maybe my crazy story helps someone out there feel a little more compassionate, a little less mean-hearted, or a little less alone on their own journey. I hope so.

This is the first blog I’ve penned in months upon months, probably in over two years. It wasn’t easy, but I did it – though truth be told I’m still second guessing myself, and the delete button is whispering my name like a deceitful serpent with a tasty apple. “This is far too personal,” it croons. “People are too hurtful. Take the easy way out.” It’s true. Dealing with people is hard. There will always be mean people in our circles and we live in an increasingly broken and hateful society. But maybe that’s why I know I have to do this. The world still needs nice. Sometimes hope is all we have. I should know.

Plus, there are an awful lot of amazing people out there too who don’t deserve to be punished for the behaviors of others. You just have to learn to have tough skin and selective hearing when dealing with the gen-pub. Recently, I’ve been keeping a document of all the extraordinarily nice things you guys say to me so that next time (and I’m sure there will be a next) I feel defeated or feel like quitting, I can read them and remember.

I recently heard an acronym for hope that hit home: H.O.P.E. – Hold on; pain ends.

I like that. I like it a lot. It reverberates.

Lately, there has been a familiar tingling at the tips of my fingers calling me back to the things I used to love most – sharing words, mentoring women, loving this community. Maybe the fire in my soul isn’t dead after all…it’s just been silently burning like embers below the piles of ash waiting for some new fuel. We shall see. I’m trying, I promise.

Sometimes pressing the publish button and sharing the most intimate details of my personal life is the bravest thing I manage to do. Being called to mentor others by sharing my deepest, rawest moments with them is a curse, but it’s also a beautiful gift.

Be brave, me. Be brave.

And as for potato chips and psychotic killers, perhaps a well-honed potato chip is enough to defend off the attack after all. Because, friends, despite Life’s best efforts, I’m still here. Never discount a girl and her chip. Now if I could only learn to use the Force…

Where have I been? The simple answer is…it’s complicated. But now you know.

Be kind, friends. Always. You never know what someone you encounter is going through. Love you all.

A fellow Pilot Wife,

~Angelia