Picking up the pieces . . .

There comes a time after every break up where a girl finds herself in that miserable state.  Mine is around the beginning of month number two.  It's the reason my parents gave me my inevitable title of "boyfriend dejour" when I was in high school.  I could never go longer then two month because I needed one to get over the other.  That's always easy to do when you have no kids, a good income, and an active social life and way to meet people.  As a single mom, things become different.  You now have to worry about "is this the right person to bring into my family" or "do they care about kids?"  Or my favorite "how am I even supposed to meet someone between nap time, playdates, two jobs, and hopefully sleeping?"  I realized today that when your only a month out of a break-up, you don't.  You instead rebuild yourself, your life, your self-esteem, etc. before you run the risk of someone else taking it all away from you again. 

Maybe it's because I ALWAYS have a boyfriend that I never really accepted how much they have brought me down.  My son's father has probably been the worst of all.  After a vicious attack from him this morning that questioned my mothering abilities, I realized that my life has been squashed one break up at a time till I could no longer survive without my significant others approval.  Of course that only attracts people who like to step on bugs and squish them further into the ground, so you can imagine that I have pretty low.  It took 4 people telling me today that I'm a great mom for me to start considering that it might be true and only one person to convince me that I was awful.  So here I am deciding that I need to rebuild myself, put back together all the shattered pieces of myself that are on the ground.  After all, if I can't do this, then I really won't be a good mom. 

As a planner, there is no better way for me to do this then to take concrete steps to try and better myself.  It may all seem mediocre on paper, but in reality, it won't be till I eliminate the chaos and hate from my life before I can begin to work on my inner self.

So I give you world, my list of things to do:

1.  Begin to ask for help (trust me this is the hardest thing for me to do and one reason why I put up with craziness from his father still)
2.  Clean out/organize my house
3.  Budget and attempt to organize my financial life
4.  Tell myself at least one positive thing a day, write it on a post-it note, stick it on bathroom mirror so I'm forced to see different ones each day
5.  Try a new activity till I find one that I like
6.  Meet new people
7.  Apply for jobs in Texas (so I can hopefully get home one day)

That's it.  It's not much and it's still a long way from me feeling like this awesome empowered person, but ya know, it takes a long time to climb back to the top.