To put it very mildly, I am having a lot of trouble dealing with all that stuff that is going in my life at the moment and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it and it’s all getting on top of me and I’m not coping very well.
It all pretty much started in January 2004 when my marriage fell apart and my son and I went back home to live with my Mum.
Our 12 year marriage hadn’t been too bad for 8-9 years but then money worries set in and my hair began to fall out with noticeable bald patches appearing on the back of my head, I started trying to cover them up and trying to deal with it. My ex-husband had his own ways of dealing with things I guess, and that’s when I started finding pictures and videos of beautiful, long-haired women on our computer. This didn’t do too much for my already very fragile self-confidence. More and more pictures appeared each time I turned the computer on, more of my hair fell out, the stress between us caused more and more rows and everything just fell apart. I was worried how all the rows and upset would affect my son who was 8 and so we moved out.
While living at my Mum’s I got talking to a man called Steve on the internet, I told him about my situation and that I was looking to meet someone who was ‘family orientated’ as in the later years of our marriage my ex-husband hadn’t really had any time for my son and I wanted to give him the chance of having a ‘father’ figure, someone to look upto and to go to for advice etc. Steve said that was great, as, at 40, he’d thought he’d missed out on having a family and this could be his chance. I met up with him quite a few times at my local pub, he seemed really nice so I introduced him to my Mum and my son and everything went great for about four or five months, we all went out for meals and days out, Steve played football with my son in my Mum’s back garden and we all got on great.
Then suddenly my Mum’s attitude to Steve changed. She started saying that he came round to the house too much and that I should start meeting him outside and that he shouldn’t come into the house. This made things a bit difficult as we both used to read bedtime stories to my son before we left to go to the pub and at 8 and a half years old my son just couldn’t understand why it had all suddenly stopped. I kept asking Mum what was wrong and she finally told me that my older sister Sue had been telling her that I shouldn’t be bringing someone into Mum’s house that I had met on the internet and that he could be a murderer or anything, and that was why Mum was now frightened of letting him in the house. I found it strange that my sister firstly hadn’t said anything about this to me and secondly, why it had taken her about 5 months to say anything at all, and Mum and Steve had been getting along great upto then. Anyhow, this situation carried on and my Mum wasn’t really happy about me seeing Steve after what Sue had said so in the end my son and I moved into Steve’s flat in another town. After 3 months the 1 bedroom flat proved to be too small for the 3 of us and so we moved into a 3 bedroom rented house nearby.
I don’t really think that Steve and I would have stayed together if we hadn’t been forced into moving in together, and our relationship got more strained as the years went by, with Steve spending most of his time watching sport on television in the front room while my son and I played games or did other family stuff in the back room. For some reason Steve has never really shown any liking for my son whatsoever and he has picked up on that fact over the years and now that he is 16 it is pretty much Steve in the front room watching sport, my son on the computer in his room playing games and chatting with his friends over the internet and I end up sitting on my own in the back room using the computer or reading.
One day in 2007 when we went to visit Mum we couldn’t get in the house and I had to call the police to break in and we found that my Mum had had a stroke, she was in the hospital for 6 months and then after a brief spell at home, which she couldn’t deal with very well, we’ve moved her into a nursing home. In the hospital the doctors discovered some signs of dementia and she has been getting progressively worse ever since. We go to visit her twice a week – I take in DVD’s of some of the old musical films that she loved to watch and sometimes she sings along, but it is so hard seeing her like this as she was always so very lively and independent before and it’s breaking my heart every time I go to see her.
When Mum had the stroke – I think it must have been the shock of finding her and everything – the rest of my hair fell out and now I try to get by with a wig but I find it really hard to get out of the house firstly because I don’t really feel that it looks like real hair and secondly because I’m always frightened that it will blow off and I daren’t even think what that would be like.
To sum up my life at the moment – I can’t work because of my hair and the fact that I’ve got no confidence whatsoever, it’s hard to go out of the house and even harder talking to people – even in shops and stuff. It’s so stupid, I just freeze up and everything goes out of my head and I’m standing there looking daft and not knowing what to say – I know this because it happened at one of my sons' school open evenings.
I have hardly any money, just the stuff my ex-husband (who has now moved to New Zealand) sends for my son and my child benefit.
My diabetes (I’ve been diabetic for nearly 30 years now)is pretty much out of control because of all the stress going on (even with the help of the hospital’s diabetic team) and I think I’m seeing the first signs of diabetic complications setting in as I’m having trouble sleeping at night because my hands and feet keep going dead on me.
Steve and I are rowing pretty much every day and my son keeps out of the way and stays in his bedroom on the computer. It’s just too much for me.
I just don’t know how to keep going. I rang my sister a month or two back to talk about things and she said she ‘doesn’t do’ talking about my problems and that it is pretty much just self-pity. Maybe it is, but everyone needs someone to talk to just to help deal with things, my sister won’t help, Steve and I are either rowing or just sitting in separate rooms and I’ve got no-one else. I just don’t know what to do and how to sort everything out. My son is only 16 and his life up to now has been pretty rotten, I just want us to be happy. Any help or ideas or anything would be good.
