I was ok now. Taking medication that actually made me well. And I had some with me at all times, in case an attack were to come on, and in such a case I was to put one under my tongue.
The job at hand now was to finish raising my children. I went back to work, but only on a part-time basis. That was all I could handle. My son was very much affected by all that he had gone through with his parents, he was a teenager now and he started getting into all kinds of trouble. I tried talking with him, but there was no getting through. The poor kid had no stability, no sense of safety, and the "wrong crowd" was wooing him. Finally, after telling him it was going to come to this if things didn't change, I had to send him to live with his father. I'll never forget the day I put him on that bus. My heart was breaking into a million pieces. I had tried hard to avoid this, but it had gotten to the point where he was involving his next-younger sister and I just had to step in.
One night I awakened to a noise that wasn't familiar. So I got up and went to check on the cats, whom I though must be into something. But they were both asleep. So I went to check on the kids, and my son and his sister were gone. So I went into the livingroom, all lights off, and waited. Finally, I heard them sneaking back into the house ever so quietly, and I YELLED, "You don't have to be so quiet." And that was the last straw. That's when I contacted his father and asked him to take our son, and he agreed to it.
Things weren't any better with the younger children after my son left, how could they be? They had a father who traded his family for a woman like himself, and a mother who was cracking at the seams trying to deal with everything, OF COURSE the kids were in trouble. They were living in the same kind of devastation that I was. So they did what most teenagers do, and especially hurting, damaged, teenagers, they "did their own thing." With the wisdom, or lack thereof, of children who don't realize what they're doing.
But they finally left, one by one on graduating high school, and the very end of that period was the most difficult of it all. My youngest daughter, a tender-hearted and hurting little girl got involve with the wrong crowd and we had all kinds of hell to get through it. One day I was particularly overwhelmed and I yelled at her "just get out of here." She thought I meant "move out," and she ran to a friend's house where she stayed for quite awhile. I was so upset over this that I thought I might just not survive anymore stress. If the Lord hadn't warned me sternly years ago not to ever go near alcohol again, I definitely would have drunk myself to sleep that day. But I had enough sense not to, as the Lord had sternly warned me. so instead I took a double dose of my medication in order to force myself to sleep because I just could not stand another hour in this world. The double dose did not put me to sleep as it usually would. So I took another double dose. Anything to just escape this horror and sleep. I don't know how many of those pills I took, and no I was NOT trying to kill myself, God forbid, but apparently I took too much and when I woke up there was my pastor and my daughter and my best friend in my bedroom. Imagine my shock! One of them, I think it was my friend, had come into the house and found me, and couldn't rouse me, so she called the pastor. They determined to wait and see if they could bring me around because otherwise it would have to be the hospital and we just didn't need that after all we'd been through.
But that's how bad life had gotten.
Then one day, this same girlfriend asked me to join her at a prayer meeting at a place I had never been to before. So I went. I was in such a state of depression that I couldn't even raise my head. I just sat there and listened. Then one of the ladies in the leadership of the group came over to me and said, "The Lord is saying something to me about a move. Are you planning a move?" I looked up into her clear blue eyes, having no idea what she was talking about. I said, "there's only one place I would LIKE to go to if I'm going anywhere. Jerusalem. Is that what the Lord means?" She said she didn't know, only that there is going to be a move.
