Help. 
Save.

4 letter words that in my opinion carry more heaviness of other less favorable 4 letter words. Because, instead of a derogatory or harmful nature they carry extreme weight and burden. Especially for a person like me. I am a "fixer".

Fixers are many times the children of addicts. My parents were very young when I was born, still in high school, married and divorced before I was even out of diapers. My birth mother from a very early age was a substance addict who later transferred her drug addiction to a religion addiction. My birth father was an alcoholic. He filled his workday with coffee but the sound of an ice cold beer being cracked open announced he was home. Weekends were slightly different. Coffee until 11 am, then yes, just like weekdays beer until bed or passed out in his chair-whichever came first. I also found out about 2 years before he passed away that he in fact had not given up his need to self soothe with marijuana like I had believed. 

A fixer will physically throw their everything into solving issues. It is our addiction. We will put our own needs, health, and sanity on pause while working on the issue at hand because the reward of the fix. No excuses only solutions and offer more than you take are mantras. 

But even fixers have their limits. Cloudy and often hard to self recognize but they are there none the less. When limits surface fixers find themselves at a crossroads, keep going or stop ,When the fixer is tasked to help or save another person and they finally realize they are unable to complete the task with successful results because the other party continues to self sabotage-the fixer will always choose to simply stop. We will dust the damage off, re-group and move on. 

The fixer then gets pegged as the villain by the person they chose to stop helping. That person cries victim. Unwilling to recognize they in face are not a victim but instead an accomplice to the circumstances they have created and continue to produce. 

Blink and a decade passes you by.

 It has been just about a decade since I typed my last blog post. I believe things were a lot different then. I mean clearly I got busy, things changed, life unfolded. My little wax side hustle took off an when I say took off exploded internationally. We grew quickly. We blinked and both of my kids finished high school. We became world travelers. Actually I discovered that travel is my great love language. Take me anywhere, show me the culture, the architecture, the food. I don't care if it is a little alcove of a beach in Puerto Rico where only the only other heartbeats are the flea infested wild dogs and their pups, the hustle and bustle of downtown Barcelona, or the quaint German influenced village of Alsace. If it means throwing a toothbrush and change of clothes in a bag and setting off on an adventure I am here for all of it. 

When this blog was first birthed it was centered all around my love of Halloween. We threw lavish annual haunts the size of wedding receptions completely themed out and changed over every year. 100 invites were sent out at the least. We retired those a couple of years ago. Sometimes I miss the planning, the prep, the excitement of our guests faces when they crossed the event threshold and the energy those evenings brought. It was definitely the place to be on All Hallows Eve. We still have party attendees regularly try to convince us to come out of retirement for "just one more" hoping we would catch party fever and pick right back off where we left off. But the truth of the matter is that chapter like the last decade of our lives has passed. 

This new decade that I find myself in is full of twists and turns. We have extreme highs and dark lows. I feel like this new season needs to be documented if for no other reason than to offer my soul a little bit of therapy. Perhaps a written recollection so that when my life season has passed my not so little anymore littlez will be able to come here and read the world through their matriarchs words. Allow me to connect with them when I no longer am a phone or text away. 

So if you have every said out loud "I can't make this shit up!", hit subscribe or whatever it is in the blog world now (I am super rusty) and stick around because you are about to witness the mother load of  that sentence. The good, the bad, the insane and the ugly as this blog shifts to mourning an almost retired, empty nester life to parenting non biological troubled teens as an almost senior citizen. Who has the popcorn?